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conventional terms to indicate what organizations set out to accomplish. These are excellent and useful words, but I have come to prefer another and I believe better term— purpose . Think how often you see it—“sense of purpose” . . . “What’s the purpose?” . . . “It serves a purpose.”
    Purpose is the destination of a vision. It energizes that vision, gives it force and drive. It should be positive and powerful, and serve the better angels of an organization.
    Leaders must embed their own sense of purpose into the heart and soul of every follower. The purpose starts from the leader at the top, and through infectious, dynamic, passionate leadership, it is driven down throughout the organization. Every follower has his own organizational purpose that connects with the leader’s overall purpose.
    I once watched a TV documentary about the Empire State Building. For most of the hour, the documentary toured the wonders of the building—its history and structure: how many elevators it had, how many people worked or visited there, how many corporate offices it had, and how it was built. But at the end the story took a sharp turn. The last scene showed a cavernous room in a subbasement filled with hundreds of black trash bags, the building’s daily detritus. Standing in front of the bags were five guys in work clothes. Their job, their mission, their goal was to toss these bags into waiting trash trucks.
    The camera focused on one of the men. The narrator asked, “What’s your job?” The answer to anyone watching was painfully obvious. But the guy smiled and said to the camera, “Our job is to make sure that tomorrow morning when people from all over the world come to this wonderful building, it shines, it is clean, and it looks great.” His job was to drag bags, but he knew his purpose. He didn’t feel he was just a trash hauler. His work was vital, and his purpose blended into the purpose of the building’s most senior management eighty floors above. Their purpose was to make sure that this masterpiece of a building always welcomed and awed visitors, as it had done on opening day, May 1, 1931. The building management can only achieve their purpose if everyone on the team believes in it as strongly as the smiling guy in the subbasement.
    Good leaders set vision, missions, and goals. Great leaders inspire every follower at every level to internalize their purpose, and to understand that their purpose goes far beyond the mere details of their job. When everyone is united in purpose, a positive purpose that serves not only the organization but also, hopefully, the world beyond it, you have a winning team.
    Not long ago I spoke at a conference for the leaders of a credit rating company. Their whole focus seemed to be on reducing losses, eliminating high-risk applicants, purging bad debt, and speeding up the process. These goals are all essential to the success of the company, I told them, but they are all negative and hardly inspiring. Isn’t your real purpose to find the right people to give credit to? Isn’t your purpose to help people buy homes, educate their children, plan for their future? Isn’t that what this conference should be all about?
    Google’s corporate mission statement is identical with its purpose: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The founders set out to serve society, and created a remarkably successful company.
    To achieve his purpose, a successful leader must set demanding standards and make sure they are met. Followers want to be “in a good outfit,” as we say in the Army. I never saw a good unit that wasn’t always stretching to meet a higher standard. The stretching was often accompanied by complaints about the effort required. But when the new standard was met, the followers celebrated with high-fives, pride, and playful gloating.
    Standards must be achievable (though achieving them will always require extra effort), and