Common Purpose – by Joel Kurtzman

I recently read an insightful book by Joel Kurtzman, Common Purpose: How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary. Mr. Kurtzman pulls together his years of experience at several distinguished organizations and shares what he has learned about leading an organization to accomplish the extraordinary. He also interviewed 50+ leaders and compiled the best insights from those interviews into this latest book.

What is common purpose? It is leading a group of people from a self absorbed world of “me” and inspiring them to come together as “we” to achieve the extraordinary. The research is compelling and the interviews are packed with relevant insight for leaders at all levels. I encourage every leader to learn from Mr. Kurtzman’s experience by reading Common Purpose.

Top 11 quotes that spoke to me:

• High-functioning organizations must be open to disagreements, arguments and creative discord in an effort to fight insularity, they cannot tolerate people who are perpetually negative or can’t find a way to get with the team.




• What does all this tell you? Leadership is not just about what you do. It is also about who you are. Character not only counts; it is an important force for change.




• Guide, advise, recommend. Don’t direct behavior or decide for others what they should do, or you’ll lose your best people.




• The job of a leader is to set goals measure progress, hold people accountable, and remove obstacles from each team member’s path.




• At many companies, CEOs and other leaders manage by “walking around” as it is called. While this helps CEO get a sense of what is going on, it does little to create a true two-way communication approach. The point of accessibility is to make it two-way, to remove barriers to communication, and to make people understand that their leaders are part of the team.




• It is difficult to overstress how important it is for teams of people working together to meet informally from time to time…The point is that you cannot lead a team if you do not know the people you are leading, and the best way to do that is informally.




• What great leaders think about are ways to make their own organization more responsive, flatter, better, and faster at achieving their goals.




• We are thinking, feeling and doing creatures, so it is not enough for most of us to get a list of priorities and to then be told to go out and accomplish them. We need to be part of something, and we need to feel some measure of affiliation for the group of which we’re part. In Boyatzis’s view, compassion, caring and authenticity have the power to bind us together so that we can do amazing things.




• What worked yesterday works less well today and won’t work at all tomorrow. As a result, training must evolve, learning must evolve, ways of doing and leading must evolve, and even the way the organization is structured must evolve.




• Common purpose leadership, at it most basic level, is about recognizing people as individuals. Common purpose leadership begins with respect for individuals and their differences, and goes on to celebrate their strengths.




• It should come as no surprise that kindness, caring, and empathy energize teams. The best leaders are those who care deeply about the people on their teams. In fact, I suggest that one essential quality of a successful leader is to enjoy and be interested in people.

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Mr Kurtzman was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Business Review and a member of the editorial board of Harvard Business School Publishing. He was founding Editor-in-Chief of Strategy + Business magazine, where he first coined the term “Thought Leader”. Mr. Kurtzman has also served as the business editor and columnist at The New York Times.

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