How to Cultivate Purpose (and Autonomy, Collaboration, and Excellence) in Companies

How do companies foster a sense of meaning and purpose – for employees and for customers? There were multiple benefits to this approach, including increased job satisfaction as well as greater customer engagement – this could translate into company savings through greater employee retention, and greater revenues from customers that believed in the company’s mission. But activating a sense of purpose requires four distinct steps, outlined in the PACE acronym: purpose, autonomy, collaboration, and excellence. This case study walks students through the steps a company might make to activate a greater sense of purpose and satisfaction, and evaluate its PACE efforts, provides a number of specific examples from company projects, and also offers five PACE “caselets” from the U.S. military, Thumbtack’s Team Philippines, Indiegogo, Salesforce.com, and Ferrari.