The Genuine – ElPropósito2 min de lectura

Three steps to know whether a purpose is the right one

A shared purpose is a collection of purposes gathered around a single one. A team or an organization defines a statement of identity to give its existence life and meaning. Once everyone agrees on that identity, the second stage of the team’s life begins. (The first comes when people, by choice or by order from above, come together for the first time toward a common goal.) The question is: how can we tell whether a purpose is genuine and will benefit many more people, or the whole world? How do we know whether the objectives and plans that flow from it are the right ones? There are three steps to knowing whether a purpose is genuine and will build something.

Step one: an organization’s purpose always places individual freedoms above the shared purpose. That applies to the people who wrote it and to everyone directly or indirectly affected by the team’s work. All of them keep full personal freedom to make their own decisions and own their responsibilities, while respecting, for example, the lives of others. A purpose that seeks to take away any freedom arbitrarily is not genuine.

Step two: strategies flow from a purpose, and when they are drawn up they apply the lessons of the past and make decisions that avoid repeating the same mistakes. An effective strategy pursues one thing, the long term, and securing it takes a very transparent vision. Without transparency there is no trust. Too many strategies are built on individual and private interests.

Step three: a purpose, and the objectives, plans and activities that come from it, rely on common sense, reason and above all empirical evidence, which give everything proposed sound judgment and consistency.

My conclusion today: without these three steps, however many plans there are, it is all activity for its own sake, with no meaning. The worst outcome is a needless waste of resources and, above all, the loss of freedoms that bad decisions bring.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. Once again I dedicate this post to my beloved Guatemala. Today two political parties face off in the runoff. I hope their purposes (if they ever defined them) are about improving and building, and above all about protecting one of the first fundamental rights of every individual in this world: freedom, along with responsibility for one’s own actions.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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