Making Work Matter: How to Create Positive Change in Your Company and Meaning in Your Career

Copyright © 2024 Nancy McGaw

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Paperback ISBN: 979-8-218-35734-4

Ebook ISBN: 979-8-218-35735-1

Cover design by Sasha Wizansky

Tracy K. Smith, The Good Life from Life on Mars. Copyright © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org.

Royal Oak Press

New York

Dedicated to Robert and Louise

Contents

Introduction

Section 1—Beginning

1. Imagine Possibilities for Your Company to Create Business and Social Value

2. Discover Your Purpose to Fuel Your Commitment to Change

3. Reframe the Problem You Want to Solve

Section 2—Essential Tools for Changemakers

4. Map a Path for Achieving Change

5. Seek Small Wins to Build Momentum for Big Change

6. Tell Stories and Invite Others to Tell Theirs

Section 3—Impactful Collaborating

7. Engage to Spark Collaboration

8. Inquire with Questions That Ignite Imaginations

9. Listen to Learn

Section 4­—Staying on Course

10. Dare to Step Up

11. Reflect Routinely on Purpose

12. Persist on Your Journey

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Introduction

People frequently tell me that they want to have more meaning in their work, to do more than achieve their company’s financial goals. They have a bigger vision for the company, one that rests on the conviction that business can contribute to solving some of society’s most complex challenges. They want their work to matter.

Many already see opportunities for making changes in their company’s products or practices that could benefit people and our planet while contributing to their company’s bottom line. But they don’t know how to get started or to make the case for change. And they wonder if they are ready to take on the challenge.

If you want to have more impact, this book will help you see possibilities for what to do—and guide you to act as a changemaker in your company. It offers proven skills and strategies. It will also introduce you to people like you who have already taken the leap into what we call corporate social intrapreneurship: using the platform of business to tackle urgent social problems and align business and societal value creation.

Before telling you how I came to know these intrapreneurs, I want to share some good news: Companies need your ideas, business acumen, and tenacity more than ever.

Although loud critics are charging companies with practicing woke capitalism and disregarding shareholders’ interests, forward-looking companies know that managing social and environmental risks and identifying opportunities for value creation in the midst of social and environmental dynamics is critical for achieving long-term success.

To do so, companies will need new products and services, business models, management practices, and bold collaborations. C-suite executives can set the tone, but the change will come only if companies harness the collective imagination and energy of people working in every department of the company—including you.

Can one person actually make a difference? My experience gives me confidence to say yes. Emphatically.

Why am I so sure?

Fifteen years ago, my colleagues at the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program and I set out on a treasure hunt. We believed there were professionals in every industry who longed to do great work and use the platform they had in business to create positive social impact. We wanted to find them.

We sought people who were exceptionally good at their craft and prized by their companies because of their expertise and commitment to their work. But they had to vault over another hurdle as well. They had to be working in a way that created value for their companies, their communities, and the environment. In other words, for example, they had to be creating cool products or services that enhanced the lives of customers, identifying ways to reduce the environmental footprint of their company and its supply chain, or envisioning more inclusive and equitable management practices.

Over the years, this treasure hunt has led us to innovators in some of the largest companies in the world, such as Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, Toyota, McDonald’s, and Starbucks, and in technology powerhouses such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and LinkedIn.

We found them in every department—from finance, R&D, and marketing to strategy, sustainability, and talent management. They were designers, analysts, strategists, business developers, lawyers. Some managed teams; others were individual contributors. Some were far along in their journeys as corporate social intrapreneurs; others were starting out on this path.

At the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program, where I worked, once we started finding these innovators, we believed that we could learn a great deal from working with them and that we could help them be more effective—and courageous—in their commitment to changemaking.

So in 2009, working with a talented design team, I created the Aspen First Movers Fellowship Program. Since then, each year, through a rigorous selection process, we choose about 20 intrapreneurs to become part of the program. To date, we have worked with nearly 300 First Mover Fellows. They have shown that making positive change in large publicly held companies is possible. This book is filled with their stories.

In these pages you will meet people like Kamala Avila-Salmon, a media and marketing expert who is developing inclusive content in motion pictures at Lionsgate; Anupam Bhargava, who launched an eco-friendly engine-cleaning company when he was a general manager at Pratt & Whitney; JoAnn Stonier, who built a global privacy and data protection program at Mastercard; and many more.

These intrapreneurs dare to stand up against prevailing forces arrayed against them. They challenge a system that too often rewards short-term financial gain instead of longer-term results with more widely distributed benefits. Even when they run up against inertia or face resistance, these intrepid innovators persist, achieving small wins that build momentum for deeper change.

Aspen First Mover Fellows consistently tell us that what they have learned in the program and in a community of corporate innovators has transformed their ability to do this work. Along the way, the Fellowship has become one of the world’s leading development programs for corporate social intrapreneurs.

I believe thousands of people want to enact this kind of change in their companies and, by doing so, find more meaning in their careers. That is why I wrote this book. I want to bring the lessons we have learned in the First Movers Fellowship Program to a much broader audience and to introduce the strategies we have found to be effective. If you are one of those who long to work in this way, I hope the lessons and the stories from the First Mover Fellows will inspire you to act.

How This Book Is Organized

The First Movers Fellowship Program was built on four key themes, or pillars: innovation, leadership, reflection, and community. We believe all are essential for intrapreneurs to be able to develop the courage and capacity needed to bring innovative ideas to life within companies and to influence change, usually without explicit authority to do so. This book, divided into four sections, integrates these themes throughout so that readers can build the skills and mindsets critical for effective corporate social intrapreneurship.

Section 1 provides guidance for getting started on your journey as a corporate social intrapreneur.

Chapter 1, Imagine, helps you see possibilities for creating positive change in your company. Seeing opportunities that others may miss or prefer to ignore can ignite your excitement for taking on the challenge of driving change.

Chapter 2, Discover, emphasizes the importance of defining your personal purpose and thinking about how to align it with your professional endeavors. Knowing what really matters to you is a galvanizing force for action and serves as a shield against the inevitable challenges you will face as an intrapreneur.

Chapter 3, Reframe, introduces strategies for examining and redefining the social or environmental problem you want to address. It emphasizes that moving to problem-solving too quickly may lead you in the direction of a solution that doesn’t work.

The second section of the book offers three essential tools for changemakers.

Chapter 4, Map, calls on you to take full advantage of your institutional savvy and knowledge of the changing business environment. With that information, you can draw a road map to get from status quo to new possibilities.

Chapter 5, Seek Small Wins, illustrates the importance of striving to achieve modest strategic victories that take aim at very big problems. Then, creating a narrative around these small wins helps you engage others and build momentum for change.

Chapter 6, Tell Stories, emphasizes that storytelling is a critical skill for changemakers and offers strategies for improving your storytelling prowess. When you have solid data on problems that you know your organization can address, you may feel that you have an irrefutable case for change. The truth is that you will generate more interest and engagement among colleagues for the change you want to make when you tell compelling stories about how real people have been—or could be—impacted.

Section 3 focuses on creating impactful collaborations.

There is a myth about corporate social intrapreneurs that they are lone wolves. In fact, corporate change makers do their best work when they make room for others to be part of the change. Chapter 7, Engage, contains diverse examples of Fellows’ successful collaborations and provides strategies for making collaborations work.

Chapter 8, Inquire, aims to build your capacity for collaboration by showing the importance of shifting away from advocacy for your ideas to curiosity about others’ expertise and ideas. And it provides suggestions for crafting questions that will ignite the imaginations of those who could help cocreate solutions to complex problems.

Learning how to be a better listener is the subject of chapter 9, Listen. It is a skill that most of us think we have mastered. In fact, many of us are careless listeners. Learning how to listen attentively requires practice, but the effort delivers rewards. Listening well, with the intent to learn, is the key to unlocking the value of engaging with others and creating impactful collaborations.

The final section of the book is dedicated to helping you stay the course as an intrapreneur.

Chapter 10, Dare, addresses a critical inhibitor for many innovators: doubting your own ability to lead the change you want to see. The lessons in the chapter give you confidence and tools to buck conventional wisdom and stand up to opposing forces. You don’t have to be innately courageous. The chapter shows that with practice, you can learn how to challenge corporate norms and entrenched practices and advocate powerfully for innovations that make the world better.

Chapter 11, Reflect, emphasizes the importance of making time to step back from daily routines and consider all of your behaviors and decisions in the context of your aspirations. Reflection is fuel for corporate social intrapreneurs because it builds your self-awareness and helps you link your purpose with your professional endeavors.

Finally, in chapter 12, Persist, you learn that persistence is an attribute you must bring to the intrapreneurial journey in order to achieve success. There are no shortcuts. But there are victories, and each success gives you wisdom that you can put to use as you face the next challenge on your journey.

Why This Work Matters So Much to Me

Working to help business professionals become effective and courageous corporate social intrapreneurs has highly personal meaning for me. I am dedicated to helping others see possibilities for finding greater meaning in their work than I ever imagined during my tenure in corporate America.

My career didn’t begin in an office. It started at the head of a classroom. I was an English major in college and graduated with a teaching certificate. For four years I taught school in the United States and Japan. Quite by chance, I then spent a couple of years working as a consultant in Washington, DC, in health care planning.

I always dreamed of an international career of some kind. (Yes, it was that vague an aspiration.) So I got my master’s degree in international relations with a focus on international health and organizations.

As I was finishing graduate school, representatives from banks showed up on campus, and I interviewed with them. I received an offer—which I grabbed. It seemed like an exciting new adventure, although, like so many people who make a career choice they think will be a stepping stone to another pathway, I expected that my days in banking would be relatively few.

Seventeen and a half years later, I was a managing director in a global bank, heading up a portfolio team focused on the chemical industry.

Working with multinational companies (albeit mostly in Toledo and Cleveland rather than in exotic cities around the globe), I learned what it takes to manage complex customer relationships. As a vice president in the shipping division in London in the early 1980s, I saw how hard it was to get money back from clients who were in financial distress. When I looked at the credit approval requests for the loans in arrears, I realized how much we had wanted to believe our cash flow projections and the viability of so-called secondary sources of repayment. Those lessons in hubris and humility have stayed with me. Returning to New York after my stint in shipping, I saw the emergence of leveraged buyouts and securitizations. I learned how to assess and monitor account profitability and credit exposure. I learned how to cultivate a cold prospect and how to maintain established relationships. I felt the exhilaration of structuring a deal that goes to market. In short, the years were enormously valuable training for understanding how business and the financial markets work.

And yet.

I always felt there was something missing. My unease was reflected in a conversation I had with a vice president on my team. A very capable credit officer, she understood how to manage risk sensibly to address the needs of our colleagues whose objective was to book the business and those of the credit administrators who had to approve the additional credit exposure we incurred. One day, after she returned from maternity leave, she came into my office and closed the door. I want to do something more meaningful with my career, she said.

So did I, but I thought I was stuck. Not once in my nearly two decades of banking was there ever a conversation about why we did the work we did or whether we could make a difference in society as a whole. We completed annual ethics compliance checklists, but we didn’t talk about purpose. We didn’t talk about the role that responsible banking practices play in the functioning of an efficient economic system. We knew that managing risk prudently and offering clients a range of services that met their needs served the bank and the client well, but we didn’t look beyond those objectives. I would have eagerly participated in such conversations, and I suspect that many of my colleagues would have benefited from them too.

With a deeper sense of why our work mattered to our clients and, more broadly, to the proper functioning of the global economic system, we might have been better and more creative at doing our jobs; and I’m confident that we would have been more deeply engaged in our work.

But I look back now and wonder: Why didn’t I ask these questions? Couldn’t I have been more creative about finding opportunities at the intersection of business and social value? What held me back? And how could I have helped that competent banker in my office—who left the bank shortly after our conversation—see these opportunities as well?

Coming to the Aspen Institute’s Business & Society Program, with its mission of helping business leaders make decisions and investments that align with the long-term health of society, gave me a second chance. Working with corporate social intrapreneurs in the Aspen First Movers Fellowship Program, I now take great satisfaction in knowing that my colleagues and I are helping people in business have the courage and confidence to find meaning in their work and drive positive change in their companies.

By writing this book, I hope to help you find a pathway that brings deeper satisfaction. In short, I aspire to help you make a difference while you are making a living.

I also believe that the world, and more particularly the companies you work for, need your passion, skill, creativity, and determination more than ever. Pernicious social and environmental problems hold us back from the kind of just and equitable society that many of us long for. Business has a critical role to play in tackling those problems. Progress is happening in many companies, and you could nudge it even further.

For all of you who want to take the first step as a corporate social intrapreneur, and for those who are on the path but unsure what to do next, my hope is that this book will serve as a guide.

Chapter 1

Imagine Possibilities for Your Company to Create Business and Social Value

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

—Attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Kevin Thompson was working at IBM in 2006 when he read an article by the company’s CEO that would change his life. The article by Samuel Palmisano, published in Foreign Affairs , argued that multinational corporations were rapidly morphing into globally integrated enterprises, which would transform not