On Purpose-Driven Management (by our CEO, Imamura)

Purpose-led management is drawing attention.

What are your company’s purpose, vision, mission and values?

I spent nearly nine years as founder and president of a company I started earlier, and I had real trouble getting the vision to take hold.

Outward communication can be covered with a certain amount of content, but building an organisation where the people working inside it understand deeply and move together organically still feels hard to me.

In this article I set out the process NowVillage went through to define its purpose, and how we intend to embed it in the organisation from here.

1. What purpose means

The diagram below sets it out.

I read all sorts of books and web articles on purpose and went round in circles; in the end the diagram at the top was the simplest and easiest to grasp.

Purpose ➡ WHY
Vision ➡ WHERE
Mission ➡ WHAT
Values ➡ HOW

The English words fit far better.
Taking purpose to be the company’s reason for being, that is, why our company exists,
we then moved on to the process of defining that reason for being.

1. To define our reason for being, we need to look at NowVillage from many directions.
2. Those directions are five: the past, the present, the future, our customers and our people.
3. In detail, that breaks down as follows.

The past ➡ as a company only two years old, mainly my own formative experiences as founder
The present ➡ what happiness the services NowVillage offers today bring to customers
The future ➡ what world we want to build along the line our marketing services are taking
Customers ➡ among our clients, what kind of customer do we, and society, want to get behind
Our people ➡ in an age when we will probably work until 70, what sort of time should we spend together?

I will take them in turn.

2. Looking back at the past

I looked back over my own past experience as the company’s president.
Born in Kagoshima Prefecture in 1987.
My father set up a judicial scrivener’s office in our home town; it was small, but he did fine work. He was a people person, or perhaps simply strong at selling. To take on scrivener work he kept close ties not only with local residents but with regional banks and estate agents.

My mother worked at a hospital and then went independent as a psychological counsellor, dashing about with school counselling and talks.

Both my parents ran their own small businesses, and I well remember my father in the car talking about the saying that it is better to be the beak of a chicken than the tail of an ox.
As the youngest of three children I was loved by my parents and my siblings, wanted for nothing through my school years, and went on to decide to study in the United States.

Seeing the many entrepreneurs I met in my faculty while studying abroad, small-business owners such as renovation contractors more than anything, left me full of admiration, and at 25 I founded UZUZ. I spent nearly nine years there as president and then chairman.
My health gave out and my sense of purpose changed, and I now run a marketing company, NowVillage, but the word at my root is effort. My grandmother taught calligraphy, and I asked her to write out my favourite word, effort; I put it on the wall and often looked at it.

Through secondary school I barely missed a single day of club activity, and outside club hours I practised on my own constantly.
In my final year of secondary school, studying about ten hours a day on days off did not bother me much,
and while studying in the United States I was determined not to lose to the Americans; I skipped a year and graduated third in my faculty.
At my first employer I worked myself to the bone, and at UZUZ, the company I founded, I used my brain (running the business), my feet (selling) and my stomach (entertaining) from morning until late at night.

But when I left the company I had founded, at the age of 33, I realised that what mattered from then on was not effort so much as psychological safety and organisational health, a lesson from having pushed too far and burnt out halfway.

That is what the past taught me.

3. Revisiting the present, the future and our customers

Let me write about the present.
As of today, 1 November 2022, we have provided marketing work to 140 clients.
Among the companies we support, several move us.
One is Asharu Design, where I serve as CMO.

Under the banner SPORTS LIFE HACK COMPANY, they do all sorts of work to change athletes’ lives. They have gone beyond helping retired athletes find jobs and move careers to training athlete engineers, and they are growing fast.

Their president, Mr Kozono, has a strong sense of social issues; his character and his business make you want to help.

Another is Bstyle.
With the mission of making work happier, they tackle the social issue of a shrinking working-age population in many ways, from placing homemakers into jobs to RPA development.

At the same time, we see plenty of clients whose thinking leans too far towards simply making money.
There are owners who face social issues and push themselves to hold their principles and their business together, and owners who think in terms of profit and view marketing coolly as one lever among many.

I want to work with the former, without question.

4. The environment our people deserve

What does a great environment for our people look like?
The best environment I can picture is something like this.

• There is a sense, in the work, of having learnt one new thing today
• That feeling of growth takes away worry about the future and lets you face what is in front of you squarely
• Working 9:00 to 18:00 (and even with overtime, until around 20:00)
• Those hours are spent in deep concentration, the kind you had revising for exams
• Ask a question in the all-company chat and you get an answer, because the culture of I’ll help you is there
• Maternity and parental leave, illness, all sorts of situations are handled flexibly, remote working included
• People who deliver are recognised properly, and the reverse holds too
• Pay is above the level of competitors and time off is easy to take
• Birthdays and other occasions are celebrated, and the company trip is something to enjoy to the full.

Something like the world of the IMG Academy in Florida, where the tennis player Kei Nishikori trained.

A place where you live to a steady rhythm, deliver in the time you are given, are recognised, step up, and never forget consideration for the people around you.

Since we are a company, the day will come when each person moves on.
A few years after moving on, looking back, people should be able to say that company gave me my foundations, or I am where I am because I mastered marketing there. Recruit is very good at passing on that kind of culture.

5. Our purpose and embedding it from here

Thinking through the past, the present, the future, our customers and our people as above, we arrived at the following purpose, our reason for being.

[ Make It Possible – widening choices, enriching lives]

For customers and for our own people, we will focus on widening choices and opening up the possibilities for decisions in business and in life.

The data showing that self-determination raises happiness more than income or education does is exactly right.

I can do it now!
I have a choice now!

That simple feeling is what we will deliver to everyone we work with.

How to embed the purpose once it is defined is something to think about at the same time.
To begin with, we set up an awards scheme.
Under the name Purpose Awards, we hold a contest in three categories, ① business, ② technical and ③ special, on how people widened choices and enriched lives.

※ Andy, who took MVP at our recent third-year kick-off

Going forward,

• Publishing a book that puts the purpose out into the world (planned for December 2022)
• Writing a credo based on the purpose
• Referring to it in feedback comments on day-to-day actions
• Communicating it on Twitter, the blog and elsewhere
• Embedding it among the leadership, starting with the CXOs

By strengthening these, we will root it in our culture.

Thank you for reading to the end.