What’s your reason to get to work every day?

Finding fulfilment at work, alternatives to GDP, McKinsey’s conflict of interest, choosing the right team mix for Mars, and disruptive technologies

Founding Fuel

[Photo by Andreas Klassen on Unsplash]

Dear friend,

Money has long been the principal measure of success for individuals, businesses, and even countries. But it’s an insufficient measure.

As an essay in The New York Times points out, “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says.” So what does matter? How meaningful you find the work to be. “The answer comes down to… something that’s hard for these professionals to put their finger on, an underlying sense that their work isn’t worth the gruelling effort they’re putting into it.”

A similar debate has been on for some time now on whether GDP is the right measure for a nation’s prosperity. There is growing recognition that measuring only material output is inadequate.

“There is nothing evil about wanting to be wealthy,” says Arun Maira, commenting on McKinsey’s conflict of interest case. “The question is, how wealthy does one need to be? If the answer is, to be as wealthy as others, which is what seems to be driving the behaviours of many professionals, doctors and consultants, the race is on, in an upward spiral…. Somewhere in the spin along, they lose sight of the original purpose of the enterprise.”

Happy reading.

Sveta Basraon

On behalf of Team Founding Fuel

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About the author

Founding Fuel

Founding Fuel aims to create the new playbook of entrepreneurship. Think of us as a hub for entrepreneurs- the go-to place for ideas, insights, practices and wisdom essential to build the enterprise of tomorrow. It is co-founded by veteran journalists Indrajit Gupta and Charles Assisi, along with CS Swaminathan, the former president of Pearson's online learning venture.