Purpose 45
keeper in a 250-bed hospital, still maintains a sense of purpose after
fifteen years on the job because she sees herself not as ‘‘mopping floors’’
but as directly contributing to the health of the patients. ‘‘If we don’t
clean with a quality effort, we can’t keep the doctors and nurses in
business. We can’t serve the patients. This place would be closed if we
didn’t have housekeeping.’’^15
Brad Hill, a senior consultant with the Hay Group, structures incen-
tive programs for the most unlikely of populations: hourly workers.
Where does Hill get his sense of purpose? From watching the sufferings
of his grandfather, a coal miner who had a nervous breakdown from
lack of purpose and who frequently commented, ‘‘I’ll never be anything
but a damned coal miner.’’ ‘‘He never had a sense of purpose,’’ observes
Hill, ‘‘a sense that his work and his life were worth something.’’
Hill designs gain-sharing plans to measure and reward performance
for employees at the lowest level of the organization, people like his
grandfather, who formerly were totally isolated from the organization’s
purpose and who were seldom rewarded when that purpose was ac-
complished. Brad Hill is accomplishing his purpose of linkingothersto
purpose. Says a food safety inspector at one of his client companies,
‘‘Now I have the feeling that this is my company too.’’^16
Gary Heavin is the CEO of one of the fastest-growing franchises in
the United States, Curves for Women, which was ranked as the third
best franchise in the January 2002 issue ofEntrepreneurmagazine. This
women-only fitness center franchise started out with one location just
six years ago, going to 250 the next. ‘‘This year [2002], we’ll finish with
5,000 units,’’ says Heavin.
Ironically, Heavin says, ‘‘I was forty years old before I realized what
my purpose was.’’ At age thirteen, Heavin walked into his mother’s
bedroom one morning to find her dead. She had suffered from high
blood pressure and other illnesses that could have been cured by better
diet and a program of exercise. Curves for Women was founded so that
hundreds of thousands of women can live healthier, longer lives.
Curves for Women has expanded so rapidly that it is now interna-
tional. ‘‘I did an interview in Spain, where we are building a strong
franchise network,’’ says Heavin. ‘‘I told the reporter, ‘Our goal is to