Essay 4.2 | Purpose & People
Two pharmaceutical sales cultures were being asked to become one. On the surface, they seemed similar. They sold in the same broad industry. They understood customers, products, territories, numbers, incentives, and pressure. But underneath the surface, they were different tribes. They dressed differently, spoke differently, valued different kinds of proof, and carried different stories about what good looked like.
It would have been easy to describe them as “the sales audience.” That would also have been dangerously thin.
So we went into the field and listened. We watched how people worked, what they cared about, what made them proud, what made them skeptical, and what they feared losing in the co-selling. The point was not research theater. It was respect. If we were going to ask people to gather around a new story, we needed to understand the people who would have to live inside it.
This is the heart of purpose and people. Purpose by itself can become abstraction: inspiring words on a wall, a theme line, a leadership aspiration. People by themselves can become segmentation: job titles, regions, badges, demographics, personas. Purposeful events require the meeting of the two. What are we trying to move, and for whom?
That means replacing generic nouns with human verbs. Not just customers, but people evaluating, doubting, learning, buying, renewing, risking, persuading, belonging, grieving, celebrating, or trying to become competent. Not just attendees, but first-timers, returning veterans, doubting skeptics, supporting sponsors, caregiving, participating, leading, and people who would rather not be there but came anyway.
The more specifically you understand people, the more honestly you can design for them. The right story changes. The right host changes. The right ritual changes. The right measure of success changes.
Purpose without people becomes slogan. People without purpose become crowd. The work is to bring them together so the gathering can serve real human movement, not an imagined audience.
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