When employees are disengaged and underperforming, the reaction of many managers is to try new incentives and ratchet up oversight and control. Yet often nothing improves. Why? Because the assumption behind such conventional approaches is that work is fundamentally contractual and that employees are self-interested agents who will seek to minimize personal effort. And that assumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Employees do just what is needed to earn a reward or meet a standard, and nothing more. But there is another way: Rally the organization behind an authentic higher purpose--an aspirational mission that explains how employees are making a difference and gives them a sense of meaning. If you do that, they will try new things, move into deep learning, and make surprising contributions. The workforce will become energized and committed, and performance will climb. In this article, Quinn and Thakor describe how organizations like DTE Energy, KPMG, and Sandler O'Neill have dramatically increased employee engagement after discovering their higher purposes. The authors outline eight steps other companies can follow to break free of the conventional thinking about worker motivation, help a higher purpose permeate decisions throughout the company, and set off a positive chain of events.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Why do companies frequently make bad investment decisions and continue to blunder, even after the weaknesses in their capital budgeting analyses are evident? Because, according to the authors, they don't integrate capital budgeting into their overall strategy. The authors' capital budgeting framework has six key features: it is dynamic, it is integral to the firm's strategy, it recognizes sequences of options, it is cross-functional, it aligns employee compensation with capital allocation, and it emphasizes performance-based training. The three steps of this framework should take place simultaneously: First, identify a status quo strategy and how it must perform to maximize shareholder value. The strategy helps the company determine the trade-off in capital budgeting between cycle time and risk. Second, establish a system for evaluating projects and preparing capital allocation requests that is consistent with the strategy. Finally, develop a culture consistent with the strategy and the evaluation system.