Solar charging station in Taiwan

Financial Times has a great interview with Frank Appel, the CEO of Deutsche Post DHL the clearly outlines his philosophy for motivating employees: Increasing revenue is a meaningless goal. When company goals are mainly financial, purpose is lost. The best companies are “driven by making the lives of customers easier by highly engaged employees.”

Appel has set up three initiatives for his 522,000 staff:

1. Go Teach, where DHL staff educate disadvantaged young people
2. Go Help, where they work with the UN to use the company’s logistics expertise to respond co humanitarian crises
3. Go Green, where they work to reduce emissions to zero

Appel sums up his message like this:

“We cannot say, listen, ‘Our strategy is to make money and if we have time left then we’ll do something which is good for the society’,” he says.

“Our job is to do something good for the society, and to do that we have to make money, otherwise we can’t continue to invest.”

This is AWESOME. It’s a clear articulation of a philosophy where a company aligns the quest for financial goals with a clear mission to create a better world.