Dan tells a story about Clare Booth Luce, the playwright, journalist, and Republican Member of Congress. In 1962, Luce met with President Kennedy, who was, at the time, pursuing an ambitious agenda domestically and overseas. She worried about his diffuse priorities. "A great man," she advised him, "is one sentence." President Lincoln's sentence was obvious: "He preserved the union and freed the slaves." So was FDR's: "He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war." What, Luce challenged the young, impatient president, was to be his sentence?
via blogs.hbr.org
From a think piece on Dan Pink's Drive in the Harvard Business Review. Bill Taylor takes Pink's findings about personal motivation and applies them to business. I wonder how many Toastmaster clubs could also state their purpose in one sentence. And I'm talking about the purpose of the twenty people or so who belong to the club, not the universal club mission.