What is customary is right, what is normal is fair, do we have to fear what is different?

These were the questions that Alejandro Moreno Salamanca posed to us at the end of his discussion paper last Wednesday at IESE in Madrid. There was no better way to open a workshop on "Innovation from corporate purpose " than by reflecting on the vital purpose of people: to be happy.

It is in the way to reach this state, where we human beings often make mistakes. We conceive happiness as the ultimate goal only attainable through the absence of effort (product of relating work, difficulty and sacrifice with certain unhappiness), when in fact it is quite the opposite, happiness is a consequence of working and persevering in what we believe in.

Thus, Alejandro provided us with two valuable levers to approach the purpose:

-To ask ourselves more fundamental questions. And for this we have to deal with two great dangers: relativism and populism. The former starts from an absolute to deny everything absolute, which leads us to renounce our certainties instead of questioning them, preventing us from reflecting on what is right; the latter leads us to oversimplify, making it difficult for us to understand nuances and causing us to provide superficial solutions to fundamental questions.

-Valuing (and wanting) difference. And to do so as a resource for development staff, authenticity and the search for a meaningful life.

Both ideas are more useful than ever in the context in which we live, where business has become the most important social institution, due to the number of hours we spend at work or interacting with people from this sphere.

As a consequence, society demands organizations with purpose, which promote a free market where the person is placed at the center. Thus, it is no coincidence that the three fundamental characteristics that make a good leader are: respect for dignity, human attention and genuine love (wanting the good of others).

Only by taking these premises into account can business be conceived as what it really is: "A community of persons, a school of virtues".

Therefore, if we pay attention to the notions on which Alejandro wanted to focus his intervention, work and human capital, and we understand that we are moving towards a humanist free market, which inevitably involves ordering society in order to make it fairer, we will understand that in order to work in companies with purpose , we must live life with purpose