Charity — Humanity’s most kind and generous desire — is a timeless and borderless virtue, dating at least to the dawn of religious teaching. Philanthropy (慈善行为) as we understand it today, however, is a distinctly American phenomenon, inseparable from the nation that shaped it. From colonial leaders to modern billionaires like Buffett, Gates and Zuckerberg, the tradition of giving is woven into the national DNA.

    1     Benjamin Franklin, an icon of individual industry and frugality (节检) even in his own day, understood that with the privilege of doing well came the price of doing good. When he died in 1790，Franklin thought to future generations, leaving in trust two gifts of 1,000 lb. of sterling silver — one to the city of Boston, the other to Philadelphia. According to his instruction, a portion of the money could not be used for 200 years.

While Franklin's gifts lay in wait, the tradition he established evolved alongside the young nation.     2     Often far less famed men and women have played a critical role in philanthropy's evolution. One of my personal heroes is Julius Rosenwald, who helped construct more than 5,300 schools across the segregated (种族隔离) South and opened classroom doors to a generation of African-American students.

    3     The answer is not just to benefit others.Tax reduction, for one, encourages the rich people to give. And philanthropy has long helped improve the public image of everyone from immoral capitalists to the new tech elite. More troubling, however, are the foundational problems that make philanthropy so necessary. Just before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “Philanthropy is praise-worthy, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.”

Franklin’s gifts represent a broader principle. We are guardians of a public trust, even if our capital came from private enterprise, and our most important obligation is ensuring that the system works more equally and more justly for more people.     4     America's greatest strength is not the fact of perfection, but rather the act of perfecting.

3 . In a recent meeting we attended, the word “culture” came up 27 times in 90 minutes. Business leaders all believe a strong organizational culture is ________ to success, yet culture tends to feel like some magic force that few know how to control. In our study, we find that answering the following three questions can help transform culture from a mystery to a(n) ________:

How does culture drive performance?

After analyzing 50 major companies, we came to one conclusion: ________ we work determines how well we work. The companies most famous for their cultures maximize the positive motives (动机), while minimizing the negative ones.

The six main reasons for which people work are “play, purpose, potential, emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia (惯性)”. The latter three motives tend to ________ performance. That is because those people are no longer thinking about work. They’re thinking about the disappointment, or the ________, or why they’re bothering to do it at all. They don’t ________ the quality of the work itself. By contrast, a high-performing ________ always maximizes the play, purpose, and potential, which is known as creating total motivation.

What is culture worth?

While it is ________ to measure whether someone is being creative, it’s relatively easy to calculate total motivation of an organization. Take for example the airline industry. All airline companies share the same terminals and use the same planes, but customer satisfaction ________ widely across airlines. When we measured the total motivation of employees of four major airlines, and compared the result with customer satisfaction, we saw that an airline’s culture closely ________ customer satisfaction. ________, cultures that inspired more play, purpose, and potential produced better customer outcomes, and in turn generated more profits.

What elements in an organization ________ motivation?

By surveying thousands of workers, we found the most sensitive element is whether an organization can allow an employee to ________ with its mission and behavioral code. For example, Medtronic enables its engineers to see how the medical devices they’ve designed are used in hospitals, so that they can see the purpose of their work. An executive of Walmart, the well-known supermarket, told us that in monthly meetings he always emphasized how much Walmart had saved for the ________—rather than how much money Walmart had made.

A great culture is not easy to build. Leaders have to treat culture building as an engineering project, not a ________ one.