One of the consequences of writing about themes such as meaning and purpose at work is that you are reminded to keep questioning your own work’s impact. Because generating a certainty that ‘my work has meaning and serves the world’ has to be balanced every so often with an inquiry into ‘what good does it (really) do?’

A good – and humbling – place to start such an inquiry would be to try and describe your work to an alien. And in the absence of an available alien, try a 6 year old child. If my son Lexxi can’t quite see the need in the world for an Organizational Development consultant, it might be healthy for me to look more closely at the assumptions I’m making about my work’s importance.

It’s a dialogue we all face from time to time. Is my work critical or worthless? Does it really help someone, somewhere, at some time? Or would no-one really notice if I didn’t turn up tomorrow? Does my work claim to be important or special – perhaps by hiding behind a set of models, theories or languages – when in fact there’s a hollowness at the heart of it? Or the opposite – does my work appear at face value banal and ordainary, when in fact it is making a difference in someone’s world?

From one perspective, perhaps, all of our activities can be made to be a nonsense. Developing the technology for the next generation of mobile phones might at one moment be celebrated as a high expression of human innovation, at the next moment a ridiculous waste of our human talent.

Finding ever more creative ways to advertise face cream as a key to deep personal happiness could be deemed a crazy affair, meaningful only to fellow marketeers, unless yours was a face that was one of your own keys to self-esteem and presence in the world.

But the skills required to do these things – creating ideas, generating energy around a message, building engagement, momentum, implementation are the source of meaning and power in our work.

And the personal development we experience whenever we try to do these things better and better – the development of patience, for example, persistence, influencing or listening skills – can never be a waste of our time and energy.

So it seems we have a choice. The value we claim is our own to declare.

So make your ‘job’ as amazing as possible and use that to drive you to be better and better.

Or make it as empty as possible – face up to its emptiness if that what it has become for you – and use that to drive you out of it and onto something different.

But don’t be half-assed about it, to use a technical term. A life of resigned ‘quiet desperation’ (Henry David Thoreau) serves no-one at all. Least of all you.