In this Big Think+ preview, TED curator Chris Anderson explains that you can attract the best talent in your industry by passionately championing a cause. This power is drawn from your organization’s mission. What do you stand for? What’s the cause? Who stands to benefit from the work you do?

When you pursue ideas that serve a better future, passionate talent will be drawn to your mission.

Chris Anderson: Everything good that's happened at TED has happened because there's a great group of people here. The number one secret as to why there are great people here is because people believe in the mission of TED. So the why question, why does this organization exist? What's it for? What's it doing for the world? People get very excited by the answers to those questions and they just want to be a part of it.

Elon Musk famously said when he opened his patents to the world that one of the motivations for him doing that was that it was quite hard to persuade the world's best engineers to come and work a hundred hours a week for a company, but it was easy to persuade them to do that for a cause. And I think TED is a cause. I think a lot of modern businesses/organizations are trying to think of themselves that way because people have a lot of choices. We're in the Knowledge Age. People don't want to spend their life working just to make money for someone else; they want to work for a better future for all of us. And so if you start right there, you can usually persuade amazing people to come and be part of it.