An authentic purpose functions as a company's "True North", guiding its strategies and behaviors. It provides a moral compass for decision-making beyond just profits.Benefits of Purpose  Cultivating a sense of purpose beyond products and services provides many benefits. It boosts employee satisfaction, fuels innovation, strengthens stakeholder relationships, and builds trusting brands.

Purpose as True North 

<ul><li>Once defined, purpose should be integrated internally through training, narratives, and leadership modeling.</li><li>Externally, communicating purpose through advertising, packaging and branding enhances consumer connections.</li><li>Strategies across the organization should reinforce purpose.</li></ul>Hiring, training, products, partnerships, and incentives should activate purpose, not just talk about it. Otherwise, purpose rings hollow.

Purpose Communication 

<ul><li>As the world changes, a company's sense of purpose will need to evolve.</li><li>Leaders must continually re-examine if current purpose still motivates employees and meets customer needs.</li><li>Refreshing purpose requires tapping into founding ideals and envisioning future opportunities to serve.</li></ul>

Purpose Evolution

Companies should look inward to discover their guiding purpose.It often requires deep contemplation of the founders' visions and analyzing how the company's competencies address human needs.

Purpose Discovery (120 words)

Purpose is a reason for being that is grounded in human values

Governing policies and structures should safeguard purpose.Executive compensation, shareholder communications, CSR initiatives and impact reporting should be guided by purpose, not undermined by it.

Purpose Governance 

In Deep Purpose, Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati examines how leaders and organizations can cultivate a deeper sense of purpose that drives meaningful growth. Through research and examples, he provides a framework for aligning company values with value creation.

Forbes, Best Business Books of 2022The Next Big Idea Club, Best Leadership Books of 2022Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right.Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor.Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before.In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by<ul><li>navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value;</li><li>building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance;</li><li>updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully;</li><li>using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and</li><li>building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being.</li></ul>As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.