Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private can achieve its full potential.
Clarifying your organization’s deep purpose is one of the most effective things you can do to strengthen your brand and position your organization to flourish.
In Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies, Harvard Business School professor, Ray Gulati, makes a convincing case for doing a deep inquiry into your organization’s deep purpose.
Gulati wisely acknowledges the many forms of inauthentic purpose: “convenient purpose,” “purpose-on-the-periphery,” “purpose-washing,” and “purpose as a smoke-screen.”
Regarding authentic purpose, he demonstrates how:
“Purpose boosts performance.”
“Inspired workers vastly outperform those who are merely satisfied.”
To get a sense of how some “best practice” organizations utilize authentic “deep purpose” effectively, have a look at Harvard Business School’s “Deep Purpose” podcasts. (If you’re short on time, you can speed-read the transcripts.)
I recommend the interview of Ananda Mahindra of the Mahindra Group, who gets high marks for brevity. Mahindra’s core purpose to drive positive change is succinctly summarized as Rise.
I also recommend the interview of Piyush Gupta of DBS Bank. DBS arguably merits an award for best bank tagline ever: A Better Bank for A Better World.
Interestingly, Mahindra and Gupta, both from India, respond in a similar way to the “doing good versus doing well” conundrum expressed by other CEOs.
Mahindra says: “These choices become easier when you apply the right time-frame to them. It’s a fictional trade-off. Doing the right thing is always going to help you do well and do good at the same time. What will happen is a short-term trade off.”
He gives the example of Air India flying people back from the Ukraine for free which builds “enormous loyalty.”
Regarding serving “loss-making” customers, Gupta says, “We’re the people’s bank. We’re the bank of the nation. We benefit from the trust that gives us; we benefit from the brand position that gives us. And frankly, we collectively believe this is the right thing to do. If we’re not going to do it, who is going to do it?”
Mahindra points out an organization has to do well to do good but the guiding, underlying principle for both leaders is to do the right thing.
They both mention that in the long-term, there is no conflict between doing the right thing and increasing shareholder value.
Doing the right thing is what engenders loyalty.
