“Purpose is certainly not just a marketing issue or positioning of your brand image. Purpose should impact every aspect of the firm.” —Raj Sisodia
PRIORITIZERS’ PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE Prioritizers reported performing better than either developers or laggards across a number of business activities. A clearly articulated purpose appears to yield many important benefits, but perhaps the easiest to quantify and the most persuasive is that prioritizing companies perform better: 58 percent of prioritizers said they experienced growth of 10 percent or more over the past three years, compared with 51 percent of the developers and 42 percent of the laggards. figure 3 Purpose—or the lack of shared understanding of purpose—seems to have a direct impact on the bottom line. Forty-two percent of laggards reported flat or declining revenue over the past three years, compared with 19 percent of developers and only 15 percent of prioritizers. STRATEGIC PURPOSE A similar pattern emerged around the ability to innovate and transform. More of the self-iden- tified prioritizers said they had successfully completed a major initiative in the past three years, including expanding geographically, changing their business model and/or operations, complet- ing a merger, and launching a new product. New markets were a particular area of strength for prioritizers: 66 percent of that group reported expanding geographically, while 44 percent of developers and 48 percent of laggards reported success in that area. Only when it came to expanding into additional market segments did the laggards lead the prioritizers, for reasons that are unclear but may merit further study. figure 4 The prioritizers saw a clear link between a widely understood sense of purpose and the ability to innovate and transform. Forty-nine percent said their organization had made a change in strategy development over the past three years based on purpose, and a third said purpose had propelled shifts in the business model as well as product and service development. Experts say that purpose streamlines the way decisions are made. “It’s an inside-out strategy rather than outside-in: you don’t just look at where the opportunities are and where you could make a lot of money as a way to decide where you ought to be. You decide where you want to be strategically, based on what you want to do,” said Michael Beer, the Cahners-Rabb Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, at Harvard Business School and a director of the Center for Higher Ambition Leadership. Interestingly, developers were more likely to make gains in branding than companies that already had a highly developed sense of purpose. Forty percent of developers said their purpose orientation had helped them drive changes to their brand over the past three years, compared with 32 percent of prioritizers. Purpose also helped the developers with their strategy (44 per- cent) and their new business development (33 percent). figure 5
THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PURPOSE
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