How a strong corporate purpose is really built

Many organizations talk about purpose. Far fewer have done the work to define it rigorously, test it, and activate it. I often comes across people inside corpoates involved in the proces who feel the right, required conversation is not taking place, often due to time pressure or other reasons. I want to help.

Because, the result is predictable. Purpose statements that sound good, but do little. Words that inspire briefly, but do not guide decisions. Initiatives that feel disconnected from a deeper reason for being.

It helps to align management on three questions:

• What is purpose?

• What does it do?

• What are the characteristics of a strong one?

Only then does it make sense to start drafting. Here's our collected experience:

What purpose is

By purpose, I mean: The meaningful positive impact the company makes on its target customers and the environment they live in.

Ambition answers what you want to achieve. Purpose answers why you exist. Values define how you behave. These three must reinforce each other. If they do not, you get strategy on paper and drift in practice.

Peter Drucker warned about this decades ago:

“That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure.”

He was not talking about poetry. He was talking about performance.

What purpose does

A strong purpose is one of the most powerful drivers of intrinsic motivation. It provides direction beyond numbers. It inspires and guides decisions across product development, marketing, finance, operations, you name it.

Done well, purpose becomes a filter:

• Which initiatives fit? Which do not?

• Where do we invest disproportionally?

• What tensions, competing priorities, must we hold?
  

It also reconciles a classic dilemma: doing good versus making money.

This is not an either/or. Companies such as IKEA (“Creating a better everyday life for the many people”) or Dulux (“Let’s Colour”) show that meaningful impact and economic value can reinforce each other. When purpose builds Differentiation, Relevance, Esteem and Knowledge, it directly strengthens brand equity for both short-term (esteem, knowledge) as long-term growth potential (differentiation, relevance) . Doing good and doing well in terms of shareholder value can be reconciled. But only if purpose is built properly.

Five characteristics of a strong purpose

1. Built on an insight foundation

A strong purpose is grounded in a universal human truth and a real friction that blocks what people want. Without friction, there is no need. Without need, no compelling proposition. The friction must be tangible. It must reflect something people genuinely experience, not something the company wishes were true.

When this foundation is clear, purpose moves from abstract aspiration to meaningful impact.

2. Inside-out and authentic

Purpose cannot be invented in a workshop. It must be distilled. One route is revisiting founding intent. In one case, we pressure-tested the founder with five consecutive “whys” until we hit the irritation point, the moment where energy and conviction became visible. Another powerful route is storytelling inside the company. Ask people to describe their greatest moment at work. Then ask why that mattered. Five times. Stories reveal what surveys do not. They surface what is implicit, emotional, often unconscious. Across roles and regions, patterns begin to emerge. Purpose is rarely created from scratch. It is uncovered.

3. Outside-in and resonant

A purpose must hit a nerve. It must scratch an important itch so that people talk about the company. In a social media age, this matters disproportionately. Resonance drives brand equity, and brand equity drives growth potential.

Crucially, you do not get the necessary insight by asking people directly what they want. The most powerful insights are often implicit.

Again, storytelling helps. Collect many stories. Identify recurring themes. Extract the red thread: universal truth, friction, resulting need. Small storytelling groups generate candidate themes. Broader testing, asking which theme triggers the strongest recognition, helps select the one that truly resonates.

4. Inspiring and guiding initiatives

A strong purpose does not only sound good. It generates action. One practical test is simple: When teams brainstorm with the purpose as input, does it trigger many ideas? And are those ideas convergent rather than scattered? We have seen purpose statements fail this test. They inspired somewhat, but did not guide, ideas where all over the place. A strong purpose becomes a source of innovation across functions, not just a line on a website.

5. Activated across the company

Even a well-defined purpose fails if it remains on paper. Activation requires a structured workshop approach. A simple but powerful sequence is:

Inspire – Clarify – Apply – Commit

• Inspire through real consumer stories.

• Clarify through dialogue and exercises.

• Apply by translating purpose into concrete team implications: "What do we Start/Stop/Accelerate?"

• Commit by having teams publicly state what they will do differently.

Often, this becomes the starting point for deeper capability building.

And ultimately, as Jim Collins reminds us in Good to Great:

“Two companies can have the same core values or purpose. The authenticity, the discipline, and the consistency with which the ideology is lived, not the content of the ideology, differentiate visionary companies from the rest of the pack.”

It is not the wording that differentiates. It is the discipline.

A practical reflection

When reviewing an existing purpose statement, it helps to test it explicitly against these lenses. Is the friction clearly defined? Is it authentically rooted inside-out? Does it resonate outside-in? Does it guide initiatives?Is there a credible activation plan?

In one recent case, the friction was well defined and the statement clearly built inside-out. It inspired initiatives. But resonance outside the organization was harder to assess. That migh become the focus of the next phase. This kind of structured scrutiny is uncomfortable. It also prevents superficial alignment.

Why this takes time

Properly developing purpose across all five characteristics can take months. Six to eight is not unusual. There is often skepticism at the start, especially from financially minded leaders. And really, that is OK. In one case, a CEO agreed to “disagree and commit” to the process. Twelve months later, he concluded: “Congrats, mission completed. I never thought it was going to work.” Purpose work requires patience. But when done rigorously, it becomes one of the true foundations of performance and satisfaction at work.

Invitation

Many organizations rush purpose. They debate wording before agreeing on what purpose is meant to do. If you recognize that pattern and want to explore a more structured approach, I would be happy to continue the conversation.