Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies

Forbes, Best Business Books of 2022; The Next Big Idea Club, Best Leadership Books of 2022; Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022; Axiom Award Bronze Medalist for Business Ethics. A 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. Too many companies deploy purpose as a promotional vehicle to virtue-signal and to look good to the outside world, conflating it with strategy or other concepts like mission, vision, and values. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when implementing purpose and shows how to embed it more deeply, delivering benefits to customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities. 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,” pursuing 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 argues that 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. Author: Ranjay Gulati