TALKING HEADS
T
Defining purpose, meaning and culture
W
Robert Rowland
Smith
It’s important to
distinguish between
purpose, meaning
and culture.
ho should be thinking about
‘purpose, meaning and
culture’? An anthropologist,
for sure. A philosopher, no
doubt. Perhaps even a priest. So, why
are these three terms increasingly the
talk of boardrooms?
Culture has been the concern of
business leaders for a generation at least;
by now it is a truth readily acknowledged
that culture has to be right if the business
is to be right overall. There’s only so
much sweating of the assets you can
do before you’re forced to reach for less
tangible means of raising performance.
Culture may be annoyingly nebulous
but changing it can change everything.
What abou t ‘purpose’ and
‘meaning’? These two newcomers
to the organisational lexicon sound
hardly less intangible than ‘culture’, so
where did they come from and why are
they important?
‘Purpose’ emerges mainly out of
climate change anxiety. Businesses
need to operate more sustainably,
burning fewer fossil fuels, using less
plastic and even moderating their
aspirations for growth and the excessive
consumption on which growth depends.
That requires focusing not solely on profit
but on something beyond it. Indeed,
the phrase ‘purpose beyond profit’ is
becoming commonplace.
So far, however, few can say exactly
what the purpose that lies beyond
profit is. Perhaps it’s simply to do less
environmental harm. Perhaps the
purpose beyond profit is actually to
“If ‘culture’ is
long-established,
and ‘purpose’
rapidly rising as a
term in business,
then ‘meaning’
comes a distant
third in terms of
prominence”
sacrifice some, or even a lot, of profit,
though how that would work in a
capitalist system remains to be resolved.
And yet, the other main energy behind
the rise of ‘purpose’ was the financial
crash of 2008. As the fortifications of the
financial world order toppled, and we got
a glimpse of the greed and negligence
from which we had been shielded, it
became clear that pure profit-centred
capitalism had been decisively checked
on its otherwise inexorable journey.
In other words, ‘purpose beyond
profit’ suggests that capitalism itself
may have had its day. Though for most
businesses, the question is not ‘purpose
beyond profit’ so much as ‘purpose as
well as profit’. They are figuring out how
to change while carrying on doing the
same thing.
As that conundrum around ‘purpose’
continues to trouble us, we have seen
the rise of ‘meaning’. If ‘culture’ is long-
established, and ‘purpose’ rapidly rising
as a term in business, then ‘meaning’
comes a distant third in terms of
prominence. It is likely to get by far
the fewest mentions in boardroom
discussions. Why is that?
Largely because where ‘purpose’ sits
at the organisational level, ‘meaning’ is
the concern of the individual. It is the
individual employee, especially younger
ones, who will cite ‘meaning’ as a key
criteria in any job they apply for. They
require the organisation to have a stated
purpose of its own, one to which they are
pleased to sign up; and the organisation’s
purpose will itself be a constituent
element of the meaning that they as an
individual seek. But what matters most
is that their work is meaningful.
Needless to say, what’s meaningful
to one individual may be meaningless
to another, but then it’s up to the
individual to decide whether to join that
organisation in the first place.
So, ‘purpose, meaning and culture’
might sound like they all point in the
same direction, and to an extent
they do. But it’s worth us keeping the
distinctions in mind if we want to have
better conversations about them.
Robert Rowland Smith is an author
and philosopher.
February – May 2020 // 39