It ’ s important to distinguish between purpose , meaning and culture .
W 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 about ‘ 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 sacrifice some , or even a lot of , profit , though how that would work in a capitalist system remains to be resolved .
If ‘ culture ’ is longestablished , and ‘ purpose ’ rapidly rising as a term in business , then ‘ meaning ’ comes a distant third in terms of prominence
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 longestablished , 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 .