By Janus Boye
History shows that hard times can lead to the greatest opportunities for renewal. The Purpose Upgrade, the latest book by UK-based Paul Skinner, supports readers in leading enterprises that thrive by solving our most important problems.
It shows how businesses can create more compelling benefits for customers, build meaningful livelihoods for colleagues, and unlock superior returns for investors by 'repurposing' and revitalising the activities they engage in.
The Purpose Upgrade is his second book. It builds on Collaborative Advantage: How collaboration beats competition as a strategy for success, which argued that we have now reached a turning point in history from which creating Competitive Advantage may no longer be in the best interests of an organisation.
In a recent informal member call, Paul introduced his new 256 page book which was launched in September. Similarly to the book, it became an insightful conversation about purpose as a renewable resource and we also had some time for Q&A. Below you’ll find my notes from the call and towards the end you can find the entire recording.
Let’s upgrade our conversation about purpose
My copy of the Purpose Upgrade has been with me for a few months now. I keep coming back to it to understand it better and to get inspiration from the hopeful message.
As Paul said as part of our conversation:
“Many books on the topic stop short of some of the real questions.”
We’ll get back to that, but let’s first understand what brought him to write this book. His advisory work for the past years has been primarily for people involved in disasters & emergencies, business leaders seeking to make a profit or with social change organisations and charities. He also runs a marketing community called MarketingKind, which is aimed at anyone who thinks marketing can make a positive impact in the world.
His first book came out in 2018 and while 2018 might seem a long time ago, it was actually not a time without its problems. Paul realised that business problems back then couldn’t be solved alone and the book focuses on creating shared purpose between stakeholders introducing collaborative advantage as a fundamental alternative to competitive advantage.
The Purpose Upgrade actually zooms further out, taking into account the latest developments, including pandemic, war and the climate emergency, and takes a closer look at how conventional thinking about purpose might hold us back. He also repositions purpose as a renewable resource.
To summarise as he said:
“If joint problems gave rise to the need for shared purpose and collaborative advantage, bigger problems means that we need to upgrade our purpose in the first place”
That also explains the not understated twofold subtitle of the book:
Change your business to save the world
Change the world to save your business
Purpose is not what you think it might be
So what does purpose really mean? It’s been a big topic in management literature in recent years and businesses are increasingly recognising that making a better contribution to people’s lives and playing a greater role in society can be a tremendous source of business advantage. Purpose level change is required according to Paul, and he encourages us to think about purpose as a more renewable resource than we usually do.
It’s hard to predict the future, but to quote Paul:
“What’s likely to happen is that we’ll have more rapid, extensive and profound shifts in the priority needs of the stakeholders whom we serve.”
That’s why, as Paul advises, we need to learn how to better repurpose our organisations - rather than just continuing with business as usual.
Repurposing is a big business opportunity and while researching for the book, he found some support for this thesis, including this HBR article from 2019 — Put Purpose at the Core of Your Strategy — which is written based on a study of high growth in companies, looking at three strategies known to drive it: creating new markets, serving broader stakeholder needs, and rewriting the rules of the game. To the surprise of the authors, they discovered a fourth driver they hadn’t considered at all: purpose.
He also shared the example of the purpose upgrade at DSM, which used to be a Dutch coal mining business founded in 1902. Today DSM has managed to become a sustainable food business working explicitly to fix the world's broken food system. Making the transition from what was once a perfectly respectable endeavour (mining), but which has become deeply problematic to becoming a successful pioneering champion of sustainable development goals is an interesting case study that also challenges how we think about purpose.
The need for purpose
The book is written in three parts and part one is simply titled: The Need. Here you can read about the origin of purpose and what Paul calls: “In Search of Lost Purpose”.
Photo from Part II of the book - In Search of Lost Purpose
The chapter also reviews existing alternatives to shareholder value maximisation and how they come up short. Paul covers how we think about purpose in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG), cooperatives and B-Corps. To quote:
“These all have huge contributions to make, but none of them gives us a regenerative purpose to pursue in the first place”
This means that you can up with anomalies, such as when BAT (British American Tobacco) was ranked in top three FTSE100 ESG performers. As he said:
“Just because a business can be sustained, doesn’t mean it is solving purposeful problems”
One of the alternatives that touched me personally was on page 67, where he offered the option of giving up and starting again. This is what I tried in 2018 with the move from J. Boye to Boye & Co, but to be honest: While it was more than a name change, the connection to purpose isn’t something I put in the original post back then. Having read Paul’s book has changed my thinking though and I might tell myself another story going forward. More on that later.
Each chapter, including this one, closes with smart questions you can ask your own enterprise. For this chapter one of them reads:
How has the relevance of your purpose changed? Can it lead to negative impacts?
In our call, he also challenged us to upgrade our purpose by asking a set of questions - this one really resonated with me:
What would it take as a thought experiment: Instead of trying to create the best business in the world, we tried to create the best business for the world?
What holds us back from achieving a purpose upgrade?
The challenge according to Paul, is that even though we might be willing to upgrade our purpose, there’s a huge amount that holds us back, including:
The stories we tell ourselves, in particular in the Western world. Think: The redemption narrative with its misleading ‘happy ever after' ending
Management models
Human psychology
He shared these three simple examples on how we might want to consider changing our conversation about purpose:
Purpose is often defined and used as a kind of North Star. A fixed vision, a sense of direction, somewhere on the sky, that we are aiming for - yet as you probably now: Things aren’t fixed. They change all the time and to illustrate the shortcoming of purpose as a North Star, Paul mentioned the example of how communities tend to be at their most purposeful when they’ve been hit by a disaster or emergency and have to change direction.
Purpose is often said to be about authenticity. That’s true according to Paul. We can’t pursue a purpose that’s not true to who we are, but you don’t really achieve meaningful purpose from introspection alone. As Paul eloquently said, there's no point in providing an authentic experience of gastronomic delight in an environment of food poverty.
Purpose tends to be used alongside focus and single-mindedness. That can be helpful and required for action, according to Paul, yet it is so much more. In an enterprise context, there’s a huge number of different aspirations at play, so it’s more about integration and alignment. Brewery and pub chain Brewdog is an example of this: They’ve done very well environmentally, but has seen its reputation damaged in terms of how it engages with colleagues, which has really undermined its stance on social issues.
Learn more about the Purpose Upgrade
For more details on the book, you can go to The Purpose Upgrade book website, which has more details, news and naturally links to buying the book.
If you are interested in learning more about the power of the stories we tell ourselves, then check out The power of self stories to drive behavior.
There were no slides in the call, but you can lean back and enjoy the entire recording below.