Purpose Before Culture
Backstage FEATURE: A clearer leadership chain for a world moving from systems to networks.
The goal for a leader is to build and further develop a company that is sustainably successful.
In simple terms: maximise sustainable profit.
Sustainable profit comes from real customer value. Customers get something useful, stay loyal, and keep paying. That creates returns for investors, wealth for founders and employees, and capital that can flow back to kids (new generation), new companies, … the future.
To get there, the organisation has to be led.
In the last Feature, we looked at Apple and Tim Cook’s answer to the company’s long-term success: culture.
We learned that culture is not the starting point. It is the result AND that you can not lead cutlure directly.
A useful leadership chain looks like this:
Purpose → Vision → Mission → Strategy → Structure → Process → Culture
So we now move upstream.
This Feature starts at the beginning of that chain: purpose.
What is the purpose of the company — and how does it connect to vision, mission, strategy, structure, process, and ultimately culture?
That question has become harder for leaders.
They now have to lead across generations whose assumptions about work, loyalty, hierarchy, meaning, and technology are further apart than before. They deal with weaker institutional trust, disruption through AI, keep talent engaged, satisfy investors, serve customers, and still build a company that performs.
That is the work to be done.
The better the leadership the more sustainable the success.
1) Generations: why the workforce thinks differently about purpose
Let’s start with the people. Purpose has become harder to lead because the distance between generations has grown.
Every company has always had older and younger employees. That is not new. What is new is the size of the gap in how they think about work, loyalty, authority, technology, meaning, and trust.
