First Insights from our book: What leaders need to create purposeful growth
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Businesses have always been under pressure to grow—but the game has changed. Investor expectations and global competition still matter, but leaders now have to navigate a whole new set of challenges: AI-driven disruptions, tariffs and supply chain volatility, geopolitical risk, and the shift to a green economy—each demanding major investments. At the same time, employees expect more from their work—more growth, more purpose, more balance.
So the stakes couldn’t be higher. CEOs are on the hook for growing their stock prices. CMOs need to unlock new markets and new sources of brand growth. ESG, DEI, and sustainability leaders have to prove their impact on the bottom line. And HR leaders are tasked with building high-performing cultures that can make all this possible.
And on top of it all, the growth they all need to create can’t come at the expense of an already overtaxed planet, or jeopardize the health, safety or prosperity of communities around the world.
Against this backdrop, we want to empower leaders to leverage the Power of Purpose as a driver of new and better growth (read more in our article ‘Purpose needs to grow up’). Smarter, more impactful, and more intentional, this new source of growth can turn global challenges and unmet societal needs into engines of innovation, inclusion, and sustainable success.
Image credit: Daniel Faro x Death to Stock
We call this Purposeful Growth
We know first hand through our work with companies like Sephora, Mattel, Mercedes-Benz, Gap Inc., Coca-Cola, Akamai, American Family Insurance, Pepsico and others, that Purpose can be turned into real-world business growth.
To share our insights and empower leaders everywhere to apply our principles and practical frameworks of Purposeful Growth across all functions of their organization, we are writing a book. In addition to our own work, we explored the challenges and opportunities of Purposeful Growth with leaders from other advanced organizations such as Google, Starbucks, Apple, H&M, Lego and others, to discover what works and what barriers to Purposeful Growth our book must help leaders overcome.
The insights we discovered confirm 3 major opportunity areas for Purposeful Growth:
Leadership that inspires: By creating clarity, meaning and focus for employees, Purpose-driven leaders can increase overall organizational performance.
A culture that performs: When Purpose is leveraged to create strategic conviction in employees, make their work matter, and empower teams to do ‘less, but better’, this results in a healthier, happier, high-performing culture.
Brands that win: Purpose can boost commercial performance through increased brand power, more visionary innovation, and the ability to unlock new markets through inclusive growth.
Let’s unpack these growth areas in greater detail:
1. Leadership that inspires
Purposeful Growth through clarity, meaning and focus
Never before seen levels of external volatility and uncertainty are distracting and overwhelming people everywhere. And a huge risk for organizations—especially large ones—is losing sight of what matters most. Plus, regardless of the current environment, strategic options always outnumber available resources. All that makes clarity, meaning, and focus the most important leadership tenets today. Against this backdrop, here is how Purpose can help:
Clarity – Corporate strategies are often complex, leaving employees confused about the company’s direction. This ‘strategic confusion’ leads to misalignment, inefficiency, and lost momentum. Purpose, when framed as a bold, simple expression of long-term priorities, cuts through the noise and turns ambiguity into clarity.
Meaning – Clarity isn’t enough. Employees and stakeholders need to connect emotionally to the strategy—understanding not just where the company is headed, but why it matters. Purpose can transform strategy into a story that creates meaning by showing how the business’ ambitions can create real impact for people and the planet.
Focus – Once purpose creates clarity and meaning, leaders must turn this energy into action. Focus is a gift—helping teams do less, but better. It sharpens execution, maximizes impact, and can protect employees from burnout.
In a world full of distractions, leadership isn’t about reacting to every shift. Purpose can help leaders create a stable North Star and unlock new growth by creating the conditions for employees to move forward with clarity, conviction and purpose.
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Barriers to overcome: The business case for Purpose and how to unlock it
Despite growing recognition of Purpose as a strategic asset, many leaders still struggle to unlock Purposeful Growth at a foundational level, mainly due to three major barriers:
Misunderstanding Purpose: There is still widespread confusion among leaders about Purpose and its business case. For those who think about purpose as an organizational embellishment, a feel good initiative or the social impact strategy of the company, it hasn’t moved the needle. Often, Purpose gets confused with things like cause marketing, DEI, ESG or CSR. Leaders who instead utilize Purpose as a way to make strategy clear and meaningful, inspire employees, drive innovation and boost brand performance, are getting rewarded with new growth.
Purpose activation gap: There is a significant gap in both internal and external Purpose activation within organizations. Many "purpose-adjacent" functions—such as DEI, ESG, and CSR—operate independently rather than purpose-aligned, leading to fragmented and disjointed corporate impact portfolios. Leadership incentives and guiding principles often fail to reflect a clear commitment to a central strategy and Purpose framework, creating misalignment across all levels. Employees, in turn, often do not experience an engaging workplace. And since uninspired organizations have a hard time inspiring consumers, leaders struggle with unlocking the full commercial potential of their brands.
Inability to drive focus: True purpose is one of the hardest commitments for leaders because it requires saying no—not just to distractions, but to competing opportunities and individual employee and consumer passion points. An organization that has understood its own Superpowers and is truly focused on driving growth through green technology innovation for example, should resist the urge to please too many stakeholder passion points that are located outside of this focus area. Purpose can help illuminate what’s essential, and the most effective leaders have the discipline to focus, the courage to say no, and the wisdom to prioritize long-term growth over short-term appeasement.
2. A Culture that performs
Purposeful Growth through strategic conviction, work that matters and doing ‘less, but better’.
Mounting pressures to growth require not just the ability to acquire and retain top talent, but to inspire all employees to bring their best selves to work in service to what matters most to the organization. There is overwhelming evidence that especially Gen Z and Millennial employees are now much more drawn to companies that can demonstrate a positive impact on society through their core business. This makes Purpose a key driver in acquiring, engaging, and retaining top talent, and a vital force in the creation of a healthy, happy, high-performing culture. When an organization is competitive on salary and benefits, then Purpose can become the tie-breaker to attract the best and brightest.
Creating strategic conviction: People are far more likely to act with confidence when they understand the company’s direction and can connect it to something meaningful. Clarity drives alignment, and meaning fuels motivation. It’s not just good for morale, it’s a strategy for both individual and organizational growth.
Making work matter: When leaders help employees understand how their role contributes to a larger purpose, they create more engagement, more resilience, and more performance. It’s not just about feeling good—it’s about fueling long-term success for both people and the business.
Doing less, but better: Purpose is a great shorthand and North Star for what is and isn’t important. This can speed up day-to-day decision making on all levels, giving employees the clarity and the freedom to move faster and smarter, because they know what to ignore and where to invest their energy.
Image credit: Daniel Faro x Death to Stock
Barriers to overcome: The Inspiration Gap
Dull experiences: While companies are used to engaging consumers with creative and carefully designed customer experiences, they rarely apply this skill to how their employees experience their work everyday. Instead of a highly curated and purpose-driven series of touchpoints that intentionally inspire specific outcomes, the employee experience in most companies is a hodge-podge of disconnected HR systems, cluttered messaging from a multitude of sources, and the occasional all-hands meeting, which often lacks proper follow up and connection to people’s everyday work.
Transactional leadership: In addition, leaders, especially those in middle management, often lose the plot, and are overwhelmed and underequipped to lead with the right mix of clarity and inspiration. In absence of Purpose-driven clarity, they operate as short term task managers instead of unlocking the full potential of their teams.
A bigger story that connects: To untie these knots, the leadership principles of clarity, meaning and focus as outlined above need to be brought to life through a compelling overarching narrative that every employee touchpoint can express in highly experiential ways, and that leaders across the organization are equipped to tell through individual and authentic storytelling.
3. brands that win
Purposeful Growth through brand power, inclusive growth and visionary innovation
Finally, with clarity, meaning and focus coming from the top, and a healthy, and happy, high-performing culture that is eager to apply itself, organizations can leverage Purpose to ignite commercial growth in the marketplace:
Brand Power: It’s been proven over and over again that consumers are more likely to purchase from companies with an authentic Purpose that is meaningful to them. The unbelievable success story of Barbie’s comeback as a cultural icon and brand that ‘inspires the limitless potential in every girl’ is just one example of the brand power that Purpose can unlock (more about our work with Mattel here). Winning brands connect deeply with consumers by helping address issues they care about, and meaningfully engaging them in the process. This boosts brand differentiation, meaning, advocacy and loyalty. By the way, this is true for B2B brands as well. Business customers are people, too, and a more meaningful way to engage them can humanize B2B brands and turn transactional relationships into more transformative ones. One word of caution though: most mainstream brands need to be careful not to make purpose political, and avoid wading into culture wars (Bud Light, anyone?). Instead, it is usually a good idea to try and focus on apolitical issues that enjoy broad relevance in society. Our work for Gap is a great example for this. This way, brand purpose can become a fundamental North Star for brands to guide why, where, when and how to show up in society.
Inclusive Growth: You can only grow so much by selling the same things to the same people. Especially in highly competitive and saturated markets, the biggest growth opportunities often lie in serving customers that businesses have historically ignored or overlooked. The disability economy, for example, is a massive untapped market—1.3 billion people with $8 trillion in disposable income—yet fewer than 5% of businesses design for them. Systemic barriers have also limited African Americans’ economic mobility. This makes closing financial gaps in banking, insurance, and retirement a potential unlock of $60 billion in annual revenue. Meanwhile, despite 1 in 6 people being over 60 by 2030, most brands still chase younger demographics, even as the anti-aging market is set to grow from $47 billion to $80 billion within a decade. In summary: Companies that focus on communities that are underserved in their category stand to unlock sizable new growth opportunities (more about Inclusive Growth here). By the way, this is a unique opportunity for DEI teams to prove the naysayers wrong and reposition themselves as drivers of market expansion. By helping the business design for underserved audiences, DEI teams can contribute to improving lives for millions of people, while unlocking entirely new revenue streams for the business (more about DEI’s potential to pivot here)
Visionary Innovation: And finally, Purpose can also be a powerful innovation springboard. When businesses anchor innovation in leveraging their unique capabilities (or as we like to say, their “Superpowers”) to solve real societal needs, they don’t just do good; they unlock massive new growth opportunities. The UN estimates that achieving the Sustainable Development Goals could open over $12 trillion in new markets. Here are just a few examples on how solving societal problems, instead of contributing to them, can unlock massive new economic value: Investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and carbon capture technologies have created new industries and millions of jobs globally. Adapting infrastructure and communities to climate change can create new markets for flood protection, drought-resistant agriculture, and sustainable building materials. Addressing the challenges of an aging population, such as chronic diseases and long-term care, has created a growing market for healthcare services, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Transitioning to a circular economy, where resources are reused and recycled, can create new markets for waste management, recycling technologies, and sustainable materials. Purposeful Growth is about creating new economic value by leveraging your unique Superpowers to solve societal problems profitably, instead of contributing to them.
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Barriers to overcome: Purpose washing, siloed thinking and playing it safe
Purpose-washing: Too many companies still see purpose as a branding exercise rather than a strategic driver of growth. Marketing is still trying to curry favor with consumers merely by signaling that they share the same values, whereas meaning, differentiation and growth come from engaging consumers in shared and consistent action over time. Another way to think about this is ‘promise making’ and ‘promise keeping’. Purpose is too often still relegated to making brand promises, whereas brands need to create action and deliver experiences that engage consumers in turning those promises into reality. What's more, doing this in a way that resonates across various cultural, social, and political contexts can create tensions, especially when trying to balance a global brand identity with regional or local expectations, particularly in today's highly polarized political and social climate.
Siloed thinking: Meaningful brand action, inclusive design and bold innovation often require cross-functional collaboration, not just between marketing and product teams, but also with functions such as DEI, ESG and in particular sustainability. Those teams can often deliver critical insights and existing corporate programs that can be leveraged by brand teams to demonstrate impact and create meaning, by design teams to create inclusive growth through deeper consumer understanding, and by entire divisions or innovation task forces to develop new offerings that go beyond the incremental. Without purpose as a unifier and a shared vision that is strong enough to overcome tunnel vision and fragmentation (more about vision here), doing big things becomes nearly impossible.
Playing it safe: The famous ‘innovators dilemma’ is alive and well: Most companies claim they want bold innovation, but their systems reward predictability. Leaders ask for breakthrough ideas and then shut them down because they don’t fit existing models. On top of that, brands are navigating an era where taking a stand can either build deep loyalty or invite backlash. It’s the paradox of modern brand leadership: if you do nothing, you risk irrelevance. If you take a stand, you risk alienating part of your customer base. Bud Light’s 2023 misstep and McDonald’s boycotts in Muslim-majority countries show that when brands engage in purpose opportunistically rather than authentically—they become vulnerable. Yet the solution isn’t avoidance. Playing it safe isn’t safe at all—it’s a slow path to obsolescence. The brands that win are the ones that navigate this space with clarity, consistency, and conviction. Purposeful Growth isn’t about pandering; it’s about bringing two things together: your brand’s unique superpowers and how those can be leveraged to deliver on unmet market needs and help solve societal problems your consumers care most about.
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The Biggest Barrier of them all: Making Purpose Work in Corporate Reality
Many leaders already recognize that purpose can be a smarter, more sustainable way to unlock new growth. Their biggest challenge isn’t the WHY—it’s the HOW. In the real world, lack of understanding, missing clarity, stretched resources and operational silos make it incredibly difficult to translate the principles of Purposeful Growth into action at scale. Leaders worry about revenue targets, market competition, organizational alignment and brand performance, and they often don’t have the experience yet in how to take Purpose from a talking point to a transformational force that helps them achieve those goals.
In our experience, the companies that break through are ‘Masters of HOW’ - they don’t just talk about purpose—they lean in, connect Purpose with strategy, educate stakeholders, inspire their organizations and empower bold action.
That’s why we are writing a book about this. Drawing on our work with corporate giants like Sephora, Mattel, Gap, Mercedes-Benz, Coca-Cola and Pepsico, the book will deliver practical frameworks, battle tested strategies, and real-world case studies to help leaders turn purpose into performance. Our book and this website are for leaders who want to move beyond theory and unlock new growth for their business, their brands and their people. If you are one of them — this is your playbook.
If anything sparks your interest in this or the following articles, please do email philipp@purposefulgrowth.co