Author:Ranjay Gulati,Vikas Adam
Brought to you by Penguin.
Many companies have used purpose as a corporate buzzword to appear virtuous internally, and look good to the outside world. But a poor understanding of the importance of real purpose can have detrimental consequences for the profitability and sustainability of a business.
Deep Purpose is the essential guide to putting purpose at the core of a company, and in doing so, understanding its very soul. Drawing together years of research, including analysis of multinational corporations from Danone and PepsiCo to Microsoft and Patagonia, Harvard professor Ranjay Gulati has identified eight conceptual barriers that are dooming leaders and their companies to a more superficial engagement with purpose. In this book, he shows you how to understand and overcome these obstacles, in order to find your company's deep purpose and supercharge its capacity to serve all stakeholders and shareholders.
By fusing commercial and social logic, business leaders can enhance financial performance, boost employee morale and retention, and leave a positive mark on society. Deep Purpose has the power to transform the business landscape and usher in a new era of ethical corporate leadership.
© Ranjay Gulati 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Deep Purpose points to the conversations we must have right now about how to redefine the role of business in society. The winning formula is moral leadership and a multistakeholder model with purpose at its core. Highly recommended.
—— Paul Polman, former CEO of UnileverBrilliant and thought-provoking as ever, Ranjay Gulati applies scholarly rigor to the important topic of purpose. This book is a must-read for all leaders.
—— Kasper Rorsted, CEO, AdidasPursuing a purpose as a company means arriving at a clear understanding of what you were put on this planet to do. It helps you steer in the right direction, navigate tradeoffs, and, when connected to a social or personal purpose, it can inspire remarkable performance. Deep Purpose peels back the layers to unveil what it truly takes to cultivate a purpose-driven culture, one that enables both the company and its employees to experience its power and benefit from the growth it can generate.
—— Corie Barry, CEO, Best BuyMany leaders today strive to align purpose with financial success, but only a few succeed. Gulati analyzes the tough challenges that leaders everywhere must address if they are to save the planet while also delivering strong profits. He provides a compelling account of what it means to be purpose-driven--a crucial objective for us as well as other organizations in the social innovation space.
—— Toshiaki Higashihara, Executive Chairman & CEO, HitachiLeaders often invoke the rhetoric of corporate purpose to elevate their or their company's image. But for the people who work in these companies, the search for purpose is a real and defining part of their professional life. Gulati's book illustrates how the best leaders help employees discover a tangible link between the organization's stated purpose and what they do on the job. When people "come alive" with a sense of purpose in their work, their motivation, energy, and creativity blossoms.
—— Ken Frazier, former CEO of MerckPurpose isn't a "nice-to-have" in the business world anymore. It's a "must-have." Purpose-driven organizations will lead the future, and Ranjay Gulati's Deep Purpose is essential reading for anyone who wants to be at the head of the pack. This comprehensive guide breaks down why cultivating purpose isn't just the right thing for businesses to
do - it's the smart thing too.
Many leaders give lip service to purpose, but few know how to create a compelling one. Ranjay Gulati is a preeminent scholar of organizational strategy, and in this book he shows what it takes to walk the talk on purpose. It's an insightful, practical, and timely read on building a mission that serves employees, customers, and communities along with shareholders.
—— Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast, WorkLifeIn this provocative and richly-researched book, Ranjay Gulati argues that the pursuit of profits without purpose is no longer a sustainable business model. As he shows, the road to high performance, for both individuals and for companies, depends on deepening our connection to enduring and essential human values. If you want to be inspired to build more sustainable organizations, Deep Purpose should be your next read.
—— Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive GlobalA thoughtful account of the obstacles of moving beyond the pure-profit imperative, and how to overcome them.
—— Financial Timesthe book is magisterial in its scope. He describes the reasons for the current distortion of the markets and why wealth and income disparity were so pronounced in the last 20 years. He lays blame on the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world distorting the markets with low interest rates. You'll want to buy this book and get it the first day available.
—— John Mauldin , Thoughts from the FrontlineEdward Chancellor argues that low interest rates, of the sort that prevailed since the financial crisis and until this year, are a catastrophic mistake because, as the great financial journalist Walter Bagehot wrote, they lead people to "invest their savings in something impossible - a canal to Kamchatka, a railway to Watchet, a plan for animating the Dead Sea, a corporation for shipping skates to the Torrid Zone". Cryptocurrencies are the Kamchatka canals of today. Their collapse, in Chancellor's view, is just the beginning of a great unravelling. The book is persuasive, perfectly timed and, for a work on such a nerdy subject, gripping.
—— Emma Duncan , Times Writers’ Favourite Books of 2022a blistering polemic against the evils of artificially low interest rates. Right on cue, the gravy train of ultra-loose monetary policy has come to a halt. Perhaps you should therefore not just buy this book but sell all your stocks ... The Price of Time addresses the biggest economic question of the past 15 years. Have the experimental monetary policies pursued by the world's leading central banks since the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 been a miracle cure or an epochal mistake? It situates this contemporary dilemma in a rich historical context. For this is just the latest instalment of an ancient debate over the nature and role of interest in a well-functioning economy. ... Capital allocation has been distorted; investment risk mispriced; pensions systems destabilised; social mobility fossilised; and moderate investors polarised into idle rent-seekers or you-only-live-once speculators. Chancellor makes a compelling and disturbing case that excessively loose financial conditions lie behind them all. ... The carnage being wrought by even the modest increase in borrowing costs so far in 2022 is not encouraging. At least if you've read this scintillating book and heeded the infamous Chancellor signal, you'll know what needs doing when we emerge from the wreckage.
—— Felix Martin , ReutersChancellor's panoptic survey of the history of interest, and what classical economists said about it, will not fail to dazzle
—— Economista sweeping historical analysis of how our financial system once again became untethered from the world it is supposed to serve. At the heart of such derangement, Chancellor argues, is a single factor: artificially low interest rates. As he reminds us, interest rates are the most important signal in a market-based economy, "the universal price" affecting all others. Interest is best defined as the time value of money, which Chancellor artfully renders as "the price of time." It is the price that informs every key financial decision-saving, spending, investing. Suppressing the rate of interest is a powerful way to boost an economy otherwise bound for recession, but it is a dangerous one. It is to finance what opiates are to medicine, a distortion of perception disguised as a cure. ... Chancellor's learned and engrossing history concludes with a somber warning. Compared with more heavy-handed forms of government intrusion, central bankers' manipulation of interest rates may seem rather innocuous, and it is much less likely to provoke howling objections from ordinary citizens. But more than any other, it threatens the efficiency and integrity of the free-enterprise system. Behind the price of time is the priceless right of freedom.
—— Adam Rowe , Wall Street Journalevery bit as gripping as any science fiction novel. It's an amazing book ... truly magisterial in scope
—— John Mauldin , Thoughts from the FrontlineSuperb! A worthy successor to Devil Take the Hindmost.
—— William Bernstein , author of The Delusion of CrowdsPraise for Devil Take the Hindmost
—— ---An admirably researched and very well written account of speculative insanity from the earliest times to, let no one doubt, the present.
—— J.K. GalbraithEntertaining, useful, admirable scholarship... Chancellor seems to have read everything.
—— New York Times Book ReviewPraise for Crunch-Time for Credit?
—— ---There was no single, dominant, astonishing voice in the wilderness in the debate on the credit crunch, but... Edward Chancellor, an economic historian, foresaw almost everything.
—— Charles Moore , Daily Telegraph