In many business corners of the planet, corporate purpose has become the boardroom’s favorite accessory, the shiny object leaders bring out at off-site meetings, town halls, and media interviews when they want to sound serious about saving the planet and being purpose-driven.
Then, ever so quietly, they set it aside when it’s time to finalize quarterly targets, rework incentives, or approve the next workforce reduction effort.
A “purpose statement” appears on the wall, and a video circulates on the company’s intranet showcasing the number of trees planted that year. There’s a landing page that’s updated with a promise to continue to “change lives.”
Yet, within the organization, people feel the same pressure to hit their targets with fewer people (e.g., do more with less) while using the same tools. An understandable suspicion begins to creep in, like an October fog in Victoria’s Inner Harbour, that purpose is just the latest label in a long line of management fashions.
Author Ron Tite has very little patience for that gap. An entrepreneur, creative director, and author of The Purpose of Purpose: Making Growth the Heart of Your Business, Tite is not interested in purpose as décor or reputation management.
“A purpose, by definition, is a fundamental belief that drives what you sell and how you grow,” he points out. Tite grounds the idea of purpose as something far more demanding than a tagline or a corporate values poster.
Growth, in his view, is not an awkward add-on to purpose; it is the evidence that the belief in what we do and how it gets done is genuine, operational, and of mutual value to the employee and the organization that serves its customers.
Tite also believes many leaders have drifted away from that connection.
Over the last decade, as social pressure mounted and the spotlight swung toward the private sector on issues ranging from climate to equity to democracy, a lot of organizations, as he put it, “started to use purpose for PR as opposed to for growth.”
When a company that makes crackers suddenly declares that its entire reason for existence is saving the planet, or an automaker announces that its purpose is human rights and equality, something feels off, not because those causes do not matter, but because they belong in a different category.
Put differently, they are expectations, not purpose. Maybe too many leaders are confused about the exact purpose of purpose?
From Purpose As Posture To Purpose As System
Tite’s starting point is to strip away the clutter that gets in the way of purpose.
Leaders often spend significant energy crafting labels such as mission, vision, North Star, BHAG, brand essence, and corporate values, without considering the underlying system. Tite suggests a much plainer structure that forces clarity for all stakeholders: what we believe in, what we do, and how we do it.
As many of us have done, Tite watched how quickly companies responded to public scrutiny by elevating broad social causes to the level of “our purpose,” without doing the more complex work of rewriting how the organization actually behaves.
“Businesses and leaders, they want to do the right thing, but they don’t know what the right thing is,” he said. The efficient answer was to publish a purpose statement; the more expensive answer, however, would have been to alter its product line, pricing, policies, and specific processes and practices to reflect a more profound belief about its role in people’s lives.
This is where his definition of purpose is worth considering.
The Purpose of Purpose
Ron Tite
If purpose is a fundamental belief that drives what you sell and how you grow, you cannot simply bolt it on to the side of the business as a mode of reputational insurance. It has to make some strategies unthinkable, some products no longer viable, and some partnerships less likely. There may be a need to say no and actually stick with the decision. Your organization’s declaration of being purpose-driven has to create a filter for opportunities rather than a catalogue of things you say you care about.
Tite is neither naïve nor insincere about how uncomfortable it sounds to act in such a way when so many corporate environments are obsessed with speed.
Leaders face activist investors, impatient boards, and team members who are more vocal about values than any previous cohort. Recall when Netflix employees staged walkouts as a protest against the firm’s hiring of Dave Chappelle.
It can be tempting to treat purpose as a statement that satisfies all stakeholders simultaneously. In his view, however, that is precisely how an organization ends up satisfying no one.
When “We Believe” Finally Becomes “I Do”
Even when leaders articulate a reasonable belief—the tenets that help shape an organization’s purpose—another trap emerges. Tite spends a lot of time here.
“What we do really well as leaders is we do the ‘we’ part really well,” he observed.
Senior teams are excellent at discussing what we believe as an organization and what we plan to do over the next three to five years. But it comes with a catch.
“If the ‘we’ doesn’t become a ‘me,’ then it doesn’t go anywhere,” he warned.
Most team members know this feeling. They attend a town hall meeting where a new purpose is unveiled—complete with a video, a refreshed slide template, and a set of purpose-driven t-shirts emblazoned with the organization’s purpose—then return to inboxes and workflows that look precisely as they did the week before.
As Tite put it, people can often recite the line because it has been drilled into them during onboarding and performance reviews, yet “they have no idea what it means, and they have no idea what role they play in it.”
The gap between “we believe” and “this is what I actually do differently on Monday” is where cynicism often takes root.
Tite’s remedy is deliberately simple language that still carries weight.
He likes to build from a basic frame: “We believe this, so we do this, by doing this.”
During our discussion, the Lego example he introduced is telling. If you work on the production line making plastic bricks, your job can easily feel like repetitive manufacturing.
As Tite described, if the company starts with “we believe that play inspires creativity, imagination, and learning,” that belief suddenly gives context to the work. Now the person on the line can say, “I make sure these bricks are perfect so kids can build and imagine without frustration.” The task is the same; the meaning is not. Purpose finally has a purpose.
The Shift
That shift in thinking and operations opens up a more interesting question.
Once the belief is apparent and people can see themselves as part of it, Tite argues that growth comes from asking, “What else could you do?”
If your belief is in the “power of play,” perhaps the business can credibly expand into films, theme parks, digital experiences, or education, much as Lego did.
But if your belief (or purpose) is about removing friction from everyday life, you can start evaluating new services through that lens rather than chasing every possible product extension. Purpose becomes a system for prioritization and innovation, not a plaque in reception for another theme park opening.
This shift in thinking also allows individuals to reflect on their own development. Suppose the organization is serious about a specific sense of purpose—how does your role advance it?
This change in perspective also enables people to consider their personal development. If the organization is genuinely committed to a particular sense of purpose, how does your role support it, and what new skills or responsibilities could help you contribute even more? That is where personal and organizational growth begin to align, strengthening each other rather than drifting apart.
Tite’s ultimate wish is for purpose to become more than a branding exercise, one that produces an utterly useless, toothless, and meaningless statement.
Purpose should become the organization’s operating system. If it really is a fundamental belief that drives what you sell and how you grow, then the work is to keep aligning decisions with that belief until the organization’s behavior is so consistent that people stop asking whether you mean it and start asking how they can help.
“Use purpose as your anchor and keep coming back to it so that you can continually reinforce it, as opposed to trying to think up a new thing,” he said.
Wise words when it comes to the purpose of purpose.
Watch the full interview with Ron Tite and Dan Pontefract on the Leadership NOW program below, or listen to it on your favorite podcast.
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