Social purpose strategy: Bring your corporate purpose to life is a guide to help companies embed their purpose into their corporate strategy. Articulating a social purpose is the first step to becoming a social purpose company. To realize your purpose, you then need to include social purpose goals in your corporate strategy. Your purpose is more enduring than your strategy; the former is timeless, the latter will likely change every few years. Company leaders need to recognize that your purpose sits at the apex, guiding and directing your corporate vision and strategy. Social purpose strategy: Bring your corporate purpose to life is a guide to help you get started.
Social purpose strategy: Bring your corporate purpose to life sets out eight steps to embedding your purpose in your corporate strategy:
- Use your purpose to set your vision
- Plan to integrate your purpose into your strategy
- Align your values to your purpose
- Define your purpose priorities
- Turn your purpose priorities into goal statements
- Include both process and impact targets
- Recalibrate your corporate scorecard to reflect your purpose
- Shift your business model to align to your purpose
Social purpose strategy: Bring your corporate purpose to life introduces the concept of a purpose materiality assessment to address:
- What are the material impacts your company has on the issues that are related to your purpose?
- What are the material impacts of your operating context on your ability to deliver on your purpose?
Social purpose strategy: Bring your corporate purpose to life also provides an example of how social purpose companies seeking to transform the economic or social system in which they operate in pursuit of their purpose can create a “Purpose Theory of Change”. This is a framework that articulates and visualizes how your company’s activities, inputs and strategies will lead to this transformation.
Finally, Social purpose strategy: Bring your corporate purpose to life introduces two examples of how a social purpose company can embed its purpose into its corporate dashboard or scorecard.
