Why Your Company Should Join the Purpose-Driven Club
Why Your Company Should Join the Purpose-Driven Club
Michael Graber is the founder and managing partner of Southern Growth Studio, now known as Epic Pivot. For over 20 years, Michael has helped more than 250 organizations embed innovation departments and successfully commercialize innovations. After rebranding, he focused his company's mission on leading privately held companies through purposeful transformations.
March 25, 2022
When the pandemic hit, Southern Growth Studio’s active business began to erode while their new business slowed. In its wake, Michael Graber was left to examine the real impact he had been making the past two decades. He reflected on a career of successfully commercializing innovation for more than 250 privately-held corporations, resulting in millions in profit. While this might sound like an impressive legacy, Michael wondered how all those corporations could have made the planet a better place. Could his work have affected more than their bottom lines?
In response, Michael did the unthinkable by overhauling his existing company, an innovation and insights boutique of 14 years. He launched Epic Pivot to focus his life’s work on evangelizing companies to be a force of good in the world and declare that the private sector can positively impact the social sector through purposeful transformation.
LEAVE YOUR INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION MINDSET BEHIND
Michael was motivated to make such an epic pivot because he observed that too many of today’s business practices are carried over from the Industrial Revolution. Accepted today as absolute, practices like hyper-competitiveness began with Robert Winslowe Taylor, the first consultant known for cutting artisans from factories to keep labor costs down and grow profit at any cost. Looking back, this is obviously a flawed and harmful practice. Businesses today, however, default to the same principle by firing 10% of non-performers each year.
We have built and accepted this focus on maximum profit, Michael says, and support it by pointing to influential figures like Adam Smith and Charles Darwin. That’s not the full story, however. While Smith did write about the principles of growth, profit, and the invisible hand in The Wealth of Nations, he also talked at length about how individuals and the market should care for one another in The Theory of Moral Sentiment, a far less frequently quoted text. Similarly, Darwin talks of the survival of the fittest in On the Origin of Species four times, yet mentions love nearly 400 times.
If we continue to accept these truths as gospel, then we will continue our march towards even greater division of wealth and the great three crises of our time: the humanitarian crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of truth and meaning.
HOW TO ENTER THE PURPOSE-DRIVEN ARENA
After realizing the urgent need for conscious capitalism to combat default business principles, Michael made a declaration. He declared that he would help corporations move the needle in the social sector by creating a purpose driven framework. He began pursuing how to adapt his consulting business to implement real change in the world, what he refers to as the triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit. Businesses obviously need to continue to make money. Michael just wants to help them shift from profit stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism.
It wasn’t long before Michael had the opportunity to prototype his purposeful transformation framework. Epic Pivot was called into two very large corporate cultures to figure out why their previous transformations had failed. Michael and his team performed extensive diagnostics with human-centered internal work, orthodoxies, and exercises to determine the root cause of failure. It turns out in both cases, no one in the companies knew why they were undergoing transformation. In other words, they were transforming without a purpose and without transparency.
Based on data from McKinsey, we know that 80% of digital transformations fail. Michael believes that companies who consider the human side of transformations by declaring a purpose desiring to do good in their backyards have the best talent and highest retention. It’s not enough to throw money at a transformation; you have to empower your team with meaning and purpose.
BEING PURPOSE-DRIVEN COMES WITH PERKS
In continuing to use his purposeful transformation framework, Michael is able to help other companies increase their bottom lines and build legacies for good through purpose-driven work. This, in turn, has helped these companies stave off the effects of the great resignation, retain top talent, give employees the authority to be creative, and help them to feel empowered.
If, after all this, you think that purposeful transformations are reserved for the Ben & Jerry’s or Patagonia’s of the world, you would be mistaken. Every business—no matter the size—not only needs a purpose, but can benefit from one. According to a study by Firms of Endearment, purpose-driven companies outperform profit-driven companies in their space by between 8 to 13 times. Why not keep your people, do good in the world, and make some money while you’re at it?
At Bridge, we talk a lot about innovation for growth and good. If you’d like to know what it’s all about, contact us about our Innovation for Good on demand service.
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