The Economics of Higher Purpose: Eight Counterintuitive Steps for Creating a Purpose-Driven Organization

Two distinguished scholars offer eight steps to help organizations discover and embrace their higher purpose–something that will dramatically improve every aspect of any enterprise, including the bottom line.

Managers are taught that employees are self-interested and work resistant, so they create systems of control to combat these expectations. The result? These gloomy assumptions become self-fulfilling prophecies, workforces tend to underperform and resist control, and managers undermine their own effectiveness in a vicious cycle. But when an authentic higher purpose permeates business strategy and decision-making, the cycle is broken. Employers and employees fully engage, become proactive contributors to purpose, and exceed expectations. Long-term economic benefits follow. Robert E. Quinn and Anjan J. Thakor offer a new logic that builds on the assumptions of economics and opens a new path to clearly identifying an organization’s higher purpose and integrating it with the organization’s strategy. They offer a practical and counter-intuitive eight-step approach to articulating higher purpose and show how to weave it into the fabric of the organization.