Most corporate efforts to embed societal purpose involve a relatively small number of senior people — C-suite, functional, and business leaders. The potential of fully engaging and aligning the entire organization, including middle management and front-line employees, thus remains unfulfilled. Without focus on organizationwide transformation, there is a risk that the head of the organization (that is, senior management) becomes disconnected from the body (organizational members), rendering the entire effort ineffective and potentially counterproductive.
To understand the nature of this disconnect in greater depth — and how best to address it — my colleagues Priya Dasgupta, Kate Napolitan, and I took a close look at some truly innovative corporate outliers — a selection of 15 companies that we identified as pushing the envelope when it comes to societal purpose, sustainability, and corporate transformation. We found that articulating a clear purpose is necessary but not sufficient to the task of focusing company attention on the actual challenges that the company seeks to address.
Our examination found that embedding sustainability and a societal purpose into the core DNA of a company requires the systematic realignment of the entire corporate architecture, including purpose, goals, metrics, and strategies, as well as the key organizational elements — structure, systems, processes, rewards, and incentives. We borrowed the metaphor of the “house” from Griffith Foods, one of the companies we studied, to represent how these various building blocks fit together as a system.
https://mitsmr.com/4gQ3uQ9
