Being a Purpose led organisation

I recently spoke at the Deloitte Financial Reporting Plus conference. It gave me the opportunity to reflect on the end of the first industrial revolution when William Welch Deloitte had the auspicious role of undertaking the first external audit of the Great Western Railway Company. Tracing the evolution of the first to the fourth industrial revolution we see that the role of business has changed fundamentally. Companies that were created through the technology advancement enabled by fossil fuels are now much more conscious of their use of resources and their role in society. 

It has forced an existential question of business leaders: Why are we here, what is our purpose?

Articulating a purpose is not new for most organisations. What is new, I believe, is the urgency around not just having a purpose, but being a truly purpose-led organisation.

This urgency is perhaps reflected by the Business Roundtable in the US. They recently published a ‘statement of purpose’ saying that businesses should be run for the benefit of all stakeholders, customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.  Signed by 181 CEOs, the statement of purpose represented a radical break with the Roundtable’s previous policy that firms should primarily serve shareholders.

At Deloitte, our purpose is to make an impact that matters for our people, our clients, our communities and on the planet.

How can we truly put this purpose at the centre of what we do? After reflecting on this, I came to the conclusion that the answer lies in the questions we ask ourselves.

An important part of being a responsible business, and being in a responsible business, is asking questions. It helps to make the existential pragmatic. For our people and our clients, I think the key question is “why?” and for our communities and our planet it is “how?”. 

Making an impact that matters for our clients, for me, means being clear why a client is asking us to undertake a particular piece of work - how will this work support the client’s objectives as a business and is it aligned to their values, and indeed our own?  Not insignificantly, this will also help us deliver more value and really support them in creating their future business.

Making an impact that matters for our people is about being able to answer the question as to why do our people want to work for our organisation? Why are they undertaking this specific work – is it aligned with their personal and professional goals and consistent with their skills and experience?

When it comes to community and planet, the ‘why’ is clearer and very daunting, but the ‘how’ is something that we can start with. As individuals in our work and our day to day, how do our actions better support the community and the planet? I recently got great feedback from some of our people about the steps they take in their work and their daily lives to ensure they are proactive in supporting our communities and our planet.

Harvesting these insights so that we can share them across our organisation and continue to ensure that our purpose is at the centre of everything that we do is a priority for our business. To support this we have launched an internal crowdsourcing platform to collate and prioritise the ideas from across our firm.

At times, asking these questions will feel uncomfortable. The answers we arrive at may dictate a course of action that we have not followed before. Over time, however, it will become more instinctive.

A lot has changed since Deloitte’s first audit of the Great Western Railway Company. But that could be nothing compared to what’s ahead of us.  Knowing why we are here and making our purpose core to our business decisions and our day to day activities will be fundamental to ensuring we have a sustainable business in a sustainable planet. 

Our measure will be in how the history of the fourth industrial revolution is written.