Designing Your Organization for Purpose and Impact

At the Fortune CEO Initiative annual meeting’s leadership roundtable last month, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, George Savage, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer for Proteus Digital Health, and Brian O’Keefe, Deputy Editor of Fortune, on the topic of social impact by design. Inspired by these two bright and creative minds, as well as my own personal experience, I feel compelled to share my thoughts and own philosophy around this theme, here, with the LinkedIn community.

Not every company has the opportunity to positively impact the lives of millions, but at Weight Watchers, we do. As President and CEO, I am dedicated to leading the business to a future that will have an even broader positive impact on society. Our purpose, which is to inspire healthy habits for real life – for people, families, communities, the world, for everyone, lends itself to guiding and empowering others to live happier, healthier lives.  In our day-to-day operations, how do I ensure that our business is contributing to a healthier, more inclusive, safer and better world? And thus, the discussion on social impact by design, and the subsequent call to action challenging organizations to rethink their respective models to account for social impact.

My philosophy is to design your organization for purpose and impact, ultimately activating through culture. Social impact cannot be “backed into” or “bolted on,” it must be embedded in the infrastructure and part of the lifeblood of the organization. Otherwise, we will not be able to move the needle. The challenges facing our world are so vast and complex that they will never bend to retroactive strategies.

How can today’s organization adapt? From my vantage point, it has to start with a fundamental purpose. A business must be able to lay out a very clear and actionable purpose, which will ultimately serve as the critical cultural foundation for the business. And then, you design for impact, developing the standards, processes and protocols to ensure that all decisions and actions moving forward are aligned with the purpose.

While so much of this sounds theoretical, and challenging to mobilize, there are steps businesses can take to ultimately shift their design. Earlier this year, we introduced our Impact Manifesto, which is our strategic vision for the future. Like most institutions in history, we created a foundational document to hold our selves accountable, and anchor our proceeding behaviors to a common ideology. In this case we outlined our common purpose: the democratization of wellness; and further laid out our worldwide commitment to run all that we do through what we call our “purpose filter."    

Every decision we make, partnership we forge, investment we make and product we launch, must advance the democratization of wellness, or we are letting impact slip to the periphery. Our “purpose filter” holds us accountable to these decisions from a brand, a business and a human perspective. At Weight Watchers we have undergone a perspective shift to first and foremost acknowledge and celebrate the positive impact we are capable of having, and aligning all business decisions to maximize that impact.

Beyond Weight Watchers, beyond the wellness sector and even beyond borders, designing for impact helps institutions – particularly businesses that are increasingly responsible for and capable of affecting social change – to carve out their role in tackling major challenges. It pushes organizations to leverage their strengths, expertise, capital and output to take on issues they are uniquely equipped to handle. At Weight Watchers we are taking what we know how to do best and utilizing it to make wellness accessible for all. What challenge are you going to take on?