Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies
5 key insights from his new book, Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies.
Selected for the Financial Times Business Books—February Edition
“In this short guide, Harvard Business School’s Ranjay Gulati offers plenty of useful advice about how leaders can set a principled course for their businesses…Deep Purpose will not be the last book to claim to show leaders the way, but it stands out as a thoughtful account of the dilemmas, trade-offs and pitfalls of moving beyond the pure-profit imperative, and how to overcome them.” – excerpt from the Financial Times review.
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Meet Ranjay
Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor and the former Unit Head of the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School. Until recently, he chaired the Advanced Management Program, the flagship senior leader executive program, at the school.Professor Gulati studies how “resilient” organizations—those that prosper both in good times and bad—drive growth and profitability. His work bridges strategy (establishing clear strategic pillars for growth), organizational design (reimagining purposeful and collaborative organizational systems), and leadership (fostering inspired, courageous and caring execution).
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Reviews of Deep Purpose
Brilliant and thought-provoking as ever, Ranjay Gulati applies scholarly rigor to the important topic of purpose. This book is a must-read for all leaders who wish to embark on or continue a journey toward a vibrant, high-performance business.
Leaders often invoke the rhetoric of corporate purpose to elevate their or their company’s image. But for the people who work in these companies, the search for purpose is a real and defining part of their professional life. Gulati’s book illustrates how the best leaders help employees discover a tangible link between the organization’s stated purpose and what they do on the job. When people “come alive” with a sense of purpose in their work, their motivation, energy, and creativity blossoms.
In this provocative and richly-researched book, Ranjay Gulati argues that the pursuit of profits without purpose is no longer a sustainable business model. As he shows, the road to high performance, for both individuals and for companies, depends on deepening our connection to enduring and essential human values. If you want to be inspired to build more sustainable organizations, DEEP PURPOSE should be your next read.
Many leaders today strive to align purpose with financial success, but only a few succeed. Gulati analyzes the tough challenges that leaders everywhere must address if they are to save the planet while also delivering strong profits. He provides a compelling account of what it means to be purpose-driven—a crucial objective for us as well as other organizations in the social innovation space.