This week’s curator, Laura-Jane Parker, looks at organisational purpose and some practical starting points to established businesses becoming more purpose-led; she also shares some related guides from Shift*Base and picks 5 links for further reading on the topic.

Practical Approaches to Cultivating Organisational Purpose

Earlier this year, Deloitte released their fifth annual Millennial Survey which – besides confirming what many are experiencing around the significant reduction in average tenure, and feelings of loyalty that this generation have towards employers, with 44% looking to walk in the next two years – also surfaced this generation’s seemingly holy grail of attraction and retention: organisational purpose.

> See Hard-coding the ‘why’ into how

Shift*Base Updates

A good starting point for practical leadership tactics that shift your company towards becoming purpose-led, where profit is an outcome rather than the sole focus is this review of Steve Denning’s The Leader’s Guide to Management. Profit over purpose is also one of the cornerstones of the Responsive Organisation model and Frederick Laloux’s concept of Teal Organisations.

Weekly Linklog

  • If all three can come to fruition–if there is a positive interconnection between the three distinct definitions of purpose–the benefits should be felt by employees, teams, the organization, customers, and perhaps most importantly, society as a whole. The Purpose Effect – Dan Pontefract
  • If we as a society think it is important that citizens are engaged, people are passionate about their work, and that we all contribute to making a better world, then we need to enable self-organization. Self-organization is the future
  • What Winning Organizations Will Look Like in 2025. The Future of Work — The Modern Careerist — Medium
  • Are you winning, or boldly going nowhere? A Simple Way to Test Your Company’s Strategic Alignment
  • It was great to have the opportunity to watch Frederic Laloux talk about his book Reinventing Organisations at the RSA yesterday, although an hour was a frustratingly short amount of time to explore such as rich topic. Frederic Laloux: ‘there is something in the air’ 

Shift*Groups Updates

Our (free) invitation-only community for change agents and internal practitioners of social business, collaboration and digital transformation remains open for new members, whilst we conduct a review of the site and look at how to improve its user experience and utility and consult on how we can better support the community.

Interested in what we do?

The field of people and groups working at a practical level to transform organisations and build better business structures for the Twenty-First Century is small but growing fast. If you would like to work with us, for us (or against us!), please say hello 🙂

 

You can sign up to receive this newsletter weekly by email here