Purpose Quotes

“Not all companies have a Purpose—but enduringly successful ones do. Purpose”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“the Purpose of a company should automatically come down to balancing the demands of stakeholders or constituencies. In real life, this is already the way companies are managed. Corporate directors have to balance demands in the short run—from customers, workers, shareholders, community and so on—or they will find themselves out of business or in jail. Companies”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Individuals must take responsibility for their choices and cannot hide behind convention or rules.”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Leaders do not simply invent a Purpose; they discover it, while at the same time developing a strategy and ensuring that Purpose and strategy support each other.”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“I acknowledge that an executive can rise quickly to the top by brilliant gamesmanship but at some point you have to do the job. And you just might have to do the job when business turns bad and there’s a terrible crisis and your people are looking to you for leadership like baby birds in a nest awaiting their mother’s return with food. What help is Machiavelli then? When there’s no one left to knife, and there’s nothing you stand for, won’t the knives be pointed at you?”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“The modern world may not know how to phrase the question, but it wants its own realistic recipe for Purpose. Competition has done us a lot of good in the last half-century, but one question remains inadequately addressed: “What are we competing for?”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“If a company’s reputation-building efforts appear to be somehow separate from its business model, then you suspect they are primarily a corrective to its naturally amoral or immoral inclinations—a medicine to relieve the symptoms but not a cure for the basic disease.”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Ethics are more important than ever before to a company’s reputation with customers, investors, potential recruits and indeed its own staff. And”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Niall Fitzgerald, former chairman of Unilever, has pointed out that social responsibility is good business because “we need a constant flow of talented people … [who] ask themselves if this is an organization whose values they share.”6”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Purpose is a call to action. But in order to hear that call and respond to it, we need to understand the distractions that get in the way of a serious discussion of an organization’s Purpose. And in many companies, that starts with the most persuasive distraction: the maximization of profit. PURPOSE”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“competition between companies is at least in part a competition between different moral ideas.”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Act only on the maxim which you can will as a law for all rational beings,” and “Act so as to treat rational beings always as ends in themselves and never as means only.” Kant”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“This is summarized in the following table. LESS”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Purpose is one that adopts a valued end result for human activity, over a person’s lifetime or the lifetime of an organization.”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“top management’s purpose needs to be serving customers, not maximizing profit, if it is to achieve long-term competitive advantage.4”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Purpose “reflects the importance people attach to the company’s work,”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“Purpose stimulates the two key forms of action that contribute to the strengths of the firm and thus competitive advantage—innovation and the formation of relationships.”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“The Purpose gives the array of these actions coherence, not just at any given moment, but over time, and thus helps ensure that the firm does achieve a genuine specialization, a genuine difference from its competitors. In this way it makes superior profits possible. Purpose”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies

“The ultimate reason for an action is thus that it increases happiness.18 More”
― Nikos Mourkogiannis, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies