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Welcome to the HBR ID Acast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Allison Beard.

Purpose has become a corporate buzzword over the past decade. Leaders are embracing the idea

that companies can't just do well financially. They also have to do good for society. But how

many organizations are really walking the talk. How many get beyond mission statements and

publicity stunts to identify and pursue a purpose that will lead to business success as

well as benefiting a broader set of stakeholders. How many dig deep down into the messy work of

making trade-offs between those stakeholders when there aren't any win-win solutions? How many

keep out it day after day, quarter after quarter, year after year? Our guest today has

studied companies around the world that do all of the above. He acknowledges that it's not easy,

but he's found common principles and themes in the way they operate that he thinks other companies

can and should try to emulate. Ranjit Kalati is a professor at Harvard Business School,

and the author of Deep Purpose, the heart and soul of high-performance companies, and the related

HBR article, the messy but essential pursuit of purpose. In full disclosure, he's also one of my

favorite collaborators and a friend. Ranjit, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Allison, thank

you so much. So, why have you chosen to study purpose? You know, five years ago, Allison,

if you told me that I was going to write a book about purpose, I would have told you you're

crazy. No way. To me, purpose was like wallpaper. Purpose was like purpose statements. My observation

was no one took those seriously. It was just a checkbox task that people undertook once in a while,

they dusted it off, but never really did much with. And I had a series of epiphanies that came

...