Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies
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Volume 10 Number 2
For Your Bookshelf Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies Nikos Mourkogiannis (Foreword by Roger Fisher) Palgrave Macmillan; New York; 2006; ISBN 10-1-4039-7581 7; 253pp; hardback, £16.99 Corporate Reputation Review (2007) 10, 158–159. doi:10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550045
Corporate Reputation Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 158–159 © 2007 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, 1363-3589 $30.00
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Increasingly, companies are on a quest to find their selves and realign their organization with the newly found core. Best-selling books have discussed the topic of valuedriven or visionary organizations. So what makes Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies different? Doesn’t it just add to the plethora of management books on a similar topic? The book by Nikos Mourkogiannis, however, does offer a fresh point of view. First, according to the author, Purpose differs from vision in that it creates a direction for the company, but not necessarily a snapshot of the destination. Furthermore, it differs from a set of corporate values because they are often not moral and they are often not concerned with the destination of the organization. As such, the difference between Purpose and a mission begins to dawn on the reader. A Purpose is more deeply valued and internal to the people in an organization than an organizational mission. Furthermore, Mourkogiannis stresses the moral aspect of a Purpose. As such, in the words of the author, ‘when a company is driven by a Purpose, the vision, mission and values flow naturally from that Purpose. People don’t need to be “aligned” – they already have been attracted to the organization, as employees or customers, by its Purpose’ (p. 54)
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Stating that not all purposes are the same, Mourkogiannis further offers a categorization for different types of Purpose, which is both intuitively appealing and literally corresponding to the insights of renowned philosophers. In this manner, four Moral Purposes are distinguished, notably ‘Discovery’, ‘Excellence’, ‘Altruism’ and ‘Heroism’, relating to the views and ideas of Kierkegaard, Aristotle, Hume and Nietzsche, respectively. This categorization is exemplary of the thorough style of writing of the author, which makes the book very nice to read and very informative. It is by no means one-sided, but reflects the interdisciplinary interest and experience of the author. The cases in the book are very well written and discuss interesting people such as Warren Buffet, Sam Walton and Henry Ford; however, it is hard to pinpoint the specific effect of Purpose on them. This is a pity, but may be mostly attributable to the nature of the concept and not to a lack of expertise of the author. In the second part of the book, Mourkogiannis goes on to discuss ‘how Purpose builds greatness’. This is where the business value of Purpose becomes clear. According to the author ‘An organization with a strong sense of Purpose does not just make people feel better. It also creates a strong sense of
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