A Quote by Ray Anderson
...there is no more strategic issue for a company, or any organization, than its ultimate purpose. For those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that.
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As business leaders, we should not choose between profit or good; rather, we must choose to profit from good. And that requires connecting what we do with a purpose beyond profit - a reason to exist that meets our shared sense of 'doing good.'
You can't live if you don't eat, but you don't live to eat. And neither does business exist primarily to make a profit. It exists to fulfill its purpose, whatever that might be.
Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than getting enough to eat is the purpose of life. Getting enough to eat is a requirement of life; life's purpose, one would hope, is somewhat broader and more challenging. Likewise with business and profit.
I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to solving human problems. You can go all the way, forgetting about personal profit, being single-minded about solving problems. The company makes profit, but profit stays with the company.
The successful producer of an article sells it for more than it cost him to make, and that's his profit. But the customer buys it only because it is worth more to him than he pays for it, and that's his profit. No one can long make a profit producing anything unless the customer makes a profit using it.
Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business. The legitimate purpose of business is to provide a product or service that people need and do it so well that it's profitable.
An organization's culture of purpose answers the critical questions of who it is and why it exists. They have a culture of purpose beyond making a profit.
There isn't any question that Hollywood is profit driven. Anybody that thinks it isn't is a fool. It's a business. Hollywood was never philanthropy. The only purpose it had was making money; the only purpose it still has is to make money.
We need to reverse three centuries of walling the for-profit and non-profit sectors off from one another. When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return. Clearly, there's some opportunity in the spectrum between those extremes. What's missing is the for-profit finance industry coming in to that area. Look at the enormous diversity of the for-profit financial industry as opposed to monolithic nature of the non-profit world; it's quite astonishing.
Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. But when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit, then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.
We, in the business world, invest our money to make a profit. Sports teams make a good profit. That's the way the system should work, not taxpayers forking over these dollars to for-profit enterprises.
Profit is not the purpose of a business, but rather the test of its validity
Having a higher purpose is more than just about profits. You actually end up making more profits in the long run because employees really are a lot more engaged and customers see the higher purpose in the company.
Business is about profit, yes, and it is about more than profit. At its best, it is about expanding the possibilities of humanity.
To me, leadership is about first defining purpose. Why does a company exist and what problem does it solve for customers? How is it different than everyone else, and what difference do they plan to make in the world? Companies (and people) should be measured based on the impact they make in the world. If the purpose and solution are solid, the money will follow.
I've come to recognize that social purpose must be embedded into the core DNA of a company. The questions 'Why do we exist as a company?' and 'How do we make a difference?' need to have the same answer.
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