How to Define Your Company's Purpose and Why

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach. We have Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher with us.
Does your company mission or purpose statement sound like someone created it by throwing darts at a corporate buzzword bingo card?
Today, we attempt to decipher the corporate equivalent of hieroglyphics. Our quest is how to define your company's purpose and live by it.
Ash, you and I, we both have family in the Vegas area, right? So, you know that drive when you're going out there, you've got that desert, you know, sort of the barren landscape and the tumbleweeds and the dirt. And then I think for most people, we have a different experience whenever we go there. We're going there to visit family, right? A lot of times. I think for most people, they're going there, you know, hit the Vegas strip. So, they're out there, they're driving through the tumbleweeds, they're going through the desert, they hit the Vegas strip, they're there for three or four days or whatever, they're max they can take and then they're just done. I think that's kind of the equivalent of this process that companies go through when they're coming up with this corporate purpose statement. They're like, let's go, let's do this, let's do this. And then after a while, stuff that sounded good early on, it just starts, the soul starts getting sucked out of it over time as they keep working on it. Or those flights to Vegas, Ash, you know the ones, you're out there, everyone's all pumped up, they're amped up to get there, right? And then what's it like on the way back? They're just drained and there's nothing, soul is.

**Ash Maher** (1:51)
The quote is, I need a vacation for my vacation.
I hear it about all the time. No, but to that point, it's like you get everyone fired up and then that's what comes out at the end.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:01)
Let's just call it blue.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:06)
Yeah, it's just like, it made sense at one point. It was brilliant. So I think, you know, I'll tell you, even just reading a hundred or so of these for this show, I feel it. We're doing the hard work out there for listeners on some of this.
The best purpose statements serve as kind of a philosophical anchor or a compass that guides an organization, right? So when they're making priorities or decisions, it's there for them.
They capture the why and that inspires people. That's a really good purpose statement.
So real quick, guys, I asked ChatGPT to write some buzzword bingo corporate purpose lines. And then I mixed those in with some real ones. So tell me if these are real or fake. All right. So here's the first one. To achieve superior growth and returns for our shareholders by delivering technology and services that improve efficiency, increase recovery and maximize production for our customers. Real or fake?

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:11)
That's got to be real because that's dry as corporate can be.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:15)
That's real.
And it's Halberton. It's awful.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:26)
The corporate hacks of corporate hacking.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:29)
Notice the focus on shareholders there too. First thing. Here's another one. To help people see data in new ways, discovery insights unlock endless possibilities. Real or fake?
Why? That one's real.

**Ash Maher** (3:53)
That's Oracle.

**Tullio Siragusa** (3:54)
It almost sounds human though.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:59)
To facilitate unparalleled growth and revolutionary market leadership in a sustainable, agile framework. Real or fake?

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:06)
That's.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:16)
All right.
Let's see. A couple more. To produce superior financial returns for its shareholders by providing high-value, added logistics, transportations and related business services through focused operating companies. Real or fake?

**Ash Maher** (4:31)
I'm going to say real now that I know that the northern light is to make the shareholders happy and there's companies that are like that. Then I guess that has to be real.
I don't think the consumer I would care too much.

**Tullio Siragusa** (4:43)
Can I answer? It shouldn't be real?
It should be real.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:48)
That's FedEx.
I actually couldn't find a real clear one on them and everything said this was it, which is it's their first line of their mission statement. So, yeah, you think that...

**Ash Maher** (4:58)
They care about the shareholders, but they're delivering packages to me.

**Stephen Sakach** (5:04)
So, okay, last one. To empower cross-functional teams to drive holistic scalable solutions in the pursuit of maximizing shareholder value through strategic excellence.