Scaling With Purpose Kit: Purpose as a North Star for Strategic Decisions

**SPEAKER_1** (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.

**Steven Skash** (0:17)
Welcome back to The Bliss Business Podcast series, Scaling with Purpose. I'm Steven Skash here with Tulio Saragusa. Hey, Tulio.

**Tulio Saragusa** (0:27)
Hey, I'm really enjoying the series.

**Steven Skash** (0:30)
Yep. So this is our 10-minute podcast series where we explore how to embed purpose into every level of your organization. Today, we're diving into the idea of purpose as a North Star for strategic decisions. We'll explore how purpose can guide long-term strategy and growth, helping businesses make decisions that align with their values and vision rather than focusing solely on short-term profits. So we talk a lot about purpose as a North Star. I mean, it's constant guiding organizations through uncertainty and complexity. It's easy to get caught up in the short-term winds, but a clear purpose can keep leaders and teams focused on what really matters.
So ensuring that every choice aligns with the organization's deeper values and long-term goals. So let's start by addressing a key challenge here, and that's balancing short-term pressures with long-term purpose. In many organizations, decisions are driven by those quarterly results, right, or immediate gains. Well, these are important metrics. Focusing solely on short-term outcomes can pull a company away from its purpose, and that can erode trust with employees, customers, and stakeholders, and send you backwards after you've made so much progress, clearly defining your purpose with the help of these podcast series, and working on your leadership, and now you just blow it because you make a short-term related decision, right?

**Tulio Saragusa** (2:12)
I mean, look at so many marquee brands that in the recent years did this. They were known for companies that took care of their people and were on point with their purpose, and made some of these short-term decisions that were purely driven by profit targets, and their reputation has been tainted forever.

**Steven Skash** (2:34)
So yeah, that whole scandal series we did, that was one of the things we're looking at is like, hey, they have a purpose that was everyone was growing in the same direction with.

**Tulio Saragusa** (2:42)
But even companies that are big companies, big tech companies in recent years that wasn't necessarily a scandal, just the way they approach things, they sacrifice. So and that's the thing when organizations prioritize short-term profits, often they end up sacrificing sustainability, innovation, and even their reputation. And you don't get that back very, very easily. So on the other hand, purpose-driven companies consistently make decisions that align with their long-term commitments. And it's not always the easiest and most profitable choice, but in the moment, but it reinforces their identity and does build loyalty over time. And most of these organizations that operate this way, they're not the companies that are filing for bankruptcies or going up and down with their margins. They're actually pretty steady growth companies. So I think study into organizations that run this way shows that they actually have the short-term gains too as a result of this.
But that's the challenge.

**Steven Skash** (3:52)
So how can businesses use purpose as a North Star for strategic decisions? Let's break it down. Tulio, what's the first place to start?

**Tulio Saragusa** (4:00)
Well, the first step is that they need to filter every major decision through the lenses of your purpose. Before making any significant strategic decision, there's three questions you want to ask. Does this align with our purpose? That's the main question. Does this decision align with our purpose? Will this choice bring us closer to the impact we want to make in the world or further away? Or it could be neutral. But the bigger question is, does it bring us closer, right? You don't want to just be neutral. You certainly don't want to go backwards. You want to move the post forward, right? Move the needle forward. And finally, does it reflect our values? And these are really good self-awareness, self-assessment type questions that an organization can ask themselves before making strategic decisions. And when leaders use purpose as a filter, they can quickly identify options that may deliver short-term gains, but deviate from the organization's long-term vision. So you can't sort of like discard this purpose-driven filter. The minute you do, it goes off track. And then getting it back on track takes so much more effort, so it's not worth it. Those are the three key questions in the first step.

**Steven Skash** (5:21)
Yeah, so you mentioned self-assessment.
So that reminds me of the concept of purpose audits, so where your organization regularly assesses whether their actions and investment align with their stated purpose. This can be especially helpful during periods of rapid growth or change when it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. And I think you want to just go through and look at every part of your business with that purpose in mind and rethink, how are you doing it? Are you sticking to your purpose? What's the next step here, Tulio?