Report #1

In 2020, we brought together our first set of meetings, convening a series of 30 business leaders from organisations and institutions headquartered in the UK and Continental Europe to form a Directors Steering Group. These meetings resulted in our first report "Enacting Purpose within the Modern Corporation: A Framework for Directors", a copy of which can be downloaded below. This report made three contributions as follows:

• definitional clarity, separating out the concepts of purpose, mission, values and vision
• differentiating purpose as strategy from purpose as marketing, and
• a new board governance framework SCORE, through which directors can best govern the enactment of their stated purpose

Future Reports

We built on this first report in the second half of 2020 and in January/February 2021, convening an additional set of 30 business leaders from organisations and institutions headquartered in North America to constitute a second Directors Steering Group, and a set of 30 global asset owners and global investment managers constituting an Investor Steering Group. We will be publishing reports from both groups in March 2021. Early insights from these meetings shows areas where expectations differ between the two groups, and areas where both see common ground.

Other Papers

We have separately worked with colleagues across academia and business on the question of how to best measure and report purpose.  Our first discussion paper "Measuring Purpose - An Integrated Framework" can be found in the reports section of this website below alongside the Steering Group reports.