A groundbreaking report, based on in-depth interviews with senior board members and executives from 21 major European firms, which analyses how Europe’s leading companies govern corporate purpose, from the boardroom to the shop floor, and identifies key differences between the European and Anglo-American models of capitalism, and resulting approaches to purpose. It includes:

• Four strategic approaches to purpose at board level, analysing their advantages and shortcomings
• How boards orchestrate purpose and how managements implement it, and the risks arising from a mismatch

Key insights:
1️ Purpose isn’t ESG or CSR. It’s an organising principle — guiding decision making, firm boundaries, and corporate identity.
2️ There is no universal “best practice”. Firms must find the best fit based on ownership, structure and culture.
3️ Alignment is everything. A company’s purpose governance must mirror how purpose is implemented within the firm.

This report is the result of the many presentations and discussions that took place at the 2024 Purpose Day, which we co-hosted in Paris in March 2024 with the Purpose Center of the HEC Sustainability & Organizations Institute. It was both a showcase for academic research, and an opportunity for practitioners to engage on best practice in enacting purposeful operations, with contributions from leading academics, and leaders of businesses and other organisations. “The Central Role of Culture in Purpose Based Business” captures some of the core insights that emerged on the importance of culture when it comes to delivering purpose intent. The central element of the report is the SCORE² Cultural Framework – standing for Safe, Committed, Organised, Realist, and Embodied – which now sits alongside the original SCORE governance framework that came out of the first Enacting Purpose Initiative report in 2020, “Enacting purpose within the Modern Corporation” (see below). Click here to read the report.

Early in 2023, we were delighted to partner with the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, Fraunhofer IMW, Global Solutions, the New Institute, and the Oxford Internet Institute for a two-day discussion on the role of value and values in formulating business practice and public policy. The aim of the Summit was to reassert the centrality of moral values for the conduct of human life and to explore the role of values in policy and business decision-making. The spread of individualism, the majority-rule basis of democracy, and the market economy have all combined to undermine the importance and relevance of moral values, creating a system essentially based on delivering ‘what we (as voters and consumers) want’. The inadequacy of this as a governing principle in making political, business, and social decisions is shown by the current ‘polycrisis’ discussed in the World Economic Forum at Davos. This report summarises the Summit and captures the key policy recommendations emerging from our discussions.

In 2021, we convened a second set of meetings establishing two parallel discussion tracks – one for board directors and one for the investment community. We brought together a group of 30 business leaders from organisations and institutions headquartered in the US to form the Directors Steering Group and a separate Global Investor Steering Group which was attended by 30 leading asset owners and managers. These meetings were hugely productive, and resulted in our second report “Directors & Investors: Building on Common Ground to Advance Sustainable Capitalism”, a copy of which can be downloaded by clicking here. This report built on the momentum from the first EPI report, outlining:

• The corporate, investor, legal and political context in which the debate on purpose has become so critical for organisations
• How different definitions converge, together with some initial thoughts on how purpose can best be measured
• What boards and investors most want to see when it comes to purpose, focusing on the common ground that unites both groups

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