How you can achieve a deep purpose culture

In this episode of the Think People Podcast, EY Lane4 host Michael Costello explores the power of purpose, interviewing Ranjay Gulati on his research, findings and formula for achieving deep purpose.  

Key takeaways:

Although the ingredients of a deep purpose may be clear, organisations aiming to drive a purpose culture still make mistakes.
Hybrid working has catalysed the development of organisational purpose.
Purpose is critical to long-term strategic success, but with financial pressures and constraints there is a deep purpose ‘trade-off’.

To ensure organisational purpose is lived and breathed by employees, organisations must adopt several approaches, including recruitment, branding and stakeholder communications.
Leaders must ensure there is strategic and purpose alignment, with organisational purpose connecting with personal purpose.

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For your convenience, the full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Podcast transcript: How you can achieve a deep purpose culture

35 min approx | 16 January 2023

Michael Costello:

"Hello, and a warm welcome to EY’s Think People Podcast, with me, Michael Costello. This is our first ever episode which kicks off nicely on the topic of purpose, exploring what great leaders and organisations, like Microsoft, LEGO, Pepsi, BP, Starbucks, and even our very own EY, are doing to unlock the potential of purpose in the workplace. Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati was kind enough to talk to us about how organisations achieve extraordinary results through the pursuit of a deep purpose. What is that I hear you cry? It’s an organisation that knows and leverages its reason for being, that balances commercial and societal needs, and ensures that purpose is not on the periphery, but informs its strategy and daily communications.

We explored huge questions on why business leaders like Satya Nadella and Howard Schultz, and investment banks, are taking purpose so seriously. How well-known brands have looked to their past to inspire their purpose, and not been held back from it. And how we can ensure our employees are aligned and connected to a purpose, and not at risk of purpose drift.

It’s also great to see Ranjay take on old concepts like work life balance, the 100-year-old concept of the win-win, and purpose only being a statement on a website or on the periphery.

Now, if you want to be in with the chance of winning Ranjay’s book, ‘Deep Purpose’, please like one of our social media posts, and share your lightbulb moment in the comments box. Let us know how this episode has inspired your thinking.

So, dear listener, listen in! As according to Ranjay, you and I are wanting more than just a salary and career. You want to know more about an organisation’s purpose, and be aligned to its very reason for being – its deep purpose. You join Ranjay and I now joining the power of purpose, so sit back, relax, and enjoy the podcast."

Ranjay Gulati

"It’s my pleasure to be with you today to talk about this research. If you told me five years ago I was going to write about purpose I would have said you’re crazy. This was far from my mind. Purpose to me sounded a very existential, philosophical and ideological idea. I would contemplate that in retirement, sitting on my wheelchair, or my armchair, or my rocking chair, sitting in my balcony one day. So the ‘why’ question seemed like a, you know, a contemplation that I didn’t really have to deal with."

Costello

"Since the big re-think, the great resignation as many people call it, what’s going on now? What are we tapping into?"

Gulati

"Yes, Covid was a re-set moment. Covid has forced a rethink for a lot of us. I wrote an article for HBR earlier this year called the Great Re-think. I said it’s not the resignation it’s the great re-think. We all confronted death and mortality and illness and a lot of things. It caused a lot of us to think about our lives in a different way. So why is purpose an unlock?

So let me try to explain the answer to that. What does purpose do for us? Individually and organisationally? So, first of all, let’s think about it at the individual level. What is purpose? Purpose has been debated for thousands of years. Ancient Greeks to ancient Indians to ancient Chinese. To then like, the perennial permanent question, right? Purpose unlocks human potential in several ways. When we understand our purpose, the first thing purpose does is it gives us clarity of direction. It gives an orienting framework, a set of principles, it gives us an orienting, it’s like a North Star, a corridor in which you want to operate. It’s really a directional thing but it’s also a motivational thing. When I’m living in alignment with my purpose, I show up differently. And if I can use a word, I show up inspired. When I’m living in alignment with my purpose I’ll show up inspired. So let’s take this from the individual level to the organisational level. If my organisation also has a purpose that somehow resonates with my personal purpose, magic happens.

I interviewed the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Pete Carroll. And Pete’s statement was ‘I’m a coach, my job is to unlock human potential’. I’m aware we’re in the middle of, you know, a sport season right now. What is the coach’s job? The coach’s job is to unlock the team and the individual potential.

Getting everybody to perform at levels that they didn’t think they could perform at. That’s what a great coach does. Now the questions is, how do you do that? What do you tap into?

The first thing is you tap into individual ambition. If you do this you’re going to go down in the history books. You’re gonna be famous, you’re gonna be rich, you’re gonna have all these good things coming your way. And you know, so get out there and perform. Then you take it to the level for the collective. To create that kind of collective sense of belonging that we are one team. And people are willing to do more for a collective they identify with than even for themselves."

Costello

"That’s interesting Ranjay in the sense that when we think about our high performing team at the pinnacle, we’re supporting each other on their journey and their learning in their growth."

Gulati

"Michael, an extreme example of that is in the Marine Corp. People will die for their team because the shame of letting their team down is greater than the shame or fear of dying. So if you haven’t watched Ted Lasso… I mean think about, what does Ted Lasso do? He’s getting people to buy into the team! Now that takes me onto the next level. There’s a third level – if you buy into an ideal – I’m doing this for an ideal. Look at Ukraine right now – you know you’re not doing it for yourself, you’re not doing it for your team mates, you’re doing it for an ideal. And so how do you take it to the highest level, where I’m truly inspired in what I’m doing."

Costello

"I do love the example you gave of the coin operated monkey. It’s not just about turning up to work, feeding the kids, it might be for some, but for many it’s more than that. It’s more than the career. Now we’re after the three things that you’ve just described."

Gulati

"Organisations have, for the longest time, been defined as a nexus of contracts. That’s what economists, when they do their reductionist thinking about ‘what is an organisation’, they call it a nexus of contracts. Which in some level may be true. Everyone is in a contract. But what a arid view of organisations. People are not just coin operated monkeys. That I’m just here, you put a coin in me and I’ll dance for you. You put two coins and I’ll dance some more. We have greater aspirations and what isn’t happening is we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. And then we create terms like work / life balance. Think about it – what a horrible phrase! Work-life balance? What about work-leisure balance? Work-family balance? Work-life means I’m not living at work, I’m dead. I live, I’m only waking up from my inert state after 5pm and on the weekends. And I’m a zombie the rest of the time. I mean, what a horrible way to frame work."

Costello

"When we look at the book and it explains ‘what is purpose’, you’ve interviewed so many fascinating people, so many different businesses, places like Microsoft, Nike, Pepsi, Lego… And even EY of course. That led them to develop a deep purpose culture. What is it then, specifically that they’ve perfected in their culture? And what would you also say about the classic tracks that they’ve avoided when trying to introduce cultural change?"

Gulati

"So let me clarify one thing that I think is a great question, Michael, is that culture and purpose are bred in parallel. Some even think of purpose as one dimension of a culture. But I think culture is a set of rules, informal rules from which we are bred. It’s what people like to say – it’s how you choose to behave when no-one is watching, right? Culture is a set of rules. Purpose is the ‘why’ that emanates into a set of principles around how you want to operate. So yes, they intersect and overlap. And the companies I looked at had culture work going on and purpose work going on, right. So Microsoft you mentioned was one - they had a culture project of growth mindset and collaboration as kind of their cultural principles. But they had a purpose project going on saying ‘we want to be an organisation that empowers others to achieve more’. And so I’ve got to connect it together somehow but they’re distinct.

Now – to the question about what are the pitfalls that people run into… The first one is – people confuse purpose as a purpose statement or a mission statement. Rarely you may have a statement that is the result of like months and months of debate and discussion. But is the underlying thought, so when you read a company’s mission statement they read really generic. Are they putting their purpose to work? And that’s why the book is called Deep Purpose because a lot of companies just have a purpose statement. Oh yeah, we’re done, check the box. Have a PR firm and they’ll come over with some nice words for us and put it out there. It’s what you do with that. Is it really a collective, shared sentiment of intention that informs your strategy, informs your hiring, informs you in your cultural sensibility, informs you in thinking about your responsibilities?

How might you want to think about yourself? You know, self-identity.

And how do you think about your place of work in the short and long term. That’s purpose. So I think that’s one thing - confusion - purpose is a purpose statement. The next one is… purpose in small companies sometimes gets personified in the founder. And when the founder leaves suddenly there’s a big vacuum and everything kind of falls apart. The culture falls apart and purpose falls. Look at Howard Shultz, poor guy has come out of retirement three times. And every time he comes back he says the company has lost its soul. So you see the language also, speaking in very soulful terms about the organisation. So there’s something going on that I think we need to understand that purpose is never done. So these companies that I have in my book… If I tell you all of them have deep purpose. No! They’re all on a deep purpose journey at different speeds and at different paces. The last one I want to say… People think of purpose as ‘win-win’. Purpose means do good and do well at the same time, simultaneously, all the time. Really? Or they have books out saying ‘a world without trade offs’. And you’re like, come on. I think that’s completely bogus, you know. Business and life are all about trade-offs. We all have to balance different competing interests. The idea is that having a purpose gives you a framework to think about those trade off and do it in an intentional and thoughtful way."

Costello

"There’s a great statistic in the book you shared. 93% of financial investors believe purpose is critical to long term strategic success. However, with many organisations facing colossal financial pressures right now, one of the difficult decisions some business leaders had to face as they try to maintain that deep purpose. They try to maintain that direction, that North Star as you described it."

Gulati

"So look, I use an example in the book about a company, a small company called Gotham Green. Gotham Green is an agro tech company that does urban farming on urban rooftops. They found there are unused spaces and they can, in a temperature controlled environment, they can do hydroponic farming. And 90% of the water is recycled. And they can grow things that are very, you know, easily spoilable. And so you don’t have shipping costs and less spoilage. And so they do herbs and they do lettuce and salads and stuff like that. And they have a great business. And you don’t have, you know, your water footprint, your environment footprint, your transportation footprint and spoilage is lower. And it’s a viable, successful business. Now one of the big things they had to ask was – packaging. Because most of these salads and all are packaged in packed plastic. And they said ‘we’re doing everything right and now we’re going to put it in a plastic box!’ I mean, what is this! So they first talked to the retailers about having no packaging, just fresh. And they told them that customers don’t want to buy it lose. Right, then they said let’s try some sustainable, recyclable packaging but none of them keeps these things fresh long enough. You know, you need shelf life, that’s part of the value proposition and the economic proposition. After a whole song and dance, they finally came to realise that nothing works as well as plastic. So they had to settle for plastic packaging. But they had their eyes on every new technology that is coming up on packaging.

But they settled for plastic. Now you might say ‘oh hypocrites’, you know ‘losers’. No, they’re being thoughtful in making that trade off. And they agonised over that trade off. And they tried to think through it with their purpose in mind. So how we think about trade offs and choices that can be financially costly. You know you mentioned financial firms and why do they care about purpose? I was first puzzled when I saw Blackrock and Vanguard and State Street and even Turnasic and other entities talking about purpose.

And I sort of realised that, you know, asset-men, money-men are in the risk business, right. When they invest in a company they take risk on behalf of their clients. And you try to quantify and manage that risk. And the problem is that one of things you’re trying to manage is that your investments are not all short term, quarterly investors. A bulk of them are passive, index investors for the long term who seem to have no voice in the process. So how do you encourage your company leadership to think long-term while delivering in the short term as well. And purpose is a wonderful proxy to develop that message. And so, when I ask you what purpose, I am forcing you to tell me what is your long-term vision for your business! So, purpose is not excusing you from short-term either. Some companies say ‘oh we’re a purpose company so we don’t deliver in the short term. We don’t deliver at all. We are so socially oriented’. Purpose became a proxy for social. Purpose involves long-term thinking with short-term deliverables along the way towards those long- term goals."

Costello

"One of the inspiring leaders you bought to us – Indra Nooyi - from Pepsi who had to make some big decisions about society. Their investors turned round and said actually we’re in the sugar business, actually we’re in the sweet drinks, it’s not about society and long-term. She had some huge decisions."

Gulati

"That was a tough one for me. Because I wasn’t sure for the longest time whether I wanted to think about them as a purpose company because, your know, they’re in the sugar and snack business. You’re selling potato chips and cola, come on, right. But it was interesting. I wanted to document the idea that even if you’re in a legacy business that may not be the most, you know, like oil and gas, you know. They’re a company that are trying to move in a positive direction. You can’t just say – too bad, you’re done, you’re evil. Right now, among the companies with the largest number of patents in alternative energy are the oil and gas companies. BP being one of them, Shell being another one of them and so are several others. So, you know, they’re moving and you’ve got to kind of, in finance they call it transitional financing, so they’re helping them transition out of their legacy businesses. So to me what I wanted to showcase and applaud over here was the effort to say we’re going to reduce the salt content, we’re going to reduce the portion size, we’re going to put warnings, we want to be responsible, we’re going to add oatmeal and healthier products. So there was movement!"

Costello

"We’re talking about a long-term transition here aren’t we. We’re talking about cultural change. There are deeply engrained, individual habits to nudge, shift, particularly those that might be 100% purely orientated towards profit and margin. We know we need to get the balance right. But what can business leaders that are listening to this right now do to nudge and shift those behaviours effectively?"

Gulati

"One of the gentlemen I interviewed said to me ‘writing a purpose statement is easy, what comes next is much harder’. It’s like getting it to be real. So let me take it down to the granular level. There’s research by a colleague of mine that has shown that there’s an exponential decay in purpose understanding as you go down the hierarchy of the organisation. Senior leadership might buy-in, they’ll drink the cool aid, they’ll go on an off-site to a beautiful location and hold hands and sing songs and say ‘we love each other and we love our purpose together!’. How, as you go down the hierarchy, how do you make purpose personal? In my journey actually Michael, after I wrote the book, I interviewed 10 CEOs from around the world. Not in the book, not featured in the book. And one of them is Alan Jope, CEO of Unilever, another one is Roz Brewer, CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance, another one is Sim Tshabalala, CEO of the largest bank in Africa, Standard Bank. And each of them highlights – this is one of the key challenges that, you know, how do you inspire the people who are further down your organisation. And it’s really interesting what you discover. Each of them has a different way of doing it, I think.

There are some common themes, I’ll give you one of two. Some companies, some, not a lot, some of them will say – you can’t get an employee to buy into some company purpose until they think about their own life purpose. So we’re going to hire coaches and exercises and online tools to do a life purpose activation exercise. And at first I was a little bit surprised, I was like – this a bit of intrusive, it’s none of your business! And by the way, I don’t know my life purpose so why should they? And – but I was like, OK. And they said – but you don’t understand Ranjay. People are more receptive to a company purpose when they know their own purpose. And so on helping people awaken their own purpose. All of us know or have implicitly got to know our purpose. How do you awaken that purpose? Or activate that purpose? And only then can you connect them to the work/company purpose.

Others talked about running a campaign like storytelling. So you know, they’ll have storytelling campaigns – people, individuals – tell your personal story about how you have found part of your life purpose – which is related to work – through your work. So, share inspiring stories. The old NASA janitor who said ‘Mr President, I’m here to put a man on the moon’. So how do we tell personal, inspiring stories that some say is storytelling and amplification through storytelling. Others talk about KPIs. You know that was what I learnt at EY - we are accountants, we like to measure things, so we’re going to measure it! Now we can’t measure purpose, you can’t measure how purposeful are we so we can measure or correlate our purpose. We can say – you know – our purpose translates into four dimensions of value. Client value, right, employee value, right, societal value and financial value. So we’re going to measure those four things and every partner is going to get compensated around those four dimensions of value. So, I found it interesting, some relying on metrics, some relying on storytelling, some relying on making it personal, some relying on their culture, some relying on really restructuring their entire organisation."

Costello

"It’s interesting that you’ve got the balance of hearts and minds in the examples that you’ve described. Balanced scorecard going right from top to bottom, but also a good story travels fast as well of course."

Gulati

"You know, purpose orientation is something so fundamental to an organisation, it’s not some kind of change management project. It’s even bigger than a culture change. It’s really getting people to buy into an idea – saying, why do we exist as an entity? It’s going right to, you might even call it, the foundational, formative DNA of the company. I looked at LEGO for instance – LEGO was almost bankrupt when Jørgen Vig Knudstorp took it over. And what did he do? He went back to the founding, like – what did the founder mean when he said ‘intelligent play’? What did he mean by that, you know? And how did he modernise it to bring it into the future? It’s not just a past looking exercise, and you’re no longer blaming nostalgia. It’s connecting the past into the future, and bringing those two together, and saying okay – what does this mean for us? In terms of our strategy, in terms of our culture, in terms of our organisation, in terms of who we hire and how we promote, our budget, what businesses we want to get out of. We don’t want to be in theme parks, we don’t want to be in movies. So it became a bit of a filtering system, to create a ‘how do we do that?’. And it doesn’t happen overnight, and it never ends."

Costello

"You’ve encouraged us like the Sankofa bird, to look back to move forward. You’ve got to tell us about this Sankofa bird, and where you got the inspiration from."

Gulati

"Yeah, it’s a beautiful Ghanian folktale about the Sankofa bird, it’s a mythological bird that looks backward while flying forward. And it made me realise as companies, because I looked at LEGO and other companies who really explored their past. That really went back into their past to understand their future. And it was an exercise, and I just finished an article in the Harvard Business Review about this very topic, about Sankofa bird story.

How do you engage in nostalgia – but not get bogged down in the past, and also look forward? How do you connect the two to each other? And modernise your history? And I found it interesting because some of us either do the following: we ignore our history, we avoid it – it’s the past, and we don’t want to get bogged down in the past, ‘we are forward-looking, future, dynamic’, you know. Others go completely into the past, and they get bogged down in nostalgia – ‘we’re 100 years old, we’re 200 years old, look at how we’ve done it always...’ So my idea was – ‘how do these organisations find a way to really relate to their past in way that is empowering to not get bogged down in it, and be empowering into the future’."

Costello

"I mean there’s plenty examples in the book where they have looked back at their history to move forward. Can you give us an example of one that has perhaps looked back and thought ‘we’re going to take this with us, but leave that behind to support this transition in this new direction’?"

Gulati

"Another one was Microsoft which calls it – Satya Nadella’s book who summarises the transformation of Microsoft. It’s called ‘Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone’. Well Microsoft was still caught up in the old – ‘a PC on every desktop, everywhere’ – it was really resident software, licensing agreements. And even though they knew the cloud was here, they had not connected to the cloud – that was one. Another one was that they were very focussed on desktop devices, and not mobile devices. So how do we do a mobile and cloud-first way of thinking about ourselves? Because the original was a PC on every desktop all the time. So, you became this PC, laptop/tablet on your desk versus a mobile phone, and not being able to connect it into the cloud – software should be a service on the cloud. So, if you had Office 365 today, it’s working off of the cloud. So that was really important – to acknowledge we are a productivity set of tools, but we need to break away from how we thought about it as a business.

And it starts with this purpose around you want to empower others to achieve more – how are we going to help others achieve more? So I think this willingness to take on the past, embrace it, be inspired by it, but then modernise it to the future. Most institutions that have survived have been able to evolve themselves with the times, right? And I think that is a very important… If you look at institutions that outlive one individual, they are the ones that are able to evolve overtime. I can give you other examples also – Bueller, one of the companies I looked at, they had their anniversary, I think it was 100-150 years, some momentous anniversary. And they were going to do a trip down memory lane. And they were going to showcase all of the things they have accomplished over the many decades of business. And the last family CEO who was from the family/owner, after that they had brought in a professional CEO, the first professional CEO in the history of the company.

And the family CEO said – ‘listen, I don’t want to do a trip down memory lane’. Fine, you can talk about memory lane, but I want to talk about the future. So in this display and celebration you’re doing, I don’t want to be backward looking, I want a forward looking exercise. And as you think forward – because Bueller is in the food processing business, they cook and process food – he said, ask yourself, when you’re looking into the future, what are we doing to leave a planet for the next generation. Food is the number two contributor to greenhouse gas emissions after oil and gas, and almost half of all food produced is wasted – never consumed. That alone can fix all our problems. So, what are we doing about it? So, think about the future – not only in terms of the survival of our business, but the survival of our planet."

Costello

"And could you give an example from Johnson and Johnson, of a stress test to see what you want to hold onto, where we’re moving forward to. And it was put out to the organisation, right?"

Gulati

"So, Johnson and Johnson had a purpose statement from the beginning from General Johnson, called the Credo – it’s engrained on a piece of concrete outside their corporate headquarters. But periodically they have done a Credo challenge. They have had moments where they’ve lost their purpose, and purpose drift has happened with them. But periodically they do what is called a Credo challenge which is saying ‘listen, let’s modify what we have’ – and they have modified it. And we should do that ourselves, right. I’m speaking for myself here Michael – my purpose here today as an individual is not the same as my purpose from 10 years ago or 20 years ago. The only regret I have is that I wish I was more intentional about my purpose 20 years ago. It was kind of there, but it was kind of buried somewhere in the recesses of my brain, and I never thought about it. I have become much more deliberate about my purpose now than I was 20 years ago. But it’s changed – our circumstances change, our own thinking changes, the world around us changes, and we need to evolve with those changing contextual circumstances."

Costello

"How did you get there then Ranjay? What does the individual do?"

Gulati

"I have to tell you – I really have to thank my students first of all, you know, who have helped me in this journey. For 10 years I’ve taught an Advanced Management programme, which is a senior leader programme in the school. And the average age is 54 years old, and maybe everyone’s going through a midlife crisis or not, I don’t know. But a lot of push-back. And I hired coaches for each of them. And I said, ‘listen, I want you to really reflect on being more purposeful about your lives’. And then one of them asked me, ‘what about you?’ – and I thought, am I being a hypocrite here, asking others to think about their lives, but what about me? And so, it forced me to contemplate. I think, you know, it’s never too late and it’s never too early to think about our purpose, and in these interviews I’ve done – now these 10 interviews I’ve done with CEOs from around the world – it is so inspiring to hear how – it’s no surprise that these people have ended up as CEOs. You hear their life journey, and you hear how when you have clarity around purpose. And when you think about individual purpose – here’s the definition that I like, it’s a William Damon definition, from a Stanford Psychologist, he says ‘purpose is at once meaningful to the self, and consequential to the world beyond’.

Most of us, not all of us, most of us want to do something bigger than us. It could be impact – this is not saving the planet only – it could be impact on our customers, changing our market, changing the way people think, transforming something bigger than myself. And purpose, when you think about it, is a way to understand what is meaningful to me first and foremost, the self is important, and consequentially to the world beyond myself – and connecting those two is in a way how magic happens."

Costello

"We mentioned the classic story of the caretaker at NASA, which I’ve told and shared many times in workshops and delegates. A reminder for those listening, there’s a caretaker at NASA who is asked ‘what do you do around here?’. And he answers, ‘I put men on the moon’. It’s a lovely story – how do leaders and employees prevent themselves from becoming detached from that original purpose."

Gulati

"First of all, you want to work in an organisation where you really deeply resonate with what your organisation does. You know, so ask yourself – ‘are you connected?’, do you feel – and the word I use is ‘do you feel inspired by what your organisation does?’ The other word I like to use is ‘proud’ – ‘do you feel proud of the organisation where you work? Now, you’re hoping your organisation and leadership creates a context to remind us that, look, what we do matters, what we do matters.

At GE Aviation, they had a campaign for a long-time called ‘We Bring People Home Safely’. Because more than half of all aircraft flying in the world at any moment in time are flying with a GE engine. So it was a way to remind people that what you do – you may not realise it – but the work you’re doing making a little widget for a million plus part piece of equipment actually does bring people home safely. What you’re doing does matter. That’s important – people want to see that they’re doing something meaningful to the self, and consequential to the world beyond their self. I think a lot of us numb ourselves at work. We numb ourselves to the idea that we live our life outside of work – work-life balance.

But I think all of us should expect more out of our jobs. We should all expect more out of it, and we should be living at work. Not in some, you know, limbo state, or zombie state, at work. And I think that’s the way we should all expect more in our lives, purposeful living, and in our jobs. And when those two connect, it’s remarkable. And I’ve seen sports coaches talk about this, as I’ve seen business leaders talk about it, and amazing individuals talk about it. What allows individuals to be extraordinary? – what allowed Nelson Mandela, or others like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King – what allowed them to be extraordinary individuals? They all had found a purpose for themselves, that was involved with the meaning of themselves, but also something bigger than themselves."

Costello

"Ranjay, I’ve loved the sense that over the years we’ve learnt that perhaps as practitioners to encourage employees to say no, to disagree, to ask for help. What your saying is, know your right to a purpose. Be more, and challenge for more. Thank you so much for all of your thoughts Ranjay – that is sadly the end of the podcast. We do have copies of the book ‘Deep Purpose’ to give away – what do they have to do Ranjay?"

Gulati

"Well, I think you have to simply like one of the podcast posts, and then you have to, in the comments, write out what is your lightbulb moment in the podcast. And I hope there’s at least one for some of you. So, if you just share what is that lightbulb thing that maybe raised your thinking in some way, I hope my 5 years of research led to one lightbulb moment, so… And if you can share that with us, you become eligible to hopefully get a copy of the book that you will read!"

Costello

"Ranjay, thank you so much for joining us. I hope we did the book justice in the time that we had together. There is so much more – the crucial blueprint to exploring the book. Please also check out ranjaygulati.com to find out more about deep purpose culture, and stay tuned for our next exciting interview on EY’s Think People podcast."

Gulati

"Thank you so much Michael, what a pleasure."

Costello

"Bye-bye."

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35m 49s

EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

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How you can achieve a deep purpose culture

Key takeaways:

Podcast transcript: How you can achieve a deep purpose culture

35 min approx | 16 January 2023

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