Why is purpose so important for an organisation?

Grant Leboff: Sean, your book, On Purpose, so the obviously questions are straight away is, why is purpose so important for an organization?

Shaun Smith: I think, because increasingly, consumers are demanding that it should be so. You’ve only got to look at some of the recent scandals, like the VW scandal or Barclay’s being the most heavily fined bank in the UK, to realize that the behavior of many large corporates is self serving and is just not to the customer’s interest at all. I think customers have had enough. They’ve said, enough of this. What we want is to do business with organizations that we care about, that we feel are on our side.

The notion of On Purpose is about being purposeful, meaningful for customers. The other meaning of On Purpose is intentional. Many organizations now are wanting to deliver customer experiences across all of their channels. We know that with the multiplicity of channels that’s an extremely difficult thing to do, so you’ve got to be intentional. The other meaning of On Purpose is intentional about the kind of experience you want to create and making sure that’s consistent across channels.

Grant Leboff: Of course, one of the things you talk about in the book is, you talk about the customers and what their demands, but, of course, also for employees themselves, how important do you think purpose is now in terms of attracting, retaining, getting the best out of… employees?

Shaun Smith: Absolutely. Robert Stevens, the founder of the Geek Squad, has this wonderful phrase, which says that purpose is like a lighthouse, it’s a beacon that attracts the kind of people that you want and detracts the kind of people you don’t want. I think that is true. The clearer you can be about the kind of organization you wish to be, the values that you have, the more likely it is that you’re going to attract those kinds of people. We often talk about hiring for DNA not MBA. You can find smart people. The important thing is to find people that really fit your brand and want to be part of it.

Grant Leboff: How does a company even begin …there are companies that have just been built with purpose in mind, haven’t they? We know some of those, but if you’re sitting, watching this now, thinking, we haven’t defined it properly, we haven’t articulated it properly, how do you go about starting to do that?

Shaun Smith: I think a good example of an organization that did that is Premier Inn. You may know that Premier Inn is the leading mid market hotel in the UK, 700 hotels, 20,000 people, very successful organization. About 3 years ago, the managing director, Patrick Dempsey, caught me and said, look I’m worried. We’re growing very well. We’re very successful. We know we’re doing a lot of things right, but I don’t really know exactly why. I know it’s something to do with our people. He called it the pixie dust. He said, we’ve got pixie dust in this organization, but I don’t really know how to protect it and unless we can describe it then we can’t protect it for the future. We can’t make sure that we grow to protect that culture.

We did a piece of research with the regular customers and with our employees and we identified what made Premier Inn special. The outcome of that was the purpose statement, which is making guests feel brilliant through a great night’s sleep.

You may say, well that’s kind of an obvious thing. Surely, every hotel does that. Well, not really, because if you think of the different types of hotels, some you go to for the fine dining, the restaurant. Some you go to for the fabulous location, the country side. Some you go to maybe for the architecture, the design. Some you go to for the spa. When we did the research for Premier Inn with their most valuable customers, what we identified was the number one reason for going to a Premier Inn is because the customer, the guest, has something else to do. They’ve got a business meeting. They’ve got a social engagement. Really what they want is a great night’s sleep at an affordable rate with nice people. That then led to that purpose. That led to Premier Inn investing in all of those things that were likely to guarantee giving guests a brilliant stay through a great night’s sleep.

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