What is the purpose of government?

New Zealand’s election raises a question that goes beyond the traditional left-right divide: What is government really for, and how can we ensure it delivers lasting wellbeing and opportunity for all?

As Aotearoa New Zealand prepares to vote and America counts the results of its midterm elections, perhaps the most important political question is not who should govern, but what government is actually for.

This Saturday, 7 November, New Zealanders will elect a government. On the other side of the Pacific, Americans are, as I write, awaiting the outcome of midterm elections that will determine control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The campaigns are very different, as are the political systems, the personalities are different, yet much of the argument in both countries has a familiar ring. Who will cut taxes? Who will spend more? Who will be tougher on crime, immigration or welfare? Who can be trusted with the economy? Who is up, who is down and who won the debate? These are all important questions, certainly, but they come after a much more fundamental one that we rarely seem to ask. What is government actually for?

It is a question about purpose. For much of my career I have asked organisations to answer essentially the same questions. Why do you exist? What enduring value are you here to generate? For whom? And within what parameters are you prepared to operate in pursuit of it? There is no particular reason why government should be exempt. Indeed, given the extraordinary authority we hand to governments, the resources they command and the consequences of the decisions they make, perhaps we should be demanding greater clarity of purpose from them than from anybody else.

The answer is less controversial than today’s social media driven, divisive style of politics might suggest. The International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board (IPSASB) on which New Zealand is represented, describes the primary function of governments and other public-sector entities as providing services that “enhance or maintain the well-being of citizens and other eligible residents”. Those services include education, policing, welfare, national security and defence. New Zealand’s own Public Service Act is similarly clear. It says the Public Service exists not simply to implement the policies of whichever government happens to be in office, but to support democratic government, deliver high-quality public services, facilitate active citizenship and help government pursue the long-term public interest.

Our Treasury has been thinking in similar terms for years. Its Living Standards Framework explicitly considers individual and collective wellbeing, the role of institutions and governance in facilitating it, and the wealth of New Zealand in terms that extend beyond financial capital to include human capability and the natural environment. So perhaps a reasonable statement of the purpose of government might simply be “to create and sustain the conditions in which people, communities and future generations can flourish”. Not simply some people, but everyone. Not simply today, but over time. And certainly not by consuming the natural and social systems on which tomorrow’s wellbeing depends.

This thinking is very close to the argument Dr Victoria Hurth made here in Auckland last week during her short visit to New Zealand to promote the forthcoming guidance standard on purpose ISO 37011. Her contention is that we have confused the means with the end. We have come to treat financial income, profit and GDP as if they were the things we ultimately care about, rather than instruments that should enable what we actually care about, namely good lives, healthy communities and human flourishing. Hurth describes the overarching goal as “long-term wellbeing for all people and planet”. At the organisational level, purpose-driven organisations make an optimal contribution towards that goal. Government, importantly, is one of those organisations.

In her keynote presentation she described an economy as the greatest tool a government has for achieving its mandate, a mechanism for allocating and transforming resources in ways that maximise collective wellbeing. It is an important distinction because it challenges one of the central assumptions underpinning contemporary political and economic thinking. Rather than asking how we can make the economy grow and assuming that society will benefit as a consequence, we should be asking what kind of society we are trying to create and how the economy can best help us achieve it.

This is not socialism. Nor is it capitalism. It is not fundamentally a question of left or right. As Victoria argued, it sits beneath those ideological divisions. Once we establish that the purpose of an economy is to contribute to collective wellbeing, the debate becomes one about the most effective means of achieving it. Markets, government intervention, public investment, private enterprise, taxation and regulation all have roles to play, but none should be confused with the ultimate objective. An economy is not the purpose of government. It is one of the principal means through which government helps a society flourish.

That does not diminish the importance of economic performance. GDP matters enormously. Productivity matters. Profitable businesses matter. Investment and trade matter. A country that cannot generate wealth will eventually find itself unable to provide the education, healthcare, infrastructure, security and opportunities its people need. But economic growth is not the ultimate objective any more than profit is ultimately the purpose of a company. Both are essential to generating the resources required to achieve something more meaningful.

If GDP rises while large numbers of people cannot afford somewhere decent to live, if productivity grows while natural systems are progressively depleted, or if national wealth increases while children leave school without the capabilities to participate fully in society, then surely we are entitled to ask whether the instrument is delivering against its purpose. This does not mean abandoning markets. Quite the opposite. Hurth’s argument is for a market economy governed towards the outcomes we actually want, rather than assuming that maximising financial activity will somehow produce them automatically. Her phrase for it is a ‘wellbeing economy’. To avoid the unnecessarily politicised attention it has attracted I would suggest simply calling it a ‘purposeful economy’.

This also changes the argument about taxation, which seems to dominate every election campaign. We are encouraged to evaluate competing parties according to whether their policies will leave us with a little more or a little less money in our pockets. Of course taxation matters, as does the responsible management of public finances. Governments should use public money efficiently, waste is indefensible, and a state that spends without discipline is no more purpose-driven than a business that loses money indefinitely. But low taxation cannot sensibly be an end in itself either. Taxes are one of the ways through which we purchase collective capability; hospitals, schools, roads, policing, defence, infrastructure, social protection and the institutions on which a functioning market economy itself depends.

And the demands on that capability are increasing. The Treasury’s 2025 long-term fiscal assessment warns that population ageing will significantly increase the costs of New Zealand Superannuation and publicly funded healthcare over coming decades. Its modelling shows that today’s policy settings cannot simply continue unchanged indefinitely. This does not automatically make the case for higher taxes, nor does it necessarily justify a larger state. What it does make is the case for honest choices about the outcomes we are trying to achieve, what they will cost, how they should be funded and what obligations we have to people who will be living here in 20, 40 or 60 years. We need to determine what government should provide, what markets should provide, what communities and individuals might contribute and, inevitably, what we should stop doing in order to release resources for more important priorities. These are questions of strategy, and strategy only makes sense once we treat purpose not simply as a declared statement of intent but as the fundamental core idea around which everything is aligned, organised and measured against.

It is against this background that I struggle increasingly with the conventional left-right political contest. One government arrives and changes the settings. Another arrives three years later and begins changing them back. Ministers replace one another, programmes are rebadged, institutions reorganised and priorities changed. Then we do it again. It is extraordinarily expensive, and it clearly makes long-term progress on subjects such as infrastructure, education, health, housing, climate resilience and productivity much harder than it needs to be. The political incentives encourage this behaviour. Opposition parties are rewarded for opposing, governments for announcing things, and election campaigns for producing short-term promises capable of being reduced to a headline.

We should not blame politicians alone for this. Most politicians I have met work remarkably hard. Whatever my disagreements with them, choosing public service inevitably brings scrutiny, pressure and personal sacrifice, and that deserves respect. I admire people prepared to give so much of their lives to serving their communities and their country. But politics is also a system, and systems shape behaviour. When politics becomes a career, the danger is that getting elected, remaining elected, becoming a minister or eventually becoming prime minister can gradually become the objective rather than the means to an end. Winning begins to replace serving, and personal political ambition risks taking precedence over the contribution an individual originally set out to make.

The same distortion occurs when lobbying, privileged access and private conversations allow organised interests to exert disproportionate influence over decisions whose consequences are borne by everybody. In a healthy democracy, businesses, unions, community groups and other interests must have opportunities to make their case. Governments need to listen, and consultation is essential to good decision-making. But there is a considerable difference between transparent engagement in the public interest and privileged influence exercised behind closed doors. In the 21st century, with the expectations of transparency that now exist, and the challenges we face, we should surely be capable of creating better systems of accountability.

None of this requires us to believe politicians are corrupt or ill-intentioned. It simply requires us to build governance that makes the purpose the enduring touchstone, establishes the parameters within which decisions are made, makes trade-offs transparent and holds those making them accountable for the results. That is precisely the territory now being addressed by ISO 37011. It applies not only to private organisations but also to public-sector bodies, regulators and central and local government. It asks governing bodies to align direction, decision-making, oversight and accountability with long-term wellbeing for people and nature.

Imagine applying that discipline seriously to government. Instead of judging ministers simply by whether they delivered the policies they promised, we could judge them by the contribution those policies actually made to the purpose of government. Were people’s lives improved? Was opportunity expanded? Were the country’s capabilities strengthened? Did the decisions protect or diminish the interests of future generations? And were those outcomes achieved within clearly understood and publicly accountable parameters?

There is another reason why this matters, and that is trust. The OECD’s latest survey found that 47% of New Zealanders reported high or moderately high trust in central government in 2025, above the OECD average of 40%. But trust in political parties was just 36%. For a country that has traditionally regarded institutional trust as one of its strengths, that ought to concern us. A clearly articulated national purpose would not magically restore trust, but it could give us something against which governments could be judged beyond partisan allegiance and the electoral cycle. It would establish a common reference point against which competing strategies and their results could be evaluated.

It would also force us to think much more seriously about our national values. If purpose describes the enduring value we want to generate, values are the parameters within which we commit to pursuing it. What are New Zealand’s? Fairness, trust, ingenuity, courage, stewardship, partnership and respect for future generations all come to mind, but these are not decisions that should be made by a political party or written by a consultancy. They belong to New Zealanders. We are a country with a distinctive identity, widely associated with trust, fairness, innovation, resourcefulness and an extraordinary natural environment. Surely there is an opportunity to turn those characteristics into something more deliberate than a national reputation.

Once established, a shared purpose and set of values could provide remarkable continuity. Governments would still disagree, sometimes vigorously, about taxation, spending, regulation, the role of the state and the mechanisms through which opportunities should be created. Those debates are both legitimate and necessary in a democracy. But different political philosophies could be competing to demonstrate how best to achieve a commonly understood national objective, rather than continually redefining what success itself is supposed to mean. We could maintain the benefits of political competition while reducing some of the destructive consequences of constantly changing direction.

Of course, purpose on its own achieves nothing. It requires leadership capable of representing it, explaining it, building coalitions around it and encouraging people, businesses, communities and institutions to contribute towards it. That sort of leadership feels increasingly rare. Around the world we are living through geopolitical conflict, cultural division, technological disruption and declining faith in institutions. The temptation for political leaders is to exploit those divisions because division can be electorally useful. Purpose-driven leadership demands almost the opposite. It requires the ability to unite people who disagree about the means around something bigger than themselves, and the courage to take decisions whose benefits may not become apparent until long after the next election.

This is where a leader’s character becomes as important as their political abilities. A compelling purpose requires someone who genuinely believes in it, can communicate it convincingly and has the humility to recognise that achieving it depends on the contributions of many others. A prime minister cannot personally deliver the wellbeing of a nation any more than a chief executive can single-handedly deliver an organisation’s purpose. But both can create the conditions, establish the direction and inspire the collective endeavour that makes progress possible. Leadership, at its best, is not about occupying the most important position. It is about enabling others to achieve something important together.

Which brings me, inevitably, to Saturday’s election and my own political preference. I have never believed purpose requires everybody to agree. Politics will always involve competing interests and legitimate differences over how resources should be allocated. Nor am I suggesting that any political party has discovered all the answers. But I do believe clarity about what you are trying to achieve matters, and it is one reason I chose to help and support Qiulae Wong and her Opportunity party.

Its published vision is for a New Zealand in which individuals, society and the environment “thrive together”. Its stated purpose is to enact policies that give “every Kiwi equal opportunity to pursue their potential” in socially, economically and environmentally sustainable ways. Its principles include following evidence over left-right ideologies and prioritising long-term outcomes over short-lived wins. I may not agree with every policy it proposes, and I do not need to. What appeals to me is the organising idea itself. Opportunity for all is immediately understandable and it provides a potentially powerful basis for evaluating the decisions a government makes.

Opportunity to learn, to work, to create, to build a business, to own a home, to participate and to live a healthy and meaningful life. Crucially, it is an idea that should extend beyond those fortunate enough to have started life with opportunity already on their side. It says what it does on the tin. That strikes me as a rather better starting point for political decision-making than asking which collection of short-term promises might leave a few more dollars in my bank account next year. It is also a purpose around which people from different political traditions could potentially unite, even while disagreeing about the best way of delivering it.

I am not suggesting that Opportunity, or any other political party, could simply adopt a purpose statement and thereby solve the challenges confronting New Zealand. As I have argued for years in the context of business, purpose is only useful when it becomes the organising principle through which governance, strategy, investment, operations, culture and performance are aligned. Declaring a purpose is the beginning of the work, not its completion. The same would be true of a government, and perhaps even more so given the complexity of the systems and competing interests involved.

But imagine what might change if, instead of starting every election campaign with a shopping list of policies, we began by asking those seeking to govern us to explain the enduring value they believe government exists to create. We could then ask how their policies would contribute to it, what principles and parameters would guide their decisions, how progress would be measured and how they would be held accountable when they fell short. Rather than treating every election as a contest between disconnected promises, we would be inviting political parties to present competing strategies for achieving a meaningful and shared national ambition.

As we prepare to cast our votes, perhaps it is worth remembering that the ultimate purpose of government is not especially complicated. It is to create the conditions in which all of us, and those who come after us, have the opportunity to flourish.

That strikes me as something worth voting for and organising a country around.

For transparency, I have provided some voluntary strategic and practical support to Qiulae Wong and Opportunity, entirely unpaid. The views expressed in this article are my own.

ISO 37011: When Purpose Becomes Governance

For years, organisations have been encouraged to define their purpose. ISO 37011 is the first international standard designed to explain exactly what being purpose-driven actually means, and how purpose can move from words into governance, decisions and performance. For businesses in New Zealand and around the world, its emergence creates a considerable opportunity.

Purpose has spent much of the past decade suffering from an excess of enthusiasm and a shortage of discipline. Thousands of organisations have adopted purpose statements. Consultants have developed purpose propositions. Advertising agencies have turned purpose into campaigns. Annual reports have filled with increasingly expansive explanations of why companies exist and the difference they intend to make. Some of this has undoubtedly been worthwhile. But it has also created a fundamental problem. Having a purpose and being driven by one are not the same thing.

That distinction sits at the heart of ISO 37011, Purpose-driven organizations — Guidance, the emerging international standard that has now reached an important stage in its development. In September, the draft entered ISO’s formal enquiry phase, giving national standards bodies and other stakeholders around the world an opportunity to examine and comment on it before it progresses towards publication.

I have had the privilege of contributing to the international expert group involved in its development. For me, its importance lies not simply in the arrival of another ISO document, but in what it represents. Purpose is moving from the language of aspiration towards the discipline of governance. And that matters enormously.

Where ISO 37011 comes from

The story did not begin with ISO 37011. In 2021, ISO published ISO 37000, Governance of organizations — Guidance, the first international benchmark covering the governance of organisations of every type and size. Significantly, purpose sits at the heart of that standard. ISO 37000 defines organisational purpose as an organisation’s meaningful reason to exist and places it at the centre of the responsibilities of those governing an organisation.

That was an important development in itself. It shifted purpose away from marketing and communications and placed it where I have long believed it belongs; inside governance.

The next important step came in Britain with PAS 808:2022, developed by the British Standards Institute (BSI). PAS 808 provided more detailed guidance on purpose-driven organisations, including how purpose should influence decisions and behaviour, and how organisations might assess whether they genuinely operate in accordance with their stated intent. PAS 808 is now evolving onto the international stage through ISO 37011.

The new standard is being developed through ISO/TC 309, the technical committee responsible for governance of organisations. The current draft follows more than 60 international meetings over two years, three working drafts and two committee drafts, involving experts working through the painstaking consensus-building process that sits behind international standards.

That process matters because purpose has desperately needed a common language. Ask ten executives what organisational purpose means and you may still receive ten different answers. For some it is a mission. For others it is a brand promise, a values statement, a social impact programme or simply a more inspiring description of the business strategy. The consequence is predictable. If we cannot agree what purpose means, it becomes almost impossible to agree what being purpose-driven requires. ISO 37011 address that issue.

What the standard actually does

The draft provides guidance on organisational purpose and on the governance of purpose-driven organisations. It is intended for organisations of every type and size, including businesses, public-sector organisations, regulators, voluntary organisations, social enterprises, government bodies and professional associations.

Importantly, it is guidance, not a certification standard. There are no requirements against which an organisation can simply tick boxes and declare itself ISO 37011 compliant. There is no verification framework and no certificate to hang in reception. Its recommendations are expressed as things an organisation should do rather than things it must do. That is important because becoming purpose-driven is not fundamentally a compliance exercise. It is an organisational one.

The standard builds on the three central governance functions established by ISO 37000 — direction, oversight and accountability. It asks governing bodies to consider the purpose their organisation exists to fulfil, ensure that decisions and actions are aligned with it, and hold the organisation accountable for doing so.

At its core is an important proposition. A purpose-driven organisation seeks to align its decisions and actions with the long-term wellbeing of people and the planet.

For some business leaders, that language may initially sound as though commercial performance is being displaced by social ambition, but that interpretation misses the point, and here’s why:

A business that continually loses money will eventually cease to exist. Profitability, productivity, investment, innovation and growth remain essential. Capital still needs to earn an appropriate return. Employees still need to be paid. Customers still need to choose what the organisation sells. Purpose does not remove commercial reality. It simply provides a better way of organising the enterprise within it.

The performance argument

This is where my own interest in ISO 37011 becomes particularly strong. For more than 25 years, my work on Single Organizing Idea (SOI®) has been built around a relatively simple proposition — that organisations perform better when they know clearly what they exist to achieve and organise themselves around delivering it.

Not when purpose sits alongside strategy. Not when it appears as a paragraph on the website. And certainly not when it becomes the responsibility of the communications, sustainability or people team. Purpose has to drive the organisation.

When that happens, it provides a common reference point for decisions. It helps leaders determine where to invest and where not to invest. It guides innovation. It informs the products and services an organisation develops, the customers it serves, the people it recruits, the behaviours it rewards and the measures by which performance is judged.

Importantly it creates alignment. And alignment matters because organisations waste an extraordinary amount of energy through competing priorities, disconnected functions, contradictory incentives and strategies that pull different parts of the enterprise in different directions.

A clear purpose cannot magically remove those tensions. But when it becomes the organising principle around which the organisation is governed and managed, it provides a way of resolving them. Strategy becomes the means through which purpose is pursued. Culture reinforces it. Operations deliver it. Measures tell leaders whether it is being achieved.

Commercial performance and purpose therefore need not sit at opposite ends of a philosophical argument. They are actually mutually reinforcing.

A successful purpose-driven business creates the financial strength necessary to continue investing, employing people, innovating and fulfilling its purpose. In turn, clarity of purpose can create the focus, engagement, trust and strategic coherence from which stronger performance emerges. That creates enduring value for shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, communities and the wider systems upon which the business ultimately depends.

This is where ISO 37011 makes an important contribution. It gives the international business community a common governance framework around something that has until now been interpreted far too loosely. That makes purpose harder to casually claim, but it also makes it considerably more useful.

Why Aotearoa New Zealand should pay attention

We are unlikely to compete with the largest economies through scale alone. Our advantages have always depended more heavily on ingenuity, relationships, reputation, trust and our ability to create distinctive forms of value.

Purpose-driven governance can strengthen those advantages. For an export business, clarity of purpose can help maintain coherence as the organisation enters different markets and encounters different pressures. For a fast-growing company, it can provide continuity as new people, investors and capabilities arrive. For an established organisation, it can expose areas where legacy practices no longer support what the business is trying to achieve. For boards, it introduces a more searching question than whether the organisation has a purpose statement.

Is the organisation actually being governed by its purpose?

Does purpose influence capital allocation? Strategy? Risk? Executive incentives? Innovation? Measures of success? Decisions about which opportunities to pursue and which to reject?

If the answer is no, the organisation may have declared a purpose, but it is difficult to argue that it is being driven by one. And that distinction could become increasingly important internationally as ISO 37011 creates a shared reference point against which purpose-driven claims can be understood.

For New Zealand, getting ahead of that development represents an opportunity to lead now rather than follow an obligation later. In other words, we can wait until international expectations evolve around us. Or alternatively, we can participate in shaping them and begin applying the thinking now.

From Cambridge to Auckland

Next week, Dr Victoria Hurth will be visiting New Zealand to promote ISO 37011 and discuss what the emerging standard could mean for organisations here. Her visit has a particular personal significance for me, as Victoria and I go back quite a long way.

I first met Dr Victoria Hurth around a decade ago through a purpose-focused think tank convened by Ben Kellard at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Victoria and I were both active, and occasionally rather vocal, participants. We have been discussing, arguing about and advocating for the role of organisational purpose ever since.

Victoria went on to play a leading role in ISO 37000 and PAS 808 and done a truly amazing job as Project Leader for ISO 37011.

Next Tuesday, 27 October, she will be in Auckland for a special British New Zealand Business Association event at AUT, From purpose statements to real decisions: building a wellbeing economy. Victoria will deliver the keynote before joining me and Andrew Baker of Tika Learning for a panel discussion moderated by BNZBA Vice President Dr Victoria Hatton.

The timing could hardly be better. ISO 37011 is currently in its international enquiry period, which runs from 24 September until 17 December, although national consultation deadlines may be earlier. New Zealand participates in ISO through the New Zealand Standards Organisation, giving this country a route into the international standards process rather than simply leaving others to define the framework for us. That makes the conversation next week much more than another discussion about the merits of purpose. It’s an opportunity to consider what purpose looks like when it becomes part of the actual machinery of governance.

Beyond the statement

I have spent much of my career arguing that purpose should not be treated as an addition to the organisation. It should sit at the heart of it and that is ultimately why I believe ISO 37011 matters.

The standard will not tell leaders precisely what their organisation’s purpose should be. Nor will it remove the difficult choices, compromises and tensions involved in running a successful organisation. What it can do is establish a much clearer international understanding of what leaders mean when they claim their organisation is purpose-driven.

That raises the bar. But it also creates an opportunity. Because once purpose moves beyond the statement and begins genuinely influencing governance, strategy, investment, culture, operations and performance, it stops being another piece of corporate language. It becomes useful. And when an organisation is coherently organised around a meaningful purpose, delivering value through everything it does, I believe it becomes capable not only of contributing more to the people and systems around it, but of performing better itself. That is good for business and that is good for all stakeholders too.

The Best Places to Work Have a Purpose

Why organisational purpose matters to employee experience, and how a shared sense of direction helps create better workplaces, stronger cultures and greater performance.

Pay matters. So do good managers, flexibility, trust and the everyday experience of work. But the strongest workplaces also offer something fundamental: A clear sense of what the organisation is trying to achieve, why it matters and how each person contributes to making it happen.

So what makes somewhere a genuinely good place to work? For an employee, the answer is unlikely to begin with a corporate purpose statement. It will be much more immediate. Am I treated fairly? Do I trust my manager? Is the workload reasonable? Am I listened to? Can I do good work without fighting the organisation around me? Does the organisation keep its promises?

All of these things matter enormously. New Zealand’s Best Places to Work™ 2026 Employee Experience Survey reinforces the point. When employees were asked what mattered most to them at work, 74.6 per cent included people and culture among their three most important factors, compared with 35.4 per cent who selected compensation. Supportive managers, flexibility and being able to be themselves at work also featured strongly.

But buried within that everyday experience is another question that is easy to overlook — do I understand what this organisation is trying to achieve, and can I see how my work contributes to it? That is the meeting point where organisational purpose enters the employee experience.

Not purpose as a slogan. Not an assertion that the organisation exists to make the world a better place. And certainly not another piece of employer branding designed to persuade people that their job is more meaningful than it really is.

Purpose, properly understood, is an organisation’s meaningful reason to exist, grounded in the enduring value it creates through its performance and its contribution to the long-term wellbeing of people and the planet. In a purpose-driven organisation, that understanding becomes the organising principle for strategy, decisions, priorities, behaviour and performance.

From an employee’s perspective, this matters because work rarely happens in isolation. Every day people are asked to make choices, resolve competing priorities, collaborate with others, respond to customers and decide where to put their limited time and attention. The clearer the organising logic of the business, the easier it becomes to understand not simply what needs to be done, but why. That distinction has consequences.

A sizeable body of research has found a strong relationship between experiencing work as meaningful and outcomes including engagement, commitment and job satisfaction. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Management Studies, covering 44 studies and more than 23,000 people, found particularly strong associations between meaningful work and all three. It also found a relationship with lower intentions to withdraw from an organisation.

Organisational purpose and meaningful work are not the same thing, and we should be wary of pretending that a carefully articulated purpose can somehow make every task inspirational. Few people arrive at work each morning requiring transcendence before opening their inbox. But purpose can create the conditions in which work makes greater sense.

It can provide line of sight between an individual job and a larger organisational endeavour. It can help managers explain decisions rather than merely announce them. It can give teams a common reference point when priorities compete. And it can make autonomy more practical because people have a clearer framework within which to exercise judgement. Most importantly, perhaps, it gives employees something against which to judge the organisation itself.

This is where purpose becomes much more demanding than the purpose statement suggests. Employees experience the gap between words and actions more closely than almost anyone else. They see which behaviours are rewarded. They know whether a stated commitment survives contact with a difficult commercial decision. They experience whether leaders listen, whether customers really matter, whether values disappear when targets are under pressure and whether the organisation behaves consistently when nobody is preparing a presentation about its culture. In that sense, employee experience is one of the toughest tests of whether an organisation is genuinely purpose driven.

A business cannot credibly claim that its purpose guides how it creates enduring value while treating the people expected to deliver that purpose simply as a cost to be managed. Equally, an organisation with a friendly culture, generous benefits and an impressive employee proposition can still leave people confused about where it is going, what really matters and how their work contributes. The two dimensions need each other.

This is also why being purpose driven should not be confused with making work easy. Some of the best workplaces are highly demanding. They expect excellent performance, make difficult decisions and ask a great deal of their people. What distinguishes them is not an absence of pressure, but greater coherence around why the effort matters, what is expected and how success is achieved.

Purpose therefore sits upstream of much of what we describe as employee experience. When it genuinely shapes strategy and behaviour, it can influence how leaders lead, how managers manage, how teams collaborate, what gets measured and rewarded, and how people understand the contribution they are being asked to make.

That connection is one of the reasons Neil Gaught & Associates has entered into partnership with Best Places to Work.

We approach the organisation from different but highly complementary directions. Best Places to Work begins with the lived experience of employees. Its awards process starts with confidential employee feedback before organisations can progress to independent assessment, deliberately testing the difference between what an organisation says about itself and what its people actually experience.

At NG&A, our starting point is the organisation’s core purpose and the work required to make it an organising principle for governance, strategy, culture, operations and performance. Both approaches ultimately come together in how purpose is translated into everyday organisational practice.

That is also why NG&A is sponsoring the Purpose in Action Award at this year’s Best Places to Work Awards. The category recognises organisations working to embed purpose into strategy, decision-making and everyday action, creating outcomes for employees as well as customers, communities and the organisation itself.

Next Thursday, 22 October, the 2026 Best Places to Work Awards will bring together organisations from across Aotearoa New Zealand that are trying to create better experiences for their people.

There will be much to celebrate. But behind the awards sits a more important idea. The best places to work are not created by perks, statements or culture programmes alone. They are created when people can see a connection between what an organisation is there to achieve, the decisions its leaders make, the work they themselves do and the value that work creates. When those things align, purpose stops being something employees are told about and becomes something they experience.

Purpose Inside the Machine
Q3 2026 Summary
 


Every quarter I look back at what I have written, read and discussed on Neil Gaught On Purpose. It is partly a chance to catch up on anything you may have missed, but it also reveals themes that were not necessarily obvious when each piece was published.

This quarter, one stands out.

Artificial intelligence did not dominate everything I wrote. Far from it. The subjects ranged from Matariki and leadership to organisational change, employee experience, corporate purpose and — surreally — René Magritte. But AI increasingly changes the context in which all those subjects sit.

In The Machine Needs a North Star, I explored what happens when AI begins to change not only how work gets done, but how organisations themselves are organised. As machines become capable of researching, analysing, recommending and increasingly acting, the question of what all that intelligence is ultimately being directed towards becomes much more important. AI can make organisations faster and more capable, but it cannot determine why they exist.

Perhaps appropriately, the quarter began with Matariki and the importance of orientation before action, and ended with the prospect of organisations increasingly populated by intelligent machines. Different worlds, perhaps, but connected by a remarkably similar question: Before we accelerate, do we know where we are going and why?

Here is what I shared during Q3.

Articles

Orientation Before Action: The Wisdom of Matariki

Matariki provided the starting point for a reflection on purpose, stewardship and the value of establishing our bearings before rushing forward.

In a business culture that prizes momentum, Matariki offers a useful reminder that movement and progress are not the same thing. Purpose provides organisations with a point of orientation against which choices about the future can be made.

The Leadership Challenge Hidden in Plain Sight

Prompted by the Oxford–GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey, I looked at the extraordinary range of pressures now competing for leadership attention.

My argument was that beneath geopolitical, technological, regulatory and social complexity lies a deeper challenge, that being organisational fragmentation. The more complicated the environment becomes, the greater the need for a common organising principle that helps leaders distinguish what matters from what merely demands attention.

This is Not a Purpose
René Magritte’s famous The Treachery of Images provided a surreal way into one of my recurring frustrations with corporate purpose.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe. And a purpose statement is not a purpose.

Statements matter, but purpose only becomes real when it influences governance, strategy, culture, investment, innovation, behaviour and performance. The challenge is not declaring a purpose. It is becoming organised by one.

The Machine Needs a North Star
The final article of the quarter considered what organisational purpose might mean in an increasingly AI-native world.

AI can optimise against an objective but humans still have to determine which objectives matter. Which is why I firmly believe purpose will become increasingly more important in the age of AI, not less.

Book Reviews

Two very different books featured in my Beyond Rhetoric series this quarter, both concerned, in their own way, with the gap between aspiration and implementation.

Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber

I returned to Kotter and Rathgeber’s deceptively simple fable about a colony of penguins confronting enormous change.

Nearly twenty years after publication, its lessons about urgency, leadership, resistance and collective action remain remarkably relevant. Knowing that change is necessary is one thing. Getting an organisation to move together is quite another.

Higher Ground by Alison Taylor

Alison Taylor offers an intelligent and refreshingly sceptical examination of corporate purpose, ethics, values and responsibility.
I agreed with much of her diagnosis. Where I wanted more was in the how. Understanding why purpose matters, and even defining what it should mean, is only the beginning. The harder task is turning it into the way an organisation actually operates.

Conversations

I also continued my Neil Gaught On Purpose: In Conversation series with two New Zealand leaders approaching purpose and performance from very different perspectives.

In Conversation with Gavin Findlay

As Chief Executive of the New Zealand Food Network, Gavin Findlay works in an organisation with an unmistakably social purpose.

What made our conversation particularly interesting was his emphasis on performance and commercial discipline. Having a worthwhile purpose does not reduce the need to run an organisation well. It makes clarity about what good performance is ultimately for even more important.

In Conversation with Julie Gill
My conversation with Best Places to Work™ Founder and CEO Julie Gill explored employee experience, culture, leadership and the connection between better workplaces and better organisational performance.

One theme stood out: People experience purpose through what an organisation actually does. They notice whether decisions, behaviours and priorities match the words. Purpose becomes credible when it is lived rather than simply communicated.

Into Q4

The final quarter of 2026 promises to be unusually rich territory for purpose.

New Zealand’s general election will dominate the public conversation, bringing questions of leadership, trust, priorities and long-term direction sharply into focus. For NG&A, the opportunity is not to enter party politics, but to examine what organisational purpose can teach us about making choices, maintaining direction and creating value when competing pressures intensify.

October will also put purpose into practice in two very different settings. NG&A is sponsoring the Purpose In Action Spotlight Award at Best Places to Work™, providing an opportunity to recognise organisations demonstrating that purpose can influence culture and performance, rather than simply sit in corporate language.

And the British New Zealand Business Association will host From Purpose Statements to Real Decisions: Building a Wellbeing Economy an event that brings together ISO37011 leading expert Victoria Hurth, Andrew Baker and my good-self for a panel discussion, hosted by Victoria Hatton. With the international standard inching towards publication, this should provide a timely platform for discussing what purpose actually means and what governing an organisation by purpose requires in practice.

It’s going to be a busy Q4!

Neil Gaught On Purpose: In Conversation

Neil Gaught On Purpose: In Conversation is a monthly interview series featuring leaders, thinkers and practitioners at the forefront of purpose-driven business.

Each conversation explores how purpose is being applied in practice, across strategy, governance, culture and performance.

At a time of growing complexity and uncertainty, the series brings together diverse perspectives to examine a simple but increasingly urgent question: What does it take to build a business that creates enduring value for both shareholders and society?

 

Julie Gill is the Founder and CEO of Best Places to Work™, which she helped relaunch in 2023 with an ambition that goes well beyond recognising great employers. Driven by a belief that strong organisations and positive workplace experiences go hand in hand, Julie is building BPTW as a continuous improvement platform that helps organisations listen to their people, understand what shapes their experience and turn that insight into better leadership, culture and performance. Her wider ambition is simple but bold: to help Aotearoa New Zealand become one of the best places in the world to work, “floating all the boats higher” in the process.

 

NG: Julie, before we talk about Best Places to Work™ (BPTW), I’d like to start with you. What has driven your interest in people, workplaces and organisational culture, and where did the idea that work could, and should, be better first come from for you?

JG: I’ve always been fascinated by people and the difference they can make to an organisation, but equally, the difference an organisation can make to people.

We spend such a significant part of our lives at work, so the workplace experience matters. It affects our confidence, our wellbeing, our families and communities, as well as what we’re able to contribute professionally.

Over the years, I’ve seen organisations with very similar resources and opportunities achieve very different outcomes. Often, the difference comes back to people, leadership and culture.

When people understand why they’re there, know what’s expected of them, feel valued and trusted, and have the right environment around them, they can do extraordinary things.

That’s really where my interest comes from. I don’t see creating a positive workplace experience and creating a strong organisation as two separate things. They go hand 
in hand.

Because when people love where they work, everything changes. For them, for the organisation and, collectively, for Aotearoa New Zealand.

 

NG: BPTW has been part of the Aotearoa New Zealand business landscape for two decades and was relaunched in 2023. What did you see happening in the world of work that convinced you the time was right to bring it back?

JG: Best Places to Work has been part of New Zealand for more than 25 years. After a short hiatus, we brought it back three years ago because work had changed enormously, and people’s expectations of work had changed with it.

We’d come through COVID. Flexible and hybrid working had accelerated. Wellbeing and purpose had become a much more serious workplace conversation. And people were asking different questions of their employers.

Not just, “What do you pay me?” but, “Do I belong here? Does my work have meaning? Can I grow here? Does my voice matter?”

At the same time, organisations were trying to understand what all of that meant in practice.

So we brought BPTW back with the same mission: to float all the boats higher and lift the standard of workplace experience across New Zealand.

But we also had an opportunity to build something much broader – a continuous improvement programme built around employee voice, insight, benchmarking, learning and recognition.

Although the Best Places to Work™ Awards are an important part of inspiring leaders and celebrating the exceptional work happening in organisations across Aotearoa New Zealand, our ambition goes further.

Ultimately, we want to inspire New Zealand to be the best place to work in the world!

 

NG: BPTW talks about its mission as “floating all the boats higher.” I love that phrase. What does it mean to you, and what does it tell us about what you ultimately want BPTW to achieve beyond simply recognising great employers?

JG: I love that phrase because it really captures what we’re trying to do.

Of course we want to recognise and celebrate the best workplaces. We want to tell their stories and showcase the leadership, teams, cultures and innovation within New Zealand organisations.

“Floating all the boats higher” is about lifting the standard of employee experience across Aotearoa New Zealand.

An organisation might hear through its employee feedback that there’s an issue around trust, workload, communication or leadership. We don’t see that as failure. We see it as a signal.

You now know something you didn’t know before, and you have an opportunity to do something about it.

That’s why continuous improvement is so important to us. Success isn’t only seeing the best workplaces continue to perform strongly. It’s seeing organisations listen to their people, understand where to focus, make changes and come back a year later having improved.

If we can help organisations of various sizes right across New Zealand make meaningful improvements year after year, the collective impact can be significant.

That’s what “floating all the boats higher” is all about.

 

NG: We often talk about a “best place to work” as though we instinctively know what one looks like. From everything you have learned through BPTW, what actually separates the best workplace from an organisation that simply has good benefits, good intentions or a strong employer brand?

JG: For me, the biggest distinction is that an exceptional workplace is something people experience every day. It’s not something an organisation can simply say about itself.

It shows up in the everyday things: how your manager speaks to you, whether you understand what’s expected of you, whether you trust the decisions being made, whether you feel confident speaking up, whether your workload is manageable, whether you understand where the organisation is going and the part you play in getting there.

Those experiences matter.

That’s also why our Employee Experience Survey looks across the nine BPTW Pillars of Workplace Experience, with each question aligned to those pillars.

So we’re not simply measuring how people feel. We’re understanding the conditions and behaviours that shape their experience.

What we see in the best workplaces is consistency. People understand the purpose and direction of the organisation. Leaders communicate and listen. People feel trusted and supported. They feel connected to their teams and have the environment, tools and clarity they need to perform well.

And none of that means everything is perfect.

For me, one of the hallmarks of an exceptional workplace is being willing to listen to your people, understand what the signals are telling you and keep learning and improving.

 

NG: There is still a tendency in some organisations to regard culture, wellbeing and employee experience as the softer side of business. What have you learned about the relationship between creating a best place to work and harder measures such as performance, productivity, innovation, resilience and retaining good people?

JG: I think separating the “people stuff” from the “business stuff” is increasingly unhelpful.

If people aren’t clear about what they’re trying to achieve, don’t trust their leaders, are consistently overloaded, or don’t feel confident speaking up when something isn’t working, those things will show up in the organisation.

That’s why we think about the connection between experience, behaviour and performance.

Experience shapes behaviour. Behaviour shapes performance. And performance shapes results.

The last few years have brought real pressure for organisations, and that’s when strong foundations, investment in people, and having the right systems and insights matter most.

Employee experience gives leaders valuable information. Where are people performing well? Where is there friction? What might be getting in the way? That makes employee insight useful management information, not simply an annual engagement score.

 

NG: Purpose has become an increasingly important part of the BPTW approach. What role do you believe a clearly understood organisational purpose plays in creating workplaces where people feel connected, motivated and able to perform at their best?

JG: Purpose can be incredibly powerful, but only when people can see it in the decisions an organisation makes and the way work happens every day.

A beautifully written purpose statement on the wall isn’t enough.

People need to understand: Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve? And how does what I do contribute to that?

When people are clear on purpose, work feels more connected. There’s context around why something matters, people can see the part they play, and decisions become easier because there’s a shared understanding of where you’re trying to go.

For me, purpose becomes particularly interesting when an organisation has to make a difficult decision. Does it influence where you invest? What you prioritise? What you say no to? Who you work with? How leaders behave? What you measure and reward?

That’s where purpose turns into performance.

Through BPTW, we see organisations where employees can draw a very clear line between their everyday work and the difference the organisation is trying to make.

When what an organisation says matters is reflected in what employees actually experience, purpose becomes much more than a statement. It becomes something people can connect to and act on.

 

NG: BPTW is much more than an annual awards programme and it includes employee insight, certification, learning and access to specialist expertise. How do you see that evolving, and what do you want an organisation’s journey with BPTW to look like?

JG: I want organisations to see BPTW as a workplace improvement partner.

At the heart of the programme is our Employee Experience Survey, because everything starts with listening to your people.

It gives every employee a safe, independent and confidential way to share how work feels, and it gives leaders a clear view of what’s working, where to focus and how their results compare.

Then it’s about what you do with that insight.

For one organisation, that might mean building leadership capability. Another might use Pulse Surveys to understand whether changes are having an impact. Others might access a Masterclass or specialist support, work towards BPTW Certified, or recognise their progress through the Awards.

There isn’t one pathway because organisations are at different stages and have different needs.

What we want to provide is a continuous improvement programme that helps organisations listen, understand, act, measure and improve. Recognition sits alongside that journey, but continuous improvement is at the heart of it.

 

NG: We have recently begun working together through a partnership between BPTW and NG&A, including around purpose and the emerging ISO 37011 guidance. What opportunity do you see in bringing the workplace and purpose agendas closer together, particularly here in New Zealand?

JG: I think there’s a really interesting opportunity here because purpose and employee experience are deeply connected.

An organisation can have a very clear purpose, but if its people don’t understand it, can’t see how their work contributes to it, or don’t see leaders making decisions consistent with it, there’s a gap between intention and experience.

And purpose needs to do more than make people feel positive about where they work. It should help an organisation make choices, set priorities and be clear about the value it’s trying to create.

That’s what makes the emerging work around ISO 37011 interesting. It brings another level of rigour to how organisations think about purpose and how it translates into governance, strategy and organisational practice.

The opportunity for us is to bring that together with employee voice.

We can look at what an organisation says its purpose is, how that purpose is intended to influence the organisation, and then understand what employees actually experience.

That connection between intention and experience is powerful. It helps turn purpose from something an organisation talks about into something people can see in leadership, decisions and the way work gets done.

 

NG: Finally, BPTW has an ambition to help make New Zealand one of the world’s best places to work. If we were having this conversation five years from now and you felt that ambition was becoming a reality, what would have changed for employees, organisations and New Zealand as a whole?

JG: I’d want to see improvement at scale.

For employees, we’d want more people to feel that work is a positive part of their lives. That they trust their leaders, understand what they’re contributing to, feel supported to perform at their best, have opportunities to grow and know their voice matters.

For organisations, I’d like employee experience to be treated as seriously as other important business measures.

That doesn’t mean every workplace needs to be perfect. That’s not what BPTW is about.

It’s about listening. Being curious about what your people are telling you. Understanding the signals. Making meaningful changes. Then measuring again and continuing to improve.

And for Aotearoa New Zealand, I’d love the best workplaces to become part of our competitive advantage.

We’re a relatively small country, but I think there’s something very powerful about the way we think about connection here. Connection to people, to place and to the environment around us. Those values can shape the kind of workplaces we create and the kind of leadership we want to be known for.

If we can combine that with workplaces where people are trusted, connected to purpose, encouraged to innovate and enabled to perform at their best, I think New Zealand has an opportunity to lead in its own way.

Not by trying to replicate what the rest of the world is doing, but by building on what is distinctive about Aotearoa New Zealand and showing that strong organisations, positive employee experience and care for people, planet and place can sit alongside each other.

That has an impact far beyond an individual organisation.

It’s good for our people. It strengthens our organisations and our communities. And collectively, it strengthens New Zealand.

That’s ultimately what floating all the boats higher means to me.

The Machine Needs a North Star

Meta’s faltering attempt to become an “AI-native” company reveals something much bigger than the limitations of today’s artificial intelligence. It raises a fundamental question about what an organisation is for, and why purpose will become more important as machines take on more of the work.

Within the space of a few days last week, two stories emerged about Meta — Mark Zuckerberg’s technology giant and the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that appeared, at first glance, to have very little to do with one another.

The first dominated the headlines. Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade to settle claims brought by US states alleging that Facebook and Instagram had been designed in ways that harmed and addicted children. Meta admitted no wrongdoing, but the agreement reflects a much wider international reckoning over social media and its impact on young people.

The second story received less attention, but may ultimately prove just as consequential. In a special report Reuters revealed that inside Meta, Zuckerberg and his senior team had been attempting something extraordinarily ambitious. Not simply introducing artificial intelligence into the organisation, but redesigning the entire organisation around it.

Its codename was Project OT (Organization Transformation). The ambition was to make Meta “AI native”. Traditional product teams of ten or twenty people could become pods of three to five “builders”. Specialist roles would blur, management layers would disappear and AI agents would take on increasing amounts of work. Some planning scenarios contemplated reducing the size of individual teams by as much as 60%.

But then things went quickly wrong. Employees rebelled, morale plummeted and plans for a second wave of restructuring were abandoned. More importantly, Meta’s own internal evidence suggested that the promised productivity revolution was proving far more complicated than anticipated. According to Reuters, code changes to Meta’s internal systems increased by 220% year on year, while changes resulting in new or improved features actually reaching users rose by only 36%. Technical and security incidents reportedly increased by 40%.

There is an important lesson buried inside those numbers: More output is not the same thing as more value. And that fact takes us far beyond Meta.

For more than a century, management thinkers have wrestled with the question of how organisations should be structured and what they should exist to achieve. The twentieth-century corporation was largely hierarchical. Authority travelled downwards, information upwards and managers coordinated people occupying clearly defined roles. In business, Milton Friedman’s argument that the responsibility of business was to increase profits provided an equally clear organising logic.

Other models followed. Peter Drucker shifted attention towards customers and knowledge workers. Charles Handy repeatedly challenged conventional assumptions about organisations, hierarchy and the nature of work, anticipating a world in which organisations would become less rigid, careers less linear and knowledge increasingly more important than physical assets. Stakeholder theory widened the responsibilities of business, reflecting a growing recognition that organisations exist within complex networks of relationships rather than in isolation. Agile methodologies challenged rigid planning, while Frédéric Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations proposed self-management and “evolutionary purpose”.

My own small contribution to this continuing conversation came with my book CORE in 2017, when I introduced the Single Organizing Idea (SOI®) to a wider audience and the idea that organisations perform better when governance, strategy, culture, innovation, operations and performance are aligned around a clear and shared purpose that is both valuable and relevant to all stakeholders.

The important word has always been ‘organising’, however you chose to spell it. Purpose was never intended to be something inspirational sitting above the real business of the organisation. Properly understood, it should help organise it. This is why Meta’s curtailed ‘Organizational Transformation’ experiment matters.

AI is not simply another office technology. The spreadsheet made accountants faster. Email transformed communication. The internet radically reduced the cost of distributing information. AI agents may change something much deeper. The way organisations themselves are organised.

If organisations can deploy hundreds or thousands of digital agents capable of researching, analysing, coding, communicating and undertaking increasingly complex sequences of work, many of the structures we have traditionally used to organise human activity begin to look very different. Teams may become smaller, job descriptions broader, management layers thinner and organisational boundaries more fluid.

Meta may have moved too quickly, but that does not necessarily mean it is wrong about the direction of travel. The harder question is what happens if this becomes normal.

Imagine an organisation of 500 people working alongside 5,000 AI agents, all constantly analysing information, initiating tasks and making decisions. No chief executive could instruct them individually and no operating manual could anticipate every circumstance. If the organisation changes, what organises the organisation?

This is where much of the current discussion about AI begins at the wrong end. We ask what AI can do, which jobs will disappear, how many employees companies will need and how much productivity can be extracted. Those are questions about means. But the more important questions concern ends.

Faster towards what? More efficient at doing what? More productive in whose interests? Better according to whose definition of better?

Artificial intelligence is powerful because it can optimise. Give it an objective and it can increasingly find efficient ways of pursuing it. But optimisation requires orientation. And at this point the other Meta story becomes relevant.

For years Facebook and Instagram became extraordinarily sophisticated at maximising engagement. Their systems learned how to keep people looking, clicking and returning. Whatever one’s position on the litigation, the scale of the settlement illustrates that extraordinary optimisation can produce consequences far beyond the metric being optimised.

Society is now asking whether maximising ever more human attention was always the right objective in the first place. That question cannot be answered by a better algorithm. It is a question of governance and ultimately purpose.

This is why the two Meta stories belong together. One concerns the consequences of technology Meta has already built. The other concerns how Meta intends to organise itself to build the next generation. Both lead to the same question: What is all this extraordinary capability actually for?

AI may reduce the need for hierarchy, but it will not remove the need for coherence. In fact, it will likely increase it. Organisations composed of humans working alongside intelligent agents will require a clear shared understanding of the outcome they exist to create and the principles governing how that outcome should be pursued.

That is precisely what genuine organisational purpose should provide. A Single Organizing Idea becomes an organisational compass, something against which boards can govern, leaders can develop strategy, teams can make decisions and, increasingly, AI systems can be designed and directed.

Not because machines should determine an organisation’s purpose. Quite the reverse. Humans must determine the purpose precisely because machines will increasingly determine how that purpose is pursued.

This is why the emerging ISO 37011 guidance on the governance of organisations by purpose feels so timely and necessary. The central governance challenge of the AI age may not simply be deciding where artificial intelligence can be deployed, but ensuring that extraordinary new capability remains directed towards outcomes worth pursuing.

There is a danger that organisations will see AI primarily as an opportunity to become faster, leaner and cheaper. But a badly oriented organisation does not become a better organisation simply because it becomes more efficient. It simply becomes a badly oriented organisation capable of travelling considerably faster, and the likely consequences of that should worry us all.

Reuters’ account offers an early warning. The future organisation will not simply require better artificial intelligence. It will require better human intention. Because the more powerful the machine becomes, the more important the North Star and the power of purpose.

This is Not a Purpose

For many years, a reproduction of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images has hung on the wall of my office. Painted in 1929, it is one of the most recognisable works of twentieth-century art. The painting itself is remarkably simple. Against an otherwise empty background sits an almost perfectly conventional tobacco pipe. Beneath it Magritte has written, in careful script, six words:

Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
(This is not a pipe.)

The first reaction is almost instinctive. Of course it is a pipe. We can see it. Except Magritte was right. It isn’t a pipe. It is a painting of a pipe. You cannot pick it up, fill it with tobacco or smoke it. However convincing the image might be, it remains a representation of something rather than the thing itself.

That distinction is precisely why the painting has followed me from office to office for so many years.

Magritte called the work La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images). He was interested in the relationship between objects, images and the words we use to describe them. We see an image of a pipe and our mind immediately converts the representation into reality. The picture becomes the thing.

Nearly a century later, I think we have developed a remarkably similar problem with organisational purpose. Over the past decade in particular, businesses around the world have invested enormous amounts of time, energy and money in defining their purpose. Consultants have been hired. Employees interviewed. Workshops held. Boards engaged. Words debated and refined. Eventually, after much deliberation, a sentence emerges intended to capture why the organisation exists and the contribution it seeks to make.

It’s then launched. It appears on the website and in the annual report. It’s incorporated into presentations, corporate communications and, inevitably, the ‘merch’: coffee cups, lanyards, pens, tote bags, USB flash drives and so on. It might even be painted on a wall.

And somewhere along the way, the representation becomes confused with the reality.

A purpose statement is not an organisation’s purpose.
(The words are not the purpose. They merely describe it.)

There is nothing wrong with that. Words matter. I have spent more than two decades helping organisations find the clearest and most compelling articulation of the idea around which they can organise themselves. Done well, a purpose statement can provide extraordinary clarity. It can make something complex understandable and memorable. It can give thousands of people a common language for describing why their organisation exists.

But the statement is still only a representation. A strategy document is not strategy. Values written on a wall are not culture. A sustainability report is not sustainability. An organisational chart is not an organisation. In each case, the words, pictures and diagrams are attempts to describe something that has to exist in the real world. Purpose is no different.

For over two decades I have argued that purpose should operate as a Single Organizing Idea, or SOI®. The choice of the word ‘organizing’ (with a z), has always been deliberate. Purpose has little value if it simply describes an organisation. Its real value lies in its ability to organise one.

If an organisation genuinely understands why it exists, that understanding should have consequences. It should influence the choices a board makes and the strategy an executive team develops. It should affect where capital is allocated, which markets are entered, what products and services are developed, who is recruited and rewarded, which partnerships are pursued and which opportunities are declined.

It should influence what gets measured and, most importantly, it should help when the answer is not obvious. It is in those moments that purpose stops being a statement and starts becoming useful.

Which is something New Zealand’s political parties may wish to reflect on. As TVNZ News reported this week, with elections come election campaigns and the inevitable campaign slogans; a handful of carefully chosen words intended to tell us something about who the parties are, what they stand for and what they intend to do.

Magritte would have enjoyed this year’s batch. Not because any of them are particularly memorable or clever, but because even if they were, that would rather miss the point. A slogan, after all, is no more a government than a purpose statement is an organisation. However appealing the words on the tin, they remain merely a representation of what is supposedly inside. Whether the contents bear much resemblance to the label is something we will only discover by experiencing what actually happens.

Perhaps The Treachery of Images should hang in more boardrooms — and maybe a few campaign offices too.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. And that purpose statement on the wall? That isn’t your purpose either.

The Leadership Challenge Hidden in Plain Sight

The latest Oxford–GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey reveals far more than the changing priorities of one corporate function. It offers a compelling picture of why governance, purpose and organisational alignment have become strategic imperatives in an increasingly uncertain world.

Every year, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and GlobeScan survey senior Corporate Affairs leaders from around the world to understand the issues shaping their profession. This year’s research draws on the views of almost 300 senior practitioners across 51 countries, representing some of the world’s largest organisations.

The report catalogues an extraordinary list of pressures confronting organisations. Geopolitical instability dominates concerns once again. Artificial intelligence has surged from a relatively minor issue to become the second most significant perceived business risk in just twelve months. Economic uncertainty, regulatory change, cyber threats, climate change and reputational risk all feature prominently.

On the surface, these appear to be separate challenges requiring separate responses. I suspect they are nothing of the sort.

Rather, they are different expressions of a single reality, namely that the world has become so interconnected that political, economic, technological and societal issues can no longer be managed in isolation. Decisions taken in Washington reverberate through supply chains in Asia. Advances in artificial intelligence create opportunities for innovation while simultaneously introducing new risks around misinformation, cyber security and trust. Political polarisation reshapes expectations of business just as quickly as it reshapes government policy.

Complexity itself has become the defining management challenge. That observation becomes even more interesting when viewed alongside another of the report’s findings.

For many years the conversation around Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) was dominated by climate change and social responsibility. This year’s survey tells a different story. Governance has overtaken both environmental and social issues as the greatest source of reputational risk for organisations. Ethics, accountability, transparency and board oversight are now seen as more significant than environmental performance or social impact.

That should not come as a surprise. In an increasingly unpredictable world, organisations are judged less by whether they face challenges than by how they respond to them. Governance determines the quality of decisions, the speed of adaptation and, ultimately, the level of trust that stakeholders are prepared to place in leadership. In these challenging times good governance has quietly become a competitive advantage.

Yet perhaps the most revealing finding concerns purpose.

Contrary to some popular narratives, organisational purpose has not disappeared. More than four in five organisations surveyed still have a formal corporate purpose in place (even if it is just a slogan). What has changed is the level of executive attention devoted to it. Discussion of purpose within executive teams has declined significantly over the past year, even while respondents overwhelmingly expect societal expectations of purposeful leadership to increase over the next three years. That tension is fascinating.

Boards have understandably become preoccupied with tariffs, inflation, geopolitical instability and artificial intelligence. Immediate risks demand immediate attention.
Stakeholders, however, have not lowered their expectations. Consumers, customers, employees, investors and wider society continue to judge organisations on the quality of their leadership, the values they demonstrate and the contribution they make. If anything, those expectations are becoming more demanding, not less.

The real issue isn’t that purpose has become harder to discuss. It’s that leaders risk becoming distracted by the urgent at precisely the moment when purpose is becoming even more valuable as a means of navigating uncertainty.

Purpose is not a luxury for more settled times. It is precisely what enables organisations to navigate unsettled ones.

The greatest risk is not abandoning purpose altogether. It is allowing it to be crowded out by the urgent. Organisations that lose sight of why they exist risk slowly eroding the trust, relevance and value on which their long-term success depends.

The smartest organisations appear to recognise this. Rather than stepping back from purpose, they are quietly doubling down on it; not as a communications exercise or a branding statement, but as the strategic discipline that brings governance, strategy, culture and stakeholder relationships together around a single, coherent direction.

Reading the report, I was struck by how frequently respondents returned to the same themes. They called for clearer strategy. Better internal alignment. Stronger governance. More integrated operating models. Better measurement. Greater influence at board level. Enhanced stakeholder engagement. Improved organisational capability. Seventy-four per cent believe the Corporate Affairs function itself requires revision to meet the demands of today’s environment.

Those recommendations describe something much bigger than the future of Corporate Affairs. They describe the future of organisational leadership.

For over two decades I have argued that the greatest challenge facing organisations is rarely a lack of purpose. More often, it is a lack of alignment. Strategy competes with culture. Governance sits apart from communications. Sustainability is managed separately from commercial priorities. Every function pursues legitimate objectives, yet too often without a common organising principle. The consequence is fragmentation precisely when coherence is needed most.

The Oxford–GlobeScan report documents the symptoms of that fragmentation with remarkable clarity. It also points, perhaps unintentionally, towards the solution.

The organisations most likely to thrive in the coming decade will not necessarily be those with the largest AI budgets, the most sophisticated communications teams or the most comprehensive ESG reports. They will be those capable of bringing governance, strategy, reputation, stakeholder relationships and organisational purpose together around a single, coherent direction.

That is not simply better Corporate Affairs. It is better leadership. And in a world where uncertainty has become the norm, that may prove to be the greatest competitive advantage of all.