Seeing Beyond the Here and Now: How Corporate Purpose Combats Corporate Myopia

Abstract

Corporations are currently confronting major, interlocking crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, inequalities, and social isolation. When under threat, executives tend to focus inward and on the short term. This is particularly unfortunate because it is in such crises that executives need to see beyond the here and now in order to ride the storms. In this paper, we argue that corporate purpose helps organizations fight such myopia and offer four mechanisms through which this works: exposing new insights, seeing issues holistically, helping to sustain focus, and bringing unity and direction.History: This paper has been accepted for the Strategy Science Special Issue on Corporate Purpose.Funding: The authors acknowledge the generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada [Grant 895-2015-0026] that contributed to the broader project in which these ideas were generated.