“Companies and leaders have embraced the notion that purpose-driven companies can solve social and environmental problems while also generating wealth. As the thinking goes, companies can transcend traditional approaches to CSR and instill purpose into their core operations, generating powerful win-win decisions that benefit everyone, with little compromise—if any—required on any side. A manufacturing company might change wasteful processes, for instance, using less energy while also cutting back on costs. A bank might hire a more diverse workforce, benefiting the community while also getting closer to its customer base and spurring innovation. But idealized win-win solutions such as these are both difficult and relatively uncommon. Many purpose-driven companies chase an ideal of responsible business without tradeoffs, but they revert to a quest for profits when win-win solutions prove more difficult than they imagined.

“Deep-purpose leaders . . . take a more pragmatic approach. Acknowledging the challenges inherent in pursuing a purpose, they dedicate themselves self-consciously to the ongoing and imperfect navigation of tradeoffs between stakeholders. They recognize that so-called win-win solutions almost always involve intelligent tradeoffs as well as imperfect apportioning of the mutual benefits. Inspired and empowered by the purpose, they negotiate stakeholder interests to arrive at sometimes painful decisions that stakeholders may or may not find ‘good enough’ in the short term but that pay off for everyone eventually. Decision-making at deep-purpose companies becomes an exercise in ‘practical idealism,’ a discipline of honest and often messy problem-solving. Rather than super-human enterprises that magically get decision-making right for everyone, every time, deep-purpose companies prove themselves uniquely willing to linger in a space of discomfort, ambiguity, and contradiction, staying as true as possible to their animating intent.”