Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: BookSHELF - Book review

Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies. By Nikos Mourkogiannis. Palgrave Macmillan, 253 pages. 27.95.

This is a thoughtful, passionate book about a subject that is at once very simple and highly complex. Author Mourkogiannis, a noted strategist and consultant to multinational companies, writes that companies that he admires and have become corporate icons have stood for something; in other words, they had a purpose.

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But purpose isn't readily defined. In fact, Mourkogiannis spends several chapters looking at its dimensions, figuratively turning it over and analyzing what it is and what it isn't. While it's a reason for doing something, it is not a mission statement. What it is, he writes, is "a call to action that great leaders use to stimulate people to act consistently and decisively, innovating and building high-quality relationships." What it is not: profit maximization, focusing chiefly on ethical principles, improving your brand or a set of corporate values.

As examples of various types of purpose, Mourkogiannis examines well-known company founders, from the past and the present, among them Thomas Watson at IBM, Sam Walton at Wal-Mart, Henry Ford and Siegmund Warburg, the founder of banking firm S.G. Warburg. His thoughts about these iconic figures and their successes are insightful, and he finds different concepts of purpose at work at each of their...