BM_IMD_REPORT-How-Authentic-is-your-Corporate-Purpose

4. Survey Results and Key Findings
4.1 Response sample
Appendices V, VI and VII present the characteristics of our executive respondents and the firms they
represented. The executives were in the high middle to upper levels of management, with an
average age of 51. The firms they represented were from a broad section of business an industry
4.2 The challenge of establishing an authentic corporate purpose
Although we were able to identify the core dimensions of an authentic corporate purpose, on the
whole, our research suggests that an authentic corporate purpose may in fact be a rather elusive
concept. In fact, as illustrated in Figure 2, our study found that almost a third of the executives
surveyed had considerable difficulty in identifying a single company that they perceived as having an
authentic corporate purpose.
Figure 2: Challenge in Identifying a Company with an Authentic Corporate Purpose
To illustrate the difficulty in identifying a firm with an authentic corporate purpose, one respondent
wrote:
Absolutely no name comes to my mind in this context, not even Google, Amazon, BMW,
Deutsche Bank, or any other.
Furthermore, in those instances where a company could be identified as having an authentic
corporate purpose, no one single company emerged as a clear leader. For example, as can be seen in
Figure 3, only five companies received more than five mentions each. These were Google, Nestle,
Apple, IKEA and Patagonia (refer also to Appendix VIII for a ranking of companies perceived as
having an authentic corporate purpose). In addition, there was a very long tail in that a total of over
181 companies received at least one mention suggesting very diverse and unique individual
perceptions of the authenticity of an organization’s corporate purpose (refer to Appendix IX for
companies identified as having an authentic corporate purpose and receiving at least one mention).
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