Although there’s quite a bit of criticism of the new, young generations of millennials and Gen Zers, one aspect that I genuinely appreciate is their focus on purpose and meaning. As a Gen Xer, I grew up professionally in a time dominated by capitalism, globalization, efficiency and scale. Success was measured primarily in growth curves, margins and shareholder value. Looking back, that focus delivered enormous prosperity – but it also crowded out other important dimensions of what makes work, companies and even societies healthy.
This isn’t an argument for romanticizing the past or ‘going back’ to some imagined golden age. The good old days weren’t particularly good for many people, and nostalgia is rarely a useful strategy. Rather, it’s an argument for recalibration. As a society, and especially as leaders, founders and executives, we would benefit from broadening our definition of success beyond profit, revenue and margins.
Much of modern management thinking has been about optimization: faster development cycles, leaner organizations, higher utilization, better KPIs. These tools are powerful and necessary. But optimization without direction is hollow. If you only optimize for efficiency, you eventually end up optimizing people out of meaning.
What I see in younger generations is a resistance to this emptiness. They’re far less willing to trade large portions of their lives for work that feels disconnected from values, impact or contribution. This is often framed as entitlement or lack of resilience, but I think that interpretation misses something important. It may instead reflect a more explicit demand that work should be about more than economic extraction.
Purpose, in this sense, isn’t about lofty mission statements on a website. It’s about answering a simple but uncomfortable question: Why does this organization deserve people’s time, energy and talent?
One common reaction to discussions about purpose is defensiveness, assuming that purpose is somehow anti-business or anti-capitalist. I don’t believe that at all. Capitalism has been an extraordinarily effective mechanism for innovation and value creation. The issue isn’t capitalism itself, but monoculture – when financial metrics become the sole focus.
Purpose doesn’t replace financial discipline; it complements it. Profitable companies can invest, survive downturns and scale impact. But purpose shapes what they choose to invest in, how they grow and where they draw boundaries. Without purpose, financial success becomes an end in itself. With purpose, it becomes a means.
According to a famous study by Gartenberg et al., companies that acted in line with a clear purpose outperformed those that did not. For example, they doubled their market value four times faster than competitors without a clear purpose. Also, their return on capital and performance improvement were significantly better. So, rather than viewing purpose as anti-capitalist, we should actually consider the companies lacking a clear purpose as anti-capitalist. The data clearly shows this.
The timing of this shift matters. We’ve entered an era shaped by software, data and AI. These technologies dramatically amplify human capability. When amplification is applied to well-defined, meaningful goals, it can be transformative. When applied to shallow or purely extractive objectives, it scales dysfunction just as efficiently.
This makes purpose a strategic issue as organizations without a clear sense of meaning will struggle to attract talent, make coherent long-term decisions and maintain trust with customers and society. Those with a credible, lived purpose will find it easier to navigate uncertainty, regulation and rapid technological change.
Rather than dismissing millennials and Gen Zers as naïve or idealistic, I see an opportunity for learning across generations. Experience brings realism, constraints and execution capability. Younger perspectives bring values, questioning and a refusal to accept “that’s just how it is” as a sufficient answer. If we combine these strengths, we can build companies and institutions that are both economically viable and socially grounded. Places where people do meaningful work and create sustainable value. In that sense, the renewed focus on purpose isn’t a threat to progress. It may be one of the most important corrections we can make. To end with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
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