The search for a higher purpose is our business school’s raison d’être

For some time, we and our colleagues at MIP have been asking ourselves a very important question: in a world undergoing great transformation, facing important challenges like the fight against poverty, combatting climate change and inequalities of all sorts, to name but a few, what role can we play as a business school? What contribution can we make? What can give deep meaning to our work?

Like every business school, our work involves training managers and professionals who work in different types of companies and organisations. Until now, business schools from around the world have taught their students to guide their companies towards maximising profit and value for shareholders. We have also transmitted to them the importance of carefully evaluating the sustainability of their actions, given the multiple impacts that the activities of their companies have on all stakeholders with whom they interact on a daily basis. Corporate social responsibility has become a priority for every organisation and is widely addressed in the programmes of every business school, including our own.

However, the business model arising from this combination, that is, the quest for maximising profit combined with an attention to the social responsibility of one’s actions, has shown itself incapable of truly and concretely contributing to building a society that is more inclusive, fair and sustainable. By now, this is clear to everyone.

At MIP, we believe that it is necessary to trigger a deeper, more authentic change, one that comes from within and that leads every manager, every entrepreneur and every leader to ask themselves what is the profound meaning of their actions, to identify with their company’s reason for being, and to draw inspiration and purpose from their organisation, an energy and a motivation that are the only forces able to transform companies into actors for positive change in our society, and perhaps to play a role in resolving some of the most important challenges that we are facing.

We at MIP want to contribute to setting into motion and promoting this change, and we have a large responsibility in doing so. Thousands of young students, managers and professionals are educated in our classrooms (and in our online classes) every year, and we have thousands of alumni who turn to our school for their continuous learning needs. Only if we succeed in inspiring and accompanying these people so that they know how to actively contribute - in that they are authentically motivated and intimately convinced - to the construction of a better future for us all, can we consider ourselves to be satisfied and be able to say that we have done everything possible to make our contribution to the shift that we all desire towards a more inclusive and sustainable society.

This is our aspiration, and to achieve it we need support and help. For this reason, we have started to collaborate with our friends at The Mind at Work, a team of professionals – led by Darren Rudkin and Pascale Ascher – who, for decades, have helped organisations to develop models of leadership and management inspired and guided by a “higher purpose”, from the search for a true raison d’être that explains the contribution that they can (and want) to make in building a better future for everyone.

We believe it is our responsibility, with the help of The Mind at Work, to inspire and prepare a generation of leaders that knows how to do three fundamental things:

1)    develop greater awareness of one’s “interior” dimension, of the values that drive us, of the aspirations we have and which motivate us, and in every work situation to look for a purpose that can guide and inspire our actions and behaviour;

2)    know how to involve our collaborators in open and deep conversations and discussions, aimed at the construction of a shared higher purpose, that goes beyond maximising shareholder value and that indicates the impact and the contribution which one’s organisation aims to have on stakeholders and on society in a broader sense, as well as allowing the positive energy of each collaborator to be released;

3)    guide the organisation and influence all its choices in the various areas of its activity with this higher purpose as a reference, behaving authentically so as to make clear the search for this purpose in every action, and doing so in such a way that the maximisation of shareholder value (generation of profits, cashflow) becomes a necessary means for achieving this higher purpose.

Along this path, we will also be accompanied by a friend and Adjunct Professor of our School, Arrigo Berni, former CEO of Moleskine, who has always been inspired by these principles in his professional career.

Together, we will develop new training experiences, new programmes and new workshops which, I am certain, can contribute to our achieving the ambitious goals we have set ourselves.