Purpose

A company or product needs to generate a profit, but first it needs to create value. That distinction sounds academic until you watch an organization try to operate without it — a team that cannot say what the work is for will optimise for whatever is measured, and what is measured is rarely the thing that matters.

Steve's argument is that value creation is the north star all stakeholders can rally behind and employees can find purpose in. Not a statement on a wall. A test you can apply to a roadmap on a Tuesday, and which tells you what to stop doing.

The session moves from the collective mission down to the individual: how a shared purpose gets translated into personal aspirations, and from there into the daily decisions that actually constitute a strategy. That last step is where most purpose work fails, and it gets the most time.