Driven by Purpose

Purpose has been a guiding light at BCG for nearly six decades. It originated with our founder Bruce Henderson, who told BCG colleagues that our success depends on how well we help our clients realize their own ability to improve the world.

In 2015, we accelerated our commitment to purpose by acquiring BrightHouse—the founders of purpose consulting—to bring purpose to our work with our clients and to also revisit, articulate, and communicate BCG’s purpose. Finding our purpose meant traveling the world and engaging with colleagues and our global community, trying to find out where the answers to these two questions intersect:

“Who are we when we’re at our best?” and “What’s the fundamental need in the world that we’re working to address?”

This work led us to a simple statement that encapsulates our purpose: Unlocking the potential of those who advance the world. Even though that sense of purpose has been central to the firm’s motivation since its founding, I know that doing the work to articulate it and understand what drives it has been critical to how we’ve coped throughout the challenges of the past year and thrived amid a great deal of uncertainty.

Underpinning our purpose are five core pillars:

1. We bring insight to light by challenging traditional thinking and ways of operating and bringing new perspectives to the toughest problems.

2. We drive inspired impact by looking beyond the next deadline to the next decade and by collaborating closely with our clients to enable and energize their organizations.

3. We conquer complexity by discovering unique sources of competitive advantage and hidden truths in dynamic, complex systems.

4. We lead with integrity by confronting the hard issues, staying true to our values, and stating our views candidly and directly.

5. We grow by growing others, enabling our clients, colleagues, and the broader community to build success and achieve their full potential.

A Personal Purpose Journey

To advance an organization’s purpose, its leaders have to be ready to accept the victories and defeats of the past, embracing and learning from the full picture of that history at the company and individual level. Doing the work to uncover BCG’s purpose—really understanding what we hoped to achieve as a firm and why—quickly became my own personal purpose journey and has been one of the most important and satisfying initiatives I’ve been involved in as our CEO.

Unlocking the potential of those who advance the world has come to feel like my own driving purpose at the helm of this firm—a responsibility to bring out the best in all the incredible BCGers around the world and to find distinct ways to personally contribute to advancing the world. Over the course of my nearly nine years and three terms in this role, this personal purpose has felt more and more integral to being our CEO, inspiring and energizing me in my day-to-day work.

At a time of so much societal, environmental, health, and economic stress, we know that companies—and company leaders—are going to be judged sharply by how they behave, whether it be, for example, how they manage the continuing fallout of COVID-19 by protecting and supporting their people and customers; their commitment to addressing longstanding racial inequities; or the urgency with which they tackle climate change.

By bringing purpose to life, leading with humanity, empathy, and integrity, we can help focus, align, encourage, and lift all members of an organization and have a positive impact on the world—delivering sustained value to all.

Purpose matters so much to us at BCG, which is why I'm excited to introduce this new series here on LinkedIn, “Driven by Purpose.” Over the coming months, BCGers from around the world will share stories about living and working with purpose as a driving force. We hope these stories inspire you and ultimately motivate you to also bring purpose into your work and daily life.

Rich Lesser, CEO