Today ‘purpose’ — more commonly, ‘values’ and ‘meaning’, are being considered as a strategic resource and a must for organizational agility project to benefit the community as a whole.” It is also important that we talk about organizational agility to enhance organizational agility i.e. their capacity to adapt and respond to an increasingly uncertain, dynamic, and complex micro & macro business environment. The engagement of stakeholders is becoming increasingly significant for innovation and driving sustainable business growth. One of the finest examples of engagement of customers in business is Stitch Fix, an online personal styling service in the United States. It uses recommendation algorithms and data science to personalize clothing items based on size, budget, and APRIL 2021 |
Business Strategy
difficult time. Nelson Mandela’s North Star was about liberating people from the continuing bondage of poverty, suffering, gender, and other discrimination. Similarly, purpose prompts organizations to think “why do they exist”? This question may seem simple, however, finding a convincing and durable answer needs a huge amount of soul searching and also societal confirmation for it to sustain meaningfully. Today the senior leaders are speaking a language of “purpose” –that engages employees and customers in new ways, inviting their insights for innovation and business growth. This is clearly indicating an emergence of a new era of ‘’opensourced value creation’’ – promoting shared values that invite the stakeholders --employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and others to recognize a stake in the growth path of an organization, more like an outside-in approach. In this context, let us look at Red Hat, an American multinational software company founded in 1993 and it is the largest opensource company in the world. The philosophy of Red Hat is quite interesting: “We build and support open source products from open source projects. We give back to the projects and communities we engage in. With open-source, we equip our customers for success. We take community-built code and harden its security, add features, and make it enterprise-ready and scalable. Then we push these improvements back out to the original
79
