A letter from co:collective

To our co:mmunity –

co: has always believed that purpose helps businesses both succeed and drive positive change. But pulling that off is now harder than ever.

The need for environmental progress is literally burning – witness the other week’s smoke plume in NYC. The need to increase equity for marginalized communities remains unmet. And shareholders still want growth and high returns. But at the same time, there’s growing pushback against ESG, consumers are hyper-demanding in an inflationary environment, the innovation flywheel continues to accelerate, and finding and keeping the best talent remains tricky even after the “great resignation” era. So the core question our clients bring to us today is: how do we achieve commercial success while also catalyzing environmental and social progress?

In our experience, a couple of barriers can get in the way. Almost every company has a purpose today, but not all purposes are fit for purpose. They can be too lofty, and thus hard to turn into action, or too commercial, and thus not inspiring. And even if a purpose is fit for purpose, too often it isn’t applied across the business: it can be relegated to ancillary CSR efforts rather than impacting the core. It’s not about intentions – it’s about application.

So we’ve challenged ourselves to push the conversation forward again – by thinking afresh about how to do purpose in today’s moment. Here’s where we’ve gotten to:

We believe that when defined and applied in the right way, a purpose can propel both commercial success and progress. We call businesses that do this generative.

They generate more love from customers, they create more innovation, they build more loyal bonds with their talent, and they become more resilient – by enriching, rather than exhausting, the human and material resources they depend on. And they do this by balancing the needs of all of their stakeholders – customers, investors, employees, communities and crucially, the planet.

Far from being a constraint, such organizations find that living their purpose is actually liberating. The business hat-trick—people, planet and profit – can’t be won through purpose alone. It takes a generative organization – translating purpose into value for every stakeholder group – to generate more value, for more people, more sustainably.

We’ve redesigned co: to help our clients become generative. We do that through three offerings:

→ Business & Brand

→ Organization & Culture

→ Experience Design

And as part of that redesign process, we’ve got a fresh new look and feel that was created through a generative design process with our co:mmunity.

Explore our new offerings and design on our site – we welcome your thoughts and feedback.

We couldn’t be more excited to continue on this next phase of our journey with you, our network of friends, clients, partners and advisors.

With gratitude,

Amanda Ginzburg – Partner & Chief Growth Officer

Kit Krugman – Partner & Managing Director, Organization & Culture Design

Ty Montague – Co-Founder, Chairman & Chief Purpose Officer

Neil Parker – Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer

Rosemarie Ryan – Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer