Today’s Culture and Organizational Resolve drives tomorrow’s success

Andy Moss, Visiting Professor, NYU Tandon School of Engineering and Scott Taitel, Clinical Professor, NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service have launched a collaboration to develop a methodology called Culture and Organizational Resolve (COR).

The objective of their work is to create a widely available, easily accessible way to help founders of new ventures (and leaders of any organization) establish the underlying principles that will inform their business decisions from structure to governance to hiring to product design to partnering to financing and beyond. The project took shape early in the collaboration between the two professors when Moss was Entrepreneur in Residence at the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute.  A Capstone team from the specialization Taitel heads at Wagner called Social Impact, Innovation & Investment worked under Moss’ guidance to conduct specific and directed research helping to provide important support for their efforts.

In August, 2019 long after the initiation of NYU’s Capstone project, the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executive officers of America’s leading companies, issued a statement redefining corporate purpose. This new focus goes well beyond the traditional objective of increasing shareholder value to also include delivering value to customers, investing in employees, dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers, and supporting the communities in which corporations work. The Business Roundtable initiative comes on the heels of widely publicized letters from Larry Fink, Blackrock CEO to the CEO’s of the world’s largest companies emphasizing an inextricable link “between profit and purpose” and noting, “It must begin with a clear embodiment of your company’s purpose in your business model and corporate strategy.” 

The COR methodology and the redefinition of Corporate Purpose are perfectly aligned. While existing enterprises may need to re-engineer their governance and policies in pursuit of these broader corporate purposes, newly formed enterprises, given the right tools, can assure from their inception that the principles that guide doing right by customers, employees, suppliers and communities are baked-into their corporate DNA.  The basic elements (Founders’ Principles, Product & Service, People & Human Resources, Operations & Governance and External Alignment) of the COR Framework being designed by the professors can help make the new tenets of the Business Roundtable’s corporate purpose a reality.

The COR Framework will allow enterprises to operationalize purpose as its organizational culture evolves and to make principled decisions which companies too frequently find crippling in the absence of clearly defined and communicated values. 

There has been much focus on promoting ethics in technology, particularly in light of the anticipated growth of Artificial Intelligence. The test of corporate values, however, is much broader and deeper than the adoption and implementation of any critical new technology. Organizational Culture forms much earlier in an enterprise’s life. It begins with decisions involving how thoughtful leadership will be in defining how governance structure is aligned with and in support of the founders’ principles. It then extends to aspects of the operations from how inclusive they will be in the customer discovery process driving critical information into product design, how diverse they will be in the hiring of their initial team, and how careful they will be in aligning principles with suppliers and other partners who can have a direct influence on their reputations and brand. 

Tools like Lean have been developed to support business model ideation and Agile, design thinking, etc. have been hugely beneficial to enhance product development. Currently, however, no methodology exists to explicitly support the formulation of fundamental corporate principles and ethics which are instructive to how both the Lean and Agile processes are utilized.  The COR Framework and COR Canvas currently under development and being tested in NYU entrepreneurship classes across multiple schools and leveraging critical perspectives across multiple disciplines will change this situation.  As evidenced by the recent views of Business Roundtable and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, the timing is right to significantly move this important effort forward in both the private sector as well as continuing to utilize the academic environment as a living laboratory.

While the development of COR is currently focused on the formation of new ventures, like Lean and Agile, once proven effective it should be applicable in all types of organizations. Its goal is to help develop an awareness of the impact that the founding principles established within the organizational framework defined in the COR can have when applied to the ongoing evolution of the organization’s culture.  Expanding COR beyond adoption in the classroom to include accelerators, corporate innovation hubs, and new projects and subsidiary teams in major corporations will be a valuable asset for corporations seeking to make a reality of the Business Roundtable’s vision of a redefined Corporate Purpose and Larry Fink’s notion of an inextricable link between profit and purpose becoming reality.

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