Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose

10. Lessons Learned

A journey through the FoE universe presents formidable challenges to long-standing ideas about the place and purpose of corporations in society. However, aside from the moral and ethical issues brought up by those challenges, and whether or not you have a narrower traditional view of a company's purpose, it seems to us that it is hard to argue with the success of FoE business models. That being the case, we devote this chapter to what we see as the most important lessons we learned in our research for this book.

Distinguishing Traits of Firms of Endearment

We identified seven traits that distinguish FoEs. At first blush, these traits do not appear to be all that unique to FoEs. Many companies can lay claim to some of the same ...