The Story of Purpose: The Path to Creating a Brighter Brand, a Greater Company, and a Lasting Legacy

III

Purpose, Inc.

How to Incorporate Purpose into Your Business

Four I’s see better than two.

—Joey Reiman, on visioning

Chances are that as time has passed, your organization’s original idea has become buried under a mountain of distractions: leadership changes, quarterly goals, mergers, and corporate initiatives. Suddenly, your company or brand is simply doing what it must to compete in the marketplace rather than building on its earliest distinctive ideals. Recounting our beginnings allows us to get back to the original story.

My framework for rediscovering your story is called the Four I’s Ideation Process (Figure P.III.1).

FIGURE P.III.1 The BrightHouse Four I’s Process

Source: © BrightHouse. Illustration by David Paprocki.

This structured method of thinking has served hundreds of companies as a way to discover, articulate, activate, and incorporate purpose into your company or brand.

Inspired by physiologist and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who graduated from the Medical Institute in Berlin in 1843, this multistep process serves as the foundation for our process. It will take our thinking through the gathering of information and data—investigation to thoughtful incubation—and onward to the unprecedented insight that results in illumination and illustration. It has taken our brains 4 billion years of evolution to think this way, so why not use our heads correctly?

We ...