Leadership
Why leaders should settle purpose before they rework strategy
Deri Llewellyn-Davies, known as the strategy man, argues that plans only hold once a business has done the deeper work on five elements of purpose.
#Leadership Deri Llewellyn-Davies: Do you Have The Balls to Transform?
Video from Dov Baron.
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Why should leaders settle purpose before they rework strategy?
Deri Llewellyn-Davies argues that strategy built without purpose stands on a weak foundation. A business first needs clarity on five elements: passion, service and value, market opportunity, financial purpose and lifestyle. Once those are settled, strategy has something stable to hang from, and the company is far more likely to attract and keep the talent that makes any plan work.
Deri Llewellyn-Davies has built a reputation as the strategy man, the adviser that boards and founders call when growth stalls and plans stop landing. Yet in a long conversation with Dov Baron on a leadership show for executives, the talk ran for around forty minutes before strategy came up at all. That was no accident, and it says a lot about the advice.
The story starts in a small village in west Wales, where the family ran the local shop. When a supermarket arrived in the 1970s, the shop closed and the owner gave up. Someone else bought it and made a success of it. Llewellyn-Davies spent years asking what made the difference, first answering mindset, then strategy, and finally purpose.
This article sets out the five elements of purpose that Llewellyn-Davies now tests before touching a strategy: passion, service and value, market opportunity, financial purpose and lifestyle. It also covers why skipping them makes plans fragile, why culture is the hardest asset to copy, and why the whole exercise asks more courage of leaders than most of them expect.
Key takeaways
- Strategy rarely fails on its own; it fails when a business has never done the deeper work on its purpose.
- Purpose has five elements: passion, service and value, market opportunity, financial purpose and the lifestyle of the people doing the work.
- Shareholder return alone motivates almost nobody, so leaders need to link money to something everyone in the company understands.
- Purpose work takes courage, because the right questions are usually the uncomfortable ones that no adviser has asked before.
1. Why a new strategy cannot fix a missing foundation
Llewellyn-Davies spent the first decade of a long career on strategy and still calls it work worth loving. Over time, though, the conclusion became hard to avoid: strategy on its own was broken. Mindset mattered, and so did cash and talent, but about ten years ago the missing piece became clear. It was purpose, and it had taken roughly eighteen years of experience to see it.
The image Llewellyn-Davies uses is construction. Anything built to last needs a foundation, and a foundation means digging a hole before any concrete is poured. In a family business, purpose work often uncovers cracks first, such as strained relationships and hidden motives that quietly poison everything above them. Those cracks have to be dealt with before a clean structure can go up.
That is also why Llewellyn-Davies has little patience for mission statements. Most are superficial, written without the deep work that would give them meaning. In an entire career, only one has truly reflected the business behind it, and that team had done a huge amount of searching first. Without that depth, a statement is simply a strategy with a fresh coat of paint.
2. The five elements of purpose every board should test
The first element is passion. Llewellyn-Davies suspects that in many boardrooms half the directors are not truly passionate about the business; they arrived by accident and stayed because they were good at the job. That matters, because a leader who is not fully engaged with the work and the people will soon be leading a team that is not engaged either.
The second element is service and value. Most companies can describe the service they offer, but far fewer can describe the full value they bring to the world beyond a healthy return on investment. The third is market opportunity. Passion and value mean little if no market is ready for the proposition, and this is where hobby businesses and unfocused ones get exposed.
The fourth element is financial purpose. Shareholder return is an easy answer in a boardroom, yet it inspires almost nobody further down the company. Money has to be linked to something more meaningful, such as hiring the best people or funding new ideas. The fifth is lifestyle, which Llewellyn-Davies added only after burning out twice and seeing how often business success came at a personal cost.
3. Why purpose work asks for courage from leaders
Llewellyn-Davies is blunt with executives who say purpose sounds beyond them. Busy, distracted leaders rarely make room for the questions that matter, and the cost tends to arrive later as regret. The test is simple. If the business ended tomorrow, could its leaders say they were proud of what they built and of how they treated their people? If not, the work should start now.
The argument is commercial as well as personal. A mentor once told Llewellyn-Davies that a rival can copy intellectual property in days and a business model in months, but culture takes years. Younger employees also leave quickly when work lacks meaning, and replacing them is expensive. Purpose, culture and leadership are where lasting competitive advantage now sits, and they cost very little to build.
The practical first step is to work through the five elements honestly, ideally with an outside perspective, because it is almost impossible to be objective about your own business. Dov Baron introduced Llewellyn-Davies as an author of two books, including Life's Great Adventure, and that spirit runs through this advice. Fear never fully goes away; being scared usually means doing something new.
