Do you know your Brand Purpose? It’s not the pseudoscience of your “why,” nor is it CSR or ESG or conscious capitalism. Yet knowing it can change the trajectory of your company. Inc. Business Media Editor in Chief discovered this while running the storied This Old House TV brand. He realized that it wasn’t remodeling or hammers and nails that allowed the brand to birth HGTV and keep the show on-air for more than 45 years through three generations of viewers. It was something far more emotional, far more powerful. Harnessed, Brand Purpose helps you matter to people. And internally, at a time when people are questioning the value of work, teams that uncover it and use it to their advantage will thrive with a new dedication. Brand Purpose when properly understood is internal, like a sense of direction, not external like someone else’s map. It applies to company of all sizes and in all industries, and understanding it allows you to continually refocus your core capabilities as the market and tastes and ways of doing business change, and to be—always—the company people want to do business with. 

How long will your company last? For the Fortune 500, it used to be 60 years. Today it is just 13. The pace of change is faster than it’s ever been—and it will never be slower. Scott Omelianuk, Editor in Chief of Inc. Business Media, saw that first hand while previously working at Time Inc and Time Warner—once the world’s largest publishing and entertainment corporations, each now extinct. The executives there didn’t understand what he has learned from the founders building the world’s fastest growing companies: that intrapreneurship is the key to survival. Revenue streams and consumer behaviors shift. Competition arrives overnight. And technology constantly reinvents everything. And all that is why smart leadership teams need to follow his battle-tested advice—on embracing intrapreneurship, harnessing its risk and disrupting the disruptors—to last, not just for 13 years but for decades.

“What an interesting career,” a CEO said to Editor in Chief of Inc. Business Media Scott Omelianuk. Scott had previously been a journalist, television host and producer, ecommerce strategist, consultant, professor, board advisor, EIR and co-founder of a wellness startup, and to him, his career was less interesting and more a ball pinging between the bumpers of an arcade game. But in studying that chaos, a pattern began to materialize, a through-line connecting each job Scott had, and which made him realize that—like the many successful companies he’d studied—people have a purpose, too. A personal purpose. And by understanding it, one can plan a fulfilling life, one in which decisions—about career, money, family—come if not easy at least clearly. Scott did it while watching Paul McCartney on Carpool Karaoke, realizing that while Sir Paul might be one of the greatest musical artists ever, his personal purpose—the thing that keeps him going past age 80—is something else entirely, and accessible to everyone.