Strategy and Purpose: The Case of the British Broadcasting Corporation

Abstract Using the case of the British Broadcasting Corporation, we investigate the struggle to accommodate two aspects to any organization’s purpose: a social one that disperses the reach and influence of its activities to many different constituents; and an inner, existential one provoked by the repeated question of why the organization should continue to exist. These outward and inward vectors of purpose are in perpetual tension and the job of strategy is to realize a condition of mutual accommodation between them. We explore how the BBC might reorient its strategic focus to shift from a social to an existential sense of why it ought exist at all, a move we liken as a slide from the purposeful to the purposive.