CONCEPT
Purpose Formulation in the Age of Abundance
Barnard's third executive function — the coordinating and unifying principle without which an organization ceases to be an organization — transformed by AI from a production question ('What do we make?') into a normative question ('What is worth doing?').
Chester Barnard defined organizational purpose as the coordinating and unifying principle without which an organization ceases to be an organization and becomes merely a collection of individuals. Purpose is what transforms a group of people with separate interests into a cooperative system with shared direction. Without purpose, there is nothing to cooperate toward. Without something to cooperate toward, there is no cooperation. In the pre-AI organization, purpose was often defined in terms of production — the purpose of a software company was to produce software. When AI makes production abundant, production-oriented definitions of purpose collapse. The shift from 'What can we do?' to 'What is worth doing?' is the most consequential transformation in organizational identity since the industrial revolution.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Production-oriented definitions of purpose were adequate in the pre-AI era because the organization's identity was shaped by what it