Hear, hear, Roger. Allow me to add a footnote on the employee part.
Absolutely, a too-grand corporate purpose is meaningless. It was this observation that inspired me and some colleagues to create a workshop for BDC's high impact firms in 2016, "Making Missions Matter"-- the key takeaway of which was to find a poetic (yes) balance of inspiration, authenticity, and specifics.
As the name implies, this focused on the employee problem that has been well documented by McKinsey, Bain and others: why don't purpose statements have more impact on employee behaviour?
The warmth of the reception among CEOs led me to turn into yet another book on purpose, co-authored with an ex-BCG colleague— Why Is a Verb: How Well-Managed Teams Turn Purpose Into Productivity. We published last month with endorsements from senior/C-level executives and Marriott, Indeed, Forrester and Gallup, and have since received numerous outreaches from other HR/HC leaders frustrated with the purpose-engagement-productivity complex.
One has privately described our argument as "a takedown of the purpose industry." The driving insight is that employee purpose is less a grand, lifelong idea (a popular claim that has no actual basis, scientific or otherwise) than a feeling of self-impact fit which changes over time. Leaders' purpose function is less to help employees appreciate the company's impact than to feel their own. (We recently published a piece that noted how CSR reporting has increased 3.5x since 2000, to 79%, while employee engagement remains flat at around 30%.)
One line that got excised from the final MS aligns with your thesis here. Simon Sinek famously declared, "People don't buy what you're doing, they buy why you're doing it." As you effectively argue, that should really be turned on its head: "People (including employees) don't buy why you're doing something, they buy what you're doing."
