In my twenty-five years working across sustainability, social investment, and entrepreneurship, I have rarely witnessed a clearer signal of global transformation than the one I saw recently at Muscat University. During a Green Entrepreneurship workshop organised by the Environment Society of Oman (ESO) in partnership with ASYAD and the European Union, more than ninety per cent of participants, students, founders, and professionals, voted that their top priority today is for the ecosystem to create incentives that make entrepreneurship more sustainable.
This result was more than a workshop statistic; it was a revelation. It reflected a paradigm shift in how people, especially Generation Z, think about the future. The conversation is no longer confined to traditional frameworks like the Triple Bottom Line of People, Planet, and Profit or the ESG lens of Environment, Social, and Governance. A new and deeper layer has emerged: Purpose.
The Fourth Bottom Line
Purpose is not philanthropy, nor is it a marketing slogan. It is a core strategy that gives meaning to performance and direction to progress. Companies that place purpose at the heart of their operations consistently outperform those that don’t. Deloitte’s 2024 Human Capital Report found that purpose-driven companies are 42 per cent more likely to achieve sustained profitability and 30 per cent more resilient during economic crises. A 2023 Harvard Business Review study showed that employees in purpose-led organisations demonstrate 1.4 times higher engagement and 50 per cent lower turnover.
These numbers make one truth unmistakable: Purpose is good economics. It aligns shareholder value with societal value and converts ethical awareness into a competitive advantage. In a world increasingly driven by AI, data, automation, and quarterly targets, purpose re-centres strategy around humanity.
From Scarcity to Sufficiency
Across the world, headlines focus on competition, races for rare minerals, dominance in artificial intelligence, or supremacy in digital currencies. The new trade wars are not fought with weapons but with algorithms and tariffs, driven by the belief that resources are finite and only the fastest will win. Yet, our true problem is not scarcity, it is our inability to define sufficiency.
Purpose challenges this mindset. It reminds us that the aim of progress is not to consume endlessly but to enable dignity, justice, and sustainability. The next generation understands this intuitively. Global surveys show that 77 per cent of Gen Z professionals would rather work for a company whose values align with their own, even if it means earning less. For them, purpose is not a luxury, it is a necessity.
Purpose As Resilience
When nations and corporations define success only through domination, conflict becomes inevitable. But when they define success through shared well-being, collaboration follows. Purpose, in this sense, becomes a peace framework, an antidote to polarisation and short-termism.
We are entering an age where meaning may be our most undervalued asset. Trade wars and resource conflicts thrive in a moral vacuum; purpose fills that vacuum with direction and responsibility. By re-embedding purpose in business and policy, we can slow the race to the bottom and replace rivalry with reciprocity.
The Sultanate of Oman, with its historic culture of dialogue and balance, is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation. Its economic diversification, green investment, and youth innovation agenda can become global examples of how prosperity and peace reinforce each other when guided by purpose.
Call to Action
Finance executives and sustainability advocates share more in common than they realise. Both seek continuity, resilience, and trust, qualities rooted in purpose. A purposeful economy humanises capital, measures progress by collective well-being, and builds systems that people want to sustain, not exploit.
Our world is not short of innovation, technology, or capital. What it lacks is shared direction. The future will belong not to those who accumulate the most resources, but to those who use them with meaning. By bringing purpose back to the centre of our economies, we can transform growth into progress and profit into peace.
Khalid al Huraibi
The writer is an innovator and an insights storytellerkhalidalharibi@gmail.com
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