Purpose-centered is a description of how the day is measured.
It is the one commitment the office has never put up for revision.
Every enterprise has a scorecard. Most count the same things — revenue, multiple, spread, exit. Those are real, and Pierpont keeps them honestly. But they are the second scorecard. The first is three questions, asked at the close of the day, of every engagement, every board seat, every classroom hour, and every gift:
- I.What value did we create today?
- II.Who did we help today?
- III.How can we help others more?
They are deliberately plain. A question that cannot be answered at the end of an ordinary Tuesday is not a standard; it is a slogan. These can be answered, and when the answer is thin, that is information.
The discipline has a practical consequence. It sets a floor under what Pierpont will take on. An assignment that pays well and creates nothing does not clear the first question. A transaction that enriches the principals and helps no one does not clear the second. The third is the one that keeps the office from settling: capacity that is not extended is capacity wasted.
The questions did not begin as a philosophy. They began as a working method.
At Wharton, across many years of the Entrepreneurship research and teaching, Dr. LaPier held his own teaching to the oldest standard there is. Christ did not measure his ministry by the size of the crowd; he measured it by twelve who carried the work forward. A teacher is judged the same way — not by how many students passed through the room, but by how many disciples left it, took the method with them, and could be followed for decades afterward as they built on it. Many of them Dr. LaPier still works alongside.
That is the same test Pierpont has applied to the more than one hundred transactions it has led or advised since 1996, and to the philanthropic work Dr. LaPier has carried forward with The Catholic University of America, Sibley Memorial Hospital, Crossroads Educators, Syracuse University Chancellor’s Council, Order of Malta and others.
Purpose-Centered: How to Make $100 Million and Give It Away
Dr. LaPier is now setting that method down in a book. The title states the thesis without hedging: that creating value and giving it away are not two careers pursued in sequence but one discipline practiced at once, and that the second half of the sentence is the point of the first.
Thirty years in, the questions have not been revised. They have simply been asked more often — and now written down, so that others can ask them too.