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Aaron Hurst is a renowned leader who has been a catalyst of changes in the business and nonprofit sectors over the last 25 years. As an entrepreneur and thought leader, he has changed the way business professionals work and volunteer, as well as how the nonprofit and corporate sectors collaborate to address mutual interests in society.
Born in Aspen, Colorado, his career was heavily influenced by the legacy of his grandfather, Joseph E. Slater, the founding CEO of the Aspen Institute and a member of the Kennedy administration, where he developed the concept of the Peace Corps. Following in his footsteps, Hurst has dedicated his career to helping the way people serve and connect in society.
The author of the best-selling 2014 book, “The Purpose Economy,” Hurst is widely recognized as a pioneer in the rise of purpose in the corporate world. The book and his research featured in the book made the case for purpose as a business imperative and predicted the impact of consumer and workplace demand for meaning in life and work.
Hurst founded the Taproot Foundation in 2001 after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in response to demand from business professionals to do work that contributed more to society. Inspired by President Kennedy’s work to build the pro bono ethic in the legal profession during the civil rights movement, Hurst called on business professionals to also engage in pro bono work to help build the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector — helping nonprofits address their need for marketing, technology and other professional services.
Using his understanding of the power of technology, data and scaling, Hurst grew the Taproot Foundation to seven offices across the country and changed the way nonprofits thought about working with the business community. By 2007, the organization was the largest nonprofit consulting firm in the world.
At this point, Hurst realized that making a greater impact requires thinking beyond direct service delivery and shifted Taproot’s strategy to building a marketplace for pro bono service. Partnering with the George W. Bush administration, he conceived of and helped launch the A Billion + Change campaign in 2008, which engaged 500 companies in donating over $2 billion a year in pro bono services. By 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the overall pro bono market had reached $15 billion annually.
While building the market domestically, Hurst partnered with the BMW Foundation in Berlin to build a network of pro bono service providers across 30 countries, expanding the pro bono movement globally.
In 2011, Taproot partnered with LinkedIn to integrate pro bono and nonprofit board service into their professional social media profiles. The response was overwhelming, with over a million people signing up within the first seven months, far surpassing the available opportunities. This showed a growing enthusiasm for purpose-driven work within the professional community.
This response, combined with insights from Taproot’s data, Hurst to pivot his focus from changing the way business professionals volunteer to addressing the lack of meaning in their core jobs. In 2013, he left the Taproot Foundation to write “The Purpose Economy” and make the case to businesses to shift the way they were thinking about the needs of the workplace as well as their consumers. He predicted that the need for meaning would reshape the economy in the next decade. The book is largely cited as being the catalyst of major changes in the business world and ultimately leading Business Roundtable to redefine the purpose of a company from simply returning shareholder value to addressing the broader stakeholders of companies. The new definition was adopted and signed by 181 of the top CEOs in the United States.
The same year as the book was launched, Hurst cofounded and became the CEO of the venture-backed tech startup Imperative. The company sought to create the underlying technology that would enable companies to bring purpose to their workforce. Working with researchers, Hurst uncovered the psychological drivers of the purpose of an individual and was able to use those insights to build the first purpose profiling product, which enabled companies to determine the purpose of an employee in under ten minutes.
At Imperative, he partnered with New York University, the University of Michigan, LinkedIn, and PwC to conduct the first national and global studies of purpose in the workplace. It led to a significant new understanding of the intrinsic motivation of employees, the sources of fulfillment at work, and the impact of purpose versus transactional mindset. It made the first data-driven case for companies to invest in cultivating a purpose mindset and the direct connection to performance and retention.
In 2019, Hurst launched the Imperative peer coaching platform, which was built on the same purpose of profiling technology that was being used by dozens of companies. He used AI and purpose analytics to enable employees to serve as virtual coaches for each other, removing the need for expensive professional coaches. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the platform became a critical way for companies to support and connect employees in a remote work environment.
In 2023, Hurst exited Imperative and transitioned to begin a new set of ventures focused on expanding his work on purpose in the workplace globally, beginning with a partnership with the Chilean company Alma Brands, which is expanded to serve Latin America.
Building on his grandfather’s legacy, Hurst has used technology and data to shift the way we think about the role of business in society. As was evident in the Business Roundtable’s new definition of the purpose of a company, Hurst’s work has demonstrated that purpose is not only in the best interest of individuals and society but also for corporations seeking sustained success in labor and consumer markets.
The news and editorial staffs of the New York Daily News had no role in this post’s preparation.
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