Bühler Group, a Swiss multinational processing technology provider, started by selling machines for processing grains and later transitioned into selling food processing solutions. A family-owned business in the fifth generation, Bühler's high-end milling, grinding, sorting, and die-casting machines and its process engineering and services expertise were respected by the world's largest players in the food, feed, and automotive industries. The firm's purpose was formalized in 2010 under the slogan 'Innovations for a Better World.' With the establishment of its purpose, the firm began to transform itself from a quiet technology leader to a vocal advocate for innovation, education, and sustainability in its industry, a substantial challenge for a privately held Swiss company with CHF 3 billion ($3.2 bn) revenue. Though Bühler had nurtured its long-term partnerships with customers, the firm struggled to bring about a deeper embrace of sustainability across its customers' value chains, which it considered necessary. In 2016, the firm introduced the Bühler Networking Days conference as a platform to facilitate a dialogue on innovation, sustainability, and education in the industry. The event aimed to change the firm's one-on-one interactions with customers into a public and multilateral engagement. While planning the Networking Days 2022 conference, the firm's leadership wondered how they could use the forum to inspire others in the industry to commit to concrete outcomes. Besides, had Bühler done enough to embed sustainability in its internal and external innovation ecosystem? How should the firm measure impact and see whether the efforts made so far were simply incremental or collectively enough for Bühler to be a truly purpose-led firm?

What strategies can companies use to both survive a recession and thrive when it ends? The authors studied the strategy selection and corporate performance of 4,700 public companies during the past three global recessions: 1980 to 1982, 1990 to 1991, and 2000 to 2002. They found that of companies that survive a recession, about 80% take more than three years to regain their prerecession growth rates for sales and profits. Just 9% of them flourish after a slowdown, doing better on key financial parameters than they had done before it and outperforming rivals in their industry by at least 10% in terms of sales and profits growth. One strategy has the greatest likelihood of producing postrecession winners: a combination of cutting costs, mainly by improving operational efficiency (rather than by slashing the number of employees relative to peers), and developing new business opportunities by making significantly greater investments than rivals do in R&D and marketing while also investing in plants and machinery.