Once Upon a Legend: Purpose as a Gate for Serendipity amid Unpredictability

In turbulent environments, a core strategic challenge is making sense of what truly deserves attention. While corporate purpose is increasingly recognized as a source of direction and coherence, we know little about how a reinterpreted (“reborn”) purpose shapes strategic action over time. Building on the Attention-Based View (ABV) and sensemaking theory, we examine how strategic leaders mobilize a reborn corporate purpose to navigate turbulence and channel ambiguous and emergent cues into serendipitous strategic opportunities. Heritage firms, in particular, often face heightened unpredictability, marked by leadership transitions, strategic shocks, and shifting external pressures. Based on a longitudinal, extreme-case study of MV Agusta (2018–2025), the legendary Italian motorcycle manufacturer, we abductively derive a three-stage process model from how leaders (1) reframed the firm’s purpose by reconnecting a revered heritage claim (“Motorcycle Art”) with renewed strategic intent, (2) implemented this purpose as a cognitive and relational filter that structures attention and stakeholder engagement, and (3) realized it through patterns of action that selectively amplify some cues while discarding others, underpinning strategic renewal. Our findings reveal how purpose functions as a gate of salience: a meaning-making mechanism that shapes which signals become thinkable, legitimate, and strategically actionable. We contribute to research on corporate purpose, the ABV, and serendipity by theorizing purpose as a dynamic attentional logic that gates the activation of ambiguous cues under turbulence.