Book Review: Higher Ground by Alison Taylor
Book Review: Higher Ground by Alison Taylor
Alison Taylor’s Higher Ground is an intelligent and persuasive account of why business needs to take ethics, purpose, values and human impact more seriously. It is excellent on the “why” and very good on the “what”. But for a book that explicitly promises to explore what it takes to implement corporate purpose, the practical “how” remains frustratingly unclear.
Listed among the Financial Times best business books of 2024, Higher Ground is a book I recently found myself returning to as part of my Beyond Rhetoric series. Taylor, a clinical professor at NYU Stern School of Business and former executive director of Ethical Systems, sets herself an ambitious task. Namely to explain how businesses should behave in a world in which old certainties around shareholder value, regulation and corporate responsibility are breaking down.
Her diagnosis is strong. Taylor argues that branding, culture, sustainability, risk and ethics can no longer be treated as separate disciplines. In a transparent world, organisations pursuing contradictory agendas through different functions quickly appear incoherent or hypocritical.
Taylor is equally sceptical of interchangeable values statements, superficial ESG programmes and grand claims about making the world a better place. She is particularly good on purpose becoming another form of corporate theatre. If purpose is treated as a performance, she says, it will never drive performance. Quite.
She also understands that principles occasionally have a price. A value that survives only while commercially convenient is not much of a value at all. It echoes an argument I made years ago in discussions with Michael Porter’s Shared Value team at Harvard about the flaws I saw in their ‘win-win’ model. Doing the right thing cannot always depend upon there being a convenient commercial win.
Much of Higher Ground is therefore another welcome antidote to the inflated claims surrounding corporate purpose. The problem comes when Taylor moves from diagnosis to prescription.
Ultimately the book offers a moral framework for responsible business rather than a management framework for purposeful business. So, while Taylor is excellent on the “why” and very good on the “what”, she is much less convincing on the “how”.
In her concluding chapter, “Purpose Starts with Impact”, she wraps up themes explored at length in the book into a set of principles — understand human impact, respect human rights, listen to stakeholders, take culture seriously, avoid hypocrisy and act on commitments.
The principles are sound. But principles are not a system, and so the promise Taylor makes on page nine — “In the conclusion, I’ll explore what it really takes to implement corporate purpose and find a view from a higher ground” — is never quite fulfilled. Instead of a pragmatic framework, Taylor offers her principles and two stories as examples of purpose in practice.
The first story is about American yoghurt company Chobani and its immigrant founder Hamdi Ulukaya. His commitment to refugees, employees and communities is admirable. But an admirable founder is not a methodology. Purpose is not only about creating meaning. It must also create orientation.
The second story is about Jo Alexander, a BP geologist who became disillusioned with the company, left in 2015 and later challenged its leadership publicly over climate change.
It is a story I know well. Firstly, because Lucy Traynor, a London based peer of mine who had led Deloitte UK’s firm-wide purpose strategy, pointed me towards Alexander in a conversation about BP earlier this year. And Secondly, because while I was only ever on the periphery of the BP account during my time at Enterprise IG, then part of WPP and one of the world’s largest branding consultancies, it was difficult not to be caught up in the ambition surrounding Lord John Browne and his “Beyond Petroleum” purpose. Here was the chief executive of one of the world’s largest oil companies acknowledging climate change and talking about reinventing the energy business.
Like Alexander, I believed much of it. And, like Alexander, I subsequently became disillusioned. BP would later feature heavily in my book CORE as an example of the gulf that can open between what an organisation says and what ultimately drives it.
After Alexander challenged BP’s board in 2019, incoming chief executive Bernard Looney sought her out. His new purpose — “reimagining energy for people and our planet” — persuaded her to return as BP’s Purpose Engagement Manager.
For Taylor, it is a powerful example of purpose restoring meaning and commitment. But there is an important postscript. Taylor’s account ends with Alexander’s return to BP. By the time Higher Ground was published in February 2024, however, Alexander had already left the company for a second time, in June 2023, later memorably describing herself as a “serial conscious quitter”. Then, in February 2025, BP announced a fundamental strategic reset, increasing its focus on oil and gas while sharply reducing planned investment in transition businesses.
None of this invalidates Taylor’s example. If anything, it makes it more revealing. It raises precisely the question her book never quite resolves: How does purpose become sufficiently embedded in an organisation to survive changes in leadership, strategy and commercial pressure?
Higher Ground is, at its heart, a book about business ethics, and the moral argument matters enormously. It is intelligent, accessible and refreshingly sceptical of the easy answers surrounding purpose, ESG and stakeholder capitalism. Taylor provides a strong ethical compass and tells business leaders much about the direction in which they ought to travel. What she does not quite provide, despite promising to explore what it really takes to implement corporate purpose, is the organisational route map for getting to higher ground.
Higher Ground is available at leading bookstores and online retailers.
The Machine Needs a North Star
The Machine Needs a North Star
Meta’s faltering attempt to become an “AI-native” company reveals something much bigger than the limitations of today’s artificial intelligence. It raises a fundamental question about what an organisation is for, and why purpose will become more important as machines take on more of the work.
Within the space of a few days last week, two stories emerged about Meta — Mark Zuckerberg’s technology giant and the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that appeared, at first glance, to have very little to do with one another.
The first dominated the headlines. Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade to settle claims brought by US states alleging that Facebook and Instagram had been designed in ways that harmed and addicted children. Meta admitted no wrongdoing, but the agreement reflects a much wider international reckoning over social media and its impact on young people.
The second story received less attention, but may ultimately prove just as consequential. In a special report Reuters revealed that inside Meta, Zuckerberg and his senior team had been attempting something extraordinarily ambitious. Not simply introducing artificial intelligence into the organisation, but redesigning the entire organisation around it.
Its codename was Project OT (Organization Transformation). The ambition was to make Meta “AI native”. Traditional product teams of ten or twenty people could become pods of three to five “builders”. Specialist roles would blur, management layers would disappear and AI agents would take on increasing amounts of work. Some planning scenarios contemplated reducing the size of individual teams by as much as 60%.
But then things went quickly wrong. Employees rebelled, morale plummeted and plans for a second wave of restructuring were abandoned. More importantly, Meta’s own internal evidence suggested that the promised productivity revolution was proving far more complicated than anticipated. According to Reuters, code changes to Meta’s internal systems increased by 220% year on year, while changes resulting in new or improved features actually reaching users rose by only 36%. Technical and security incidents reportedly increased by 40%.
There is an important lesson buried inside those numbers: More output is not the same thing as more value. And that fact takes us far beyond Meta.
For more than a century, management thinkers have wrestled with the question of how organisations should be structured and what they should exist to achieve. The twentieth-century corporation was largely hierarchical. Authority travelled downwards, information upwards and managers coordinated people occupying clearly defined roles. In business, Milton Friedman’s argument that the responsibility of business was to increase profits provided an equally clear organising logic.
Other models followed. Peter Drucker shifted attention towards customers and knowledge workers. Charles Handy repeatedly challenged conventional assumptions about organisations, hierarchy and the nature of work, anticipating a world in which organisations would become less rigid, careers less linear and knowledge increasingly more important than physical assets. Stakeholder theory widened the responsibilities of business, reflecting a growing recognition that organisations exist within complex networks of relationships rather than in isolation. Agile methodologies challenged rigid planning, while Frédéric Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations proposed self-management and “evolutionary purpose”.
My own small contribution to this continuing conversation came with my book CORE in 2017, when I introduced the Single Organizing Idea (SOI®) to a wider audience and the idea that organisations perform better when governance, strategy, culture, innovation, operations and performance are aligned around a clear and shared purpose that is both valuable and relevant to all stakeholders.
The important word has always been ‘organising’, however you chose to spell it. Purpose was never intended to be something inspirational sitting above the real business of the organisation. Properly understood, it should help organise it. This is why Meta’s curtailed ‘Organizational Transformation’ experiment matters.
AI is not simply another office technology. The spreadsheet made accountants faster. Email transformed communication. The internet radically reduced the cost of distributing information. AI agents may change something much deeper. The way organisations themselves are organised.
If organisations can deploy hundreds or thousands of digital agents capable of researching, analysing, coding, communicating and undertaking increasingly complex sequences of work, many of the structures we have traditionally used to organise human activity begin to look very different. Teams may become smaller, job descriptions broader, management layers thinner and organisational boundaries more fluid.
Meta may have moved too quickly, but that does not necessarily mean it is wrong about the direction of travel. The harder question is what happens if this becomes normal.
Imagine an organisation of 500 people working alongside 5,000 AI agents, all constantly analysing information, initiating tasks and making decisions. No chief executive could instruct them individually and no operating manual could anticipate every circumstance. If the organisation changes, what organises the organisation?
This is where much of the current discussion about AI begins at the wrong end. We ask what AI can do, which jobs will disappear, how many employees companies will need and how much productivity can be extracted. Those are questions about means. But the more important questions concern ends.
Faster towards what? More efficient at doing what? More productive in whose interests? Better according to whose definition of better?
Artificial intelligence is powerful because it can optimise. Give it an objective and it can increasingly find efficient ways of pursuing it. But optimisation requires orientation. And at this point the other Meta story becomes relevant.
For years Facebook and Instagram became extraordinarily sophisticated at maximising engagement. Their systems learned how to keep people looking, clicking and returning. Whatever one’s position on the litigation, the scale of the settlement illustrates that extraordinary optimisation can produce consequences far beyond the metric being optimised.
Society is now asking whether maximising ever more human attention was always the right objective in the first place. That question cannot be answered by a better algorithm. It is a question of governance and ultimately purpose.
This is why the two Meta stories belong together. One concerns the consequences of technology Meta has already built. The other concerns how Meta intends to organise itself to build the next generation. Both lead to the same question: What is all this extraordinary capability actually for?
AI may reduce the need for hierarchy, but it will not remove the need for coherence. In fact, it will likely increase it. Organisations composed of humans working alongside intelligent agents will require a clear shared understanding of the outcome they exist to create and the principles governing how that outcome should be pursued.
That is precisely what genuine organisational purpose should provide. A Single Organizing Idea becomes an organisational compass, something against which boards can govern, leaders can develop strategy, teams can make decisions and, increasingly, AI systems can be designed and directed.
Not because machines should determine an organisation’s purpose. Quite the reverse. Humans must determine the purpose precisely because machines will increasingly determine how that purpose is pursued.
This is why the emerging ISO 37011 guidance on the governance of organisations by purpose feels so timely and necessary. The central governance challenge of the AI age may not simply be deciding where artificial intelligence can be deployed, but ensuring that extraordinary new capability remains directed towards outcomes worth pursuing.
There is a danger that organisations will see AI primarily as an opportunity to become faster, leaner and cheaper. But a badly oriented organisation does not become a better organisation simply because it becomes more efficient. It simply becomes a badly oriented organisation capable of travelling considerably faster, and the likely consequences of that should worry us all.
Reuters’ account offers an early warning. The future organisation will not simply require better artificial intelligence. It will require better human intention. Because the more powerful the machine becomes, the more important the North Star and the power of purpose.