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.

This is Not a Purpose

For many years, a reproduction of René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images has hung on the wall of my office. Painted in 1929, it is one of the most recognisable works of twentieth-century art. The painting itself is remarkably simple. Against an otherwise empty background sits an almost perfectly conventional tobacco pipe. Beneath it Magritte has written, in careful script, six words:

Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
(This is not a pipe.)

The first reaction is almost instinctive. Of course it is a pipe. We can see it. Except Magritte was right. It isn’t a pipe. It is a painting of a pipe. You cannot pick it up, fill it with tobacco or smoke it. However convincing the image might be, it remains a representation of something rather than the thing itself.

That distinction is precisely why the painting has followed me from office to office for so many years.

Magritte called the work La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images). He was interested in the relationship between objects, images and the words we use to describe them. We see an image of a pipe and our mind immediately converts the representation into reality. The picture becomes the thing.

Nearly a century later, I think we have developed a remarkably similar problem with organisational purpose. Over the past decade in particular, businesses around the world have invested enormous amounts of time, energy and money in defining their purpose. Consultants have been hired. Employees interviewed. Workshops held. Boards engaged. Words debated and refined. Eventually, after much deliberation, a sentence emerges intended to capture why the organisation exists and the contribution it seeks to make.

It’s then launched. It appears on the website and in the annual report. It’s incorporated into presentations, corporate communications and, inevitably, the ‘merch’: coffee cups, lanyards, pens, tote bags, USB flash drives and so on. It might even be painted on a wall.

And somewhere along the way, the representation becomes confused with the reality.

A purpose statement is not an organisation’s purpose.
(The words are not the purpose. They merely describe it.)

There is nothing wrong with that. Words matter. I have spent more than two decades helping organisations find the clearest and most compelling articulation of the idea around which they can organise themselves. Done well, a purpose statement can provide extraordinary clarity. It can make something complex understandable and memorable. It can give thousands of people a common language for describing why their organisation exists.

But the statement is still only a representation. A strategy document is not strategy. Values written on a wall are not culture. A sustainability report is not sustainability. An organisational chart is not an organisation. In each case, the words, pictures and diagrams are attempts to describe something that has to exist in the real world. Purpose is no different.

For over two decades I have argued that purpose should operate as a Single Organizing Idea, or SOI®. The choice of the word ‘organizing’ (with a z), has always been deliberate. Purpose has little value if it simply describes an organisation. Its real value lies in its ability to organise one.

If an organisation genuinely understands why it exists, that understanding should have consequences. It should influence the choices a board makes and the strategy an executive team develops. It should affect where capital is allocated, which markets are entered, what products and services are developed, who is recruited and rewarded, which partnerships are pursued and which opportunities are declined.

It should influence what gets measured and, most importantly, it should help when the answer is not obvious. It is in those moments that purpose stops being a statement and starts becoming useful.

Which is something New Zealand’s political parties may wish to reflect on. As TVNZ News reported this week, with elections come election campaigns and the inevitable campaign slogans; a handful of carefully chosen words intended to tell us something about who the parties are, what they stand for and what they intend to do.

Magritte would have enjoyed this year’s batch. Not because any of them are particularly memorable or clever, but because even if they were, that would rather miss the point. A slogan, after all, is no more a government than a purpose statement is an organisation. However appealing the words on the tin, they remain merely a representation of what is supposedly inside. Whether the contents bear much resemblance to the label is something we will only discover by experiencing what actually happens.

Perhaps The Treachery of Images should hang in more boardrooms — and maybe a few campaign offices too.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe. This is not a pipe. And that purpose statement on the wall? That isn’t your purpose either.

The Leadership Challenge Hidden in Plain Sight

The latest Oxford–GlobeScan Global Corporate Affairs Survey reveals far more than the changing priorities of one corporate function. It offers a compelling picture of why governance, purpose and organisational alignment have become strategic imperatives in an increasingly uncertain world.

Every year, Oxford University’s Saïd Business School and GlobeScan survey senior Corporate Affairs leaders from around the world to understand the issues shaping their profession. This year’s research draws on the views of almost 300 senior practitioners across 51 countries, representing some of the world’s largest organisations.

The report catalogues an extraordinary list of pressures confronting organisations. Geopolitical instability dominates concerns once again. Artificial intelligence has surged from a relatively minor issue to become the second most significant perceived business risk in just twelve months. Economic uncertainty, regulatory change, cyber threats, climate change and reputational risk all feature prominently.

On the surface, these appear to be separate challenges requiring separate responses. I suspect they are nothing of the sort.

Rather, they are different expressions of a single reality, namely that the world has become so interconnected that political, economic, technological and societal issues can no longer be managed in isolation. Decisions taken in Washington reverberate through supply chains in Asia. Advances in artificial intelligence create opportunities for innovation while simultaneously introducing new risks around misinformation, cyber security and trust. Political polarisation reshapes expectations of business just as quickly as it reshapes government policy.

Complexity itself has become the defining management challenge. That observation becomes even more interesting when viewed alongside another of the report’s findings.

For many years the conversation around Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) was dominated by climate change and social responsibility. This year’s survey tells a different story. Governance has overtaken both environmental and social issues as the greatest source of reputational risk for organisations. Ethics, accountability, transparency and board oversight are now seen as more significant than environmental performance or social impact.

That should not come as a surprise. In an increasingly unpredictable world, organisations are judged less by whether they face challenges than by how they respond to them. Governance determines the quality of decisions, the speed of adaptation and, ultimately, the level of trust that stakeholders are prepared to place in leadership. In these challenging times good governance has quietly become a competitive advantage.

Yet perhaps the most revealing finding concerns purpose.

Contrary to some popular narratives, organisational purpose has not disappeared. More than four in five organisations surveyed still have a formal corporate purpose in place (even if it is just a slogan). What has changed is the level of executive attention devoted to it. Discussion of purpose within executive teams has declined significantly over the past year, even while respondents overwhelmingly expect societal expectations of purposeful leadership to increase over the next three years. That tension is fascinating.

Boards have understandably become preoccupied with tariffs, inflation, geopolitical instability and artificial intelligence. Immediate risks demand immediate attention.
Stakeholders, however, have not lowered their expectations. Consumers, customers, employees, investors and wider society continue to judge organisations on the quality of their leadership, the values they demonstrate and the contribution they make. If anything, those expectations are becoming more demanding, not less.

The real issue isn’t that purpose has become harder to discuss. It’s that leaders risk becoming distracted by the urgent at precisely the moment when purpose is becoming even more valuable as a means of navigating uncertainty.

Purpose is not a luxury for more settled times. It is precisely what enables organisations to navigate unsettled ones.

The greatest risk is not abandoning purpose altogether. It is allowing it to be crowded out by the urgent. Organisations that lose sight of why they exist risk slowly eroding the trust, relevance and value on which their long-term success depends.

The smartest organisations appear to recognise this. Rather than stepping back from purpose, they are quietly doubling down on it; not as a communications exercise or a branding statement, but as the strategic discipline that brings governance, strategy, culture and stakeholder relationships together around a single, coherent direction.

Reading the report, I was struck by how frequently respondents returned to the same themes. They called for clearer strategy. Better internal alignment. Stronger governance. More integrated operating models. Better measurement. Greater influence at board level. Enhanced stakeholder engagement. Improved organisational capability. Seventy-four per cent believe the Corporate Affairs function itself requires revision to meet the demands of today’s environment.

Those recommendations describe something much bigger than the future of Corporate Affairs. They describe the future of organisational leadership.

For over two decades I have argued that the greatest challenge facing organisations is rarely a lack of purpose. More often, it is a lack of alignment. Strategy competes with culture. Governance sits apart from communications. Sustainability is managed separately from commercial priorities. Every function pursues legitimate objectives, yet too often without a common organising principle. The consequence is fragmentation precisely when coherence is needed most.

The Oxford–GlobeScan report documents the symptoms of that fragmentation with remarkable clarity. It also points, perhaps unintentionally, towards the solution.

The organisations most likely to thrive in the coming decade will not necessarily be those with the largest AI budgets, the most sophisticated communications teams or the most comprehensive ESG reports. They will be those capable of bringing governance, strategy, reputation, stakeholder relationships and organisational purpose together around a single, coherent direction.

That is not simply better Corporate Affairs. It is better leadership. And in a world where uncertainty has become the norm, that may prove to be the greatest competitive advantage of all.

Neil Gaught On Purpose: In Conversation is a monthly interview series featuring leaders, thinkers and practitioners at the forefront of purpose-driven business.

Each conversation goes beyond the rhetoric to explore how purpose is being applied in practice, across strategy, governance, culture and performance.

At a time of growing complexity and uncertainty, the series brings together diverse perspectives to examine a simple but increasingly urgent question: What does it take to build a business that creates enduring value for both shareholders and society?

Purpose is often discussed in boardrooms as though it were a strategy, a marketing statement or a communications exercise. Spend an hour with Gavin Findlay, Chief Executive of the New Zealand Food Network, and it quickly becomes clear that he sees it very differently.

After a career spanning the military, sport and the charitable sector, Gavin believes purpose is ultimately about one thing, and that is creating a positive impact on someone else’s life. That simple philosophy has shaped both his leadership and the organisation he has helped build from the ground up.

In this latest interview in the Neil Gaught ON PURPOSE interview series, we discuss leadership, community, commercial reality and why purpose is far easier to write on a wall than it is to embed into an organisation.

NG: Purpose has become one of the most widely used words in business. What does it actually mean to you?

GF: For me, purpose is about the positive impact you have on someone else’s life.

Years ago I took a group of New Zealanders to South Africa during the Football World Cup. We delivered hundreds of kilograms of football kit into one of Johannesburg’s poorest communities. Seeing the reaction of those children when they received that equipment was unforgettable.

Around the same time I came across something Sir Michael Jones once said: “It’s much better to give than to receive.” That really resonated with me.

Whenever I know we’ve genuinely made a positive difference to someone else’s life, I come away feeling better myself. That’s what purpose means to me. Everyone should have a purpose, whatever form it takes.

NG: The New Zealand Food Network exists to address food insecurity, yet you work closely with businesses. How do you balance social impact with commercial reality?

GF: One of the first conversations I had with our chairman, David Kirk, was about the phrase “not-for-profit.”

I’ve never liked it because every organisation has to generate a surplus. The difference isn’t whether you make money, it’s what you do with it.

We’re a ‘for-profit’ organisation with a clear purpose; a ‘for-profit’ and ‘for-purpose’ organisation if you like. Every surplus we generate goes back into achieving our purpose.

Commercial discipline isn’t the opposite of purpose; it’s exactly what enables purpose to succeed. It’s total nonsense to say that there is a ‘for-purpose’ sector and this is the exclusive domaine of charities. All organisations have to make a profit and almost all of them can be purpose-driven.

NG: Many organisations have purpose statements. Far fewer are genuinely driven by them. What’s the difference?

GF: It’s relatively easy to write a purpose statement. It’s much harder to ensure everyone lives it.

Large organisations naturally create silos. Sales have one set of priorities, operations another, finance another. Unless everyone understands the bigger picture, purpose remains words on a wall.

We’ve been fortunate because we’ve built the New Zealand Food Network from scratch. Everything we do comes back to one simple question: Does this help us get food to where it’s needed most?

That doesn’t remove tension or difficult decisions, but it gives everyone a common direction that we are organised around achieving together.

NG: Partnerships seem to sit at the heart of everything you do. What have you learned about bringing businesses, charities, government and communities together?

GF: The biggest lesson is that every partnership has to create value for both sides.

Too often charities approach organisations with their hand out. I’ve always taken a different approach. Tell your story honestly, understand what matters to the other organisation, and recognise the value they bring as well.

Some companies genuinely believe in what we do. Others become involved because partnering with us also solves a business problem by reducing food waste and disposal costs. Either way, if the outcome is more food reaching families who need it, that’s a partnership worth building.

NG: Many people struggle to understand why organisations like yours are still needed in a developed country.

GF: People often think giving someone food solves the problem. It solves today’s problem. It doesn’t necessarily solve tomorrow’s.

The bigger issue is that we’ve lost something we’ve traditionally relied upon —community.

When I was growing up, neighbours knew each other. If someone lost their job or was struggling, the street often rallied around them. Today many of us don’t even know who lives a few doors away.

At the same time we’ve created a society where housing is dramatically less affordable and more people are living under financial pressure. That’s the reality we’re working in.

Long term we’d love to see more people become food secure rather than continually responding to food insecurity. But until then, organisations like ours have an important role to play.

NG: What advice would you give a CEO who genuinely wants to build a purpose-driven organisation?

GF: First, you have to believe in it yourself. If you don’t genuinely believe in your purpose, nobody else will either.

Second, recognise that you can’t do it alone. Great leaders surround themselves with people who are better than they are in different areas.

Finally, don’t confuse purpose with reinvention. Too many leaders arrive believing they have to create a brand-new purpose. More often the real challenge is asking: How can we fulfil our existing purpose better than we’ve ever done before?

NG: New Zealand has traditionally seen itself as a country that cares. Do you think that’s still true?

GF: Overall, yes. We’ve certainly lost some of our sense of community, but compared with many parts of the world I still believe New Zealanders care deeply about each other.

The challenge is that the gap between those who have and those who don’t continues to widen. As that gap grows, organisations working to support vulnerable communities become even more important.

NG: Finally, if you could leave business leaders with one piece of advice, what would it be?

GF: I’d encourage every leader to ask themselves one simple question: What is enough?

Businesses absolutely need to be profitable. They have to generate returns. But purpose asks what you do with that success.

Could we show a little more empathy? Could we think a little more broadly about the people and communities our organisations affect?

If this conversation encourages even a handful of leaders to ask those questions, then it’s been worthwhile.

Orientation Before Action: The Wisdom of Matariki

While the United States recently marked the 250th anniversary of its founding, New Zealand has just celebrated something shaped by more than a thousand years of accumulated Māori wisdom.

Over the past weekend, communities across Aotearoa gathered to observe Matariki, the Māori New Year. Recognised as a national public holiday only since 2022, Matariki is nevertheless rooted in centuries of Māori knowledge and Polynesian navigation. Marked by the annual rising of the Matariki star cluster, known elsewhere as the Pleiades, it signals not simply the beginning of a new year, but a moment to pause, reflect and renew.

For readers beyond New Zealand, Matariki may appear to be simply another cultural celebration. But it is much more than that. Matariki reflects a worldview in which human wellbeing, the natural environment and future generations are perceived not as competing priorities but as parts of an interconnected whole. It is a philosophy that has shaped Māori society for generations and one that, once understood, feels remarkably relevant to many of the challenges confronting organisations, governments and communities today.

Before encouraging us to look forward, Matariki asks us first to stop. To remember those who have passed. To give thanks for what has been. To reconnect with one another and with the world around us. Only then does it invite us to consider the future. In a world that prizes momentum above almost everything else, Matariki quietly reminds us that the quality of our direction matters far more than the speed of our progress.

Looking back on my first full year back in New Zealand, that is a thought that has been reinforced for me several times.

In September last year I wrote about the quiet authority of the Māori queen Te Arikinui Kuīni Ngā Wai hono i te Pō and the way her leadership embodies values such as humility, stewardship and collective responsibility rather than personal prominence. More recently, while reviewing Kate Raworth’s ‘The Evolving Doughnut’, I was reminded that many of the principles underpinning Doughnut Economics draw upon Māori thinking, where social, ecological, spiritual and economic wellbeing are understood as inseparable rather than independent pursuits.

Those observations have prompted me to think more deeply about New Zealand itself. Having lived and worked in several countries, I have increasingly come to believe that every nation possesses a distinctive contribution to make to our understanding of leadership and society. Britain has long prized its institutions. America has often been defined by optimism, entrepreneurship and individual opportunity. New Zealand’s gift, I believe, lies elsewhere. It is an instinctive appreciation that people, communities, nature and future generations cannot be separated from one another without diminishing them all.

That perspective finds expression through concepts such as whanaungatanga (relationships), manaakitanga (care and generosity towards others), kaitiakitanga (guardianship of people and place) and kotahitanga (unity). These are not simply cultural ideals to be admired from afar. They are practical principles that shape everyday decisions. They remind us that leadership begins not with authority or ambition but with responsibility, and that before deciding what to do, we should first understand who we are, where we stand and what we exist to serve.

The more I reflect upon these ideas, the more I recognise how they must have influenced my own thinking when I conceived Single Organising Idea (SOI®) during my first term in New Zealand between 2002 and 2009. At the time I was simply looking for a way organisations could identify and define a way of aligning strategy, culture and brand management with decision-making. Looking back, however, I suspect that this wonderful country and its people influenced me more profoundly than I realised.

For centuries, Polynesian navigators crossed vast expanses of open ocean by reading the stars. The stars did not tell them every decision they needed to make, nor did they eliminate uncertainty. What they provided was orientation. They offered a constant point of reference against which every course adjustment could be made.

It strikes me that this is where Matariki offers one of its most important lessons for contemporary leadership. Modern organisations can be exceptionally good at planning. They produce strategies, targets, milestones and implementation plans with impressive sophistication. Yet many still struggle to answer a simpler question: What ultimately guides our decisions?

Strategy determines where an organisation intends to go. Purpose, on the other hand, ensures it never loses sight of why the journey matters. A Single Organising Idea does not prescribe every decision; rather, it provides the enduring point of reference against which every decision can be judged. Like the navigators of old, organisations still encounter changing conditions, unexpected obstacles and difficult choices. What matters is not that every decision is perfect, but that every decision remains oriented towards the same enduring purpose.

Increasingly, this is also the direction of travel for modern governance. The forthcoming ISO 37011 guidance on purpose-driven governance encourages organisations to create and protect value in ways that contribute to the long-term wellbeing of all people and the planet, rather than focusing solely on financial performance or shareholder returns. Likewise, Doughnut Economics challenges us to measure success not simply by economic output but by our ability to enable human flourishing within planetary boundaries. Both point towards a more integrated understanding of value and one that Māori thinking has long embraced.

Uncovering Matariki’s link to my work and my core message around the power of purpose resonated but the reason it really touched me is more poignant.

One of its most moving traditions is the remembrance of those who have died since the previous rising of the stars. Before looking towards the future, communities first acknowledge those whose lives continue to shape their own. It is a deeply human act, recognising that memory is not an obstacle to progress but part of it. This year, I found myself quietly thinking of Joanne who I miss deeply.

Matariki reminded me that remembrance, love, gratitude and hope for the future are not separate emotions. They exist together, even in loss: We remember before we renew. We reflect before we resolve and we orient ourselves before we move forward.

In business we often speak of purpose as though it were another management technique or competitive advantage. Matariki suggests something richer. Purpose is not something we invent. It is something we discover through our relationships, our responsibilities and the contribution we choose to make to the world around us. Strategy then becomes not merely a plan for achieving success but a means of honouring that purpose through consistent action.
What I have ultimately learnt is that Matariki is about orientation. It reminds us that progress without reflection is simply movement; that prosperity without stewardship is ultimately self-defeating; and that purpose is less about declaring ambitious intentions than quietly orienting our daily decisions towards something greater than ourselves.

For organisations, that may be the difference between having a strategy and possessing a genuine sense of direction. For nations, it may be the difference between economic success and collective wellbeing. For each of us, it is perhaps a reminder that the people we have loved, the values we choose to uphold and the legacy we leave behind all become part of the constellation by which others navigate.

In the end, the stars do not tell us where to go. They simply help us recognise true north when we see it.

When Governance Becomes the Handbrake

The greatest threat to organisational progress is often not poor leadership or weak strategy, but misalignment in the boardroom.

A CEO’s ability to lead is shaped not only by their own capability, judgement 
and energy, but by the quality of alignment above them. However strong the executive team may be, progress becomes difficult when the board itself lacks clarity around what the organisation exists to do, how success should be measured and what kind of value it is ultimately trying to create. This matters more than many directors realise.

Boards often think of their influence in formal terms. They approve strategy, oversee risk, allocate capital and monitor performance. All of these responsibilities are important. Yet much of a board’s real influence is exercised less formally, through the signals it sends, the questions it asks, the concerns it elevates and the behaviours it rewards.

In a nutshell, it is these signals that ultimately shape executive behaviour. They shape what gets prioritised, what gets delayed and, crucially, what becomes too politically difficult to pursue.

Where a board is aligned around a shared understanding of purpose, values and strategic direction, this dynamic becomes enormously powerful. Decision-making improves. Delegation becomes clearer. Challenge becomes constructive rather than confusing. Executives gain confidence because they are operating within a coherent framework of judgement. Where that alignment is absent, ambiguity quickly fills the vacuum.

One director prioritises short-term financial returns above all else. Another emphasises stakeholder trust and reputation. Another focuses almost exclusively on operational risk. Another believes the organisation has wider societal obligations. Each perspective may have merit, but without an agreed organising logic to reconcile them, governance becomes fragmented. The consequences are rarely immediate or dramatic; more often, they emerge slowly.

Management receives mixed messages. Strategic initiatives stall. Decision rights blur. Important issues are revisited repeatedly because the criteria for judgement remain unresolved. Leadership energy is diverted away from execution and towards interpretation. In effect, governance becomes a handbrake on progress.

This is not because boards are incompetent or malicious. Most directors are thoughtful, conscientious and deeply committed to their organisations. The problem is more subtle. Governance structures designed primarily for oversight and control can, under conditions of complexity and uncertainty, unintentionally constrain the very adaptability organisations need.

Add to this the inescapable fact that complexity is rising everywhere. Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries. Climate transition is changing risk profiles and capital flows. Geopolitical instability is creating new uncertainty. Trust in institutions continues to weaken. Employees increasingly seek meaning, not merely compensation. Customers expect more from organisations than functional delivery alone. These are not peripheral trends. They represent a profound shift in the context within which organisations operate. Under such conditions, governance centred solely on risk mitigation becomes insufficient.

Boards must do more than protect organisations from downside. They must help them navigate toward long-term relevance and resilience. That requires a different kind of governance conversation.

There is another uncomfortable reality worth acknowledging.

Many boards continue to be populated by highly experienced, often deeply respected individuals whose judgement has been forged over decades of business leadership. That experience can be enormously valuable. Wisdom, pattern recognition and institutional memory matter. Yet experience alone is no guarantee of relevance.

Some directors built their careers in an era shaped by relatively stable markets, clearer hierarchies and predominantly top-down management models. The instincts that served them well in that environment do not always translate cleanly to today’s world of accelerating change, distributed leadership and growing stakeholder complexity. This is not an argument against experience. Quite the opposite. It is an argument against homogeneity.

The strongest boards are rarely those with the most impressive individual résumés. They are those with the richest diversity of perspective. That includes gender, ethnicity, professional background and lived experience, but increasingly it should also include generational diversity.

Age diversity matters because different generations often see risk, opportunity, technology and societal change through different lenses. Boards that combine hard-won wisdom with fresh perspective are better equipped to challenge assumptions, avoid groupthink and remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.
Diversity of perspective strengthens judgement, but only when anchored by shared foundations. Without that anchor, diversity can just as easily amplify fragmentation as improve decision-making.
In my view, that anchor is a clear and shared sense of purpose.
Purpose is frequently misunderstood. It is often dismissed as soft, aspirational or merely rhetorical. Yet properly understood, organisational purpose is neither a slogan nor a marketing device. It is the clearest articulation of why an organisation exists, the value it creates and for whom. Its value lies not only in inspiration but in utility.

Purpose provides the organising logic through which governance, strategy and performance can be aligned. It enables better judgement when trade-offs become difficult. It helps directors distinguish between reckless risk and necessary transformation. Without such an anchor, governance naturally becomes reactive.

Risk begins to dominate opportunity. Oversight drifts into control. Prudence gradually hardens into conservatism. The irony is that many boards believe this posture reduces risk. Increasingly, the opposite may be true.

The greatest risks facing organisations today are often linked not to moving too fast, but to moving too slowly. Markets evolve. Technology rewrites competitive advantage. Talent migrates towards organisations offering meaning and clarity. Social expectations continue to shift.

Organisations that fail to adapt rarely collapse overnight. More often, they lose relevance gradually and almost imperceptibly. By the time that loss becomes obvious, recovery is difficult. This is why board alignment matters so profoundly.

Alignment does not mean uniformity or the absence of challenge. Healthy governance requires robust debate, intellectual diversity and rigorous scrutiny. But productive disagreement depends on shared foundations. Directors must be able to disagree strongly on strategy while remaining aligned on purpose, values and the principles guiding judgement. That distinction matters because it enables challenge without dysfunction.

I believe this represents one of the defining governance challenges of our time. The board director of the future cannot simply be a guardian of compliance and financial stewardship, important though those responsibilities remain. Directors must also become stewards of long-term relevance, organisational alignment and systemic value creation.

That requires curiosity. It requires courage. Above all, it requires clarity.

The organisations most likely to thrive in the years ahead will not necessarily be those with the largest balance sheets or the most conservative governance structures. They will be those whose boards can provide both discipline and direction, balancing protection with progress.

The question every board should ask itself is a simple one. Are we enabling progress?Or are we quietly becoming the handbrake?

The Uncomfortable Truth About Corporate Purpose


Many businesses now claim to be purpose-led. Far fewer are aligned with purpose, and some may never be capable of it.

The image accompanying this article is a striking metaphor for the state of corporate purpose today. Two opposing forces pull in opposite directions, with the word ‘purpose’ stretched between them like a rope in a tug of war. That tension captures something many leaders instinctively recognise but rarely articulate. In most organisations, purpose is not absent; it is contested. It exists in a constant struggle between competing priorities, competing incentives and, ultimately, competing beliefs about what business is for.

Over the past decade, purpose has moved from the periphery of corporate conversation to its centre. Boardrooms discuss it. Leadership teams workshop it. Annual reports promote it. Recruitment campaigns lean heavily on it. Almost every major organisation now seems keen to demonstrate that it exists for something more meaningful than the pursuit of profit alone.

This shift is not imaginary, nor is it insignificant. The best available data suggests that the move toward purpose-led business has been underway for several years. In 2020, McKinsey found that 62% of organisations claimed to have a formal purpose statement, yet only 42% believed that purpose meaningfully influenced decisions or outcomes. Given the acceleration in ESG, stakeholder capitalism and governance reform since then, the number of organisations articulating purpose has almost certainly increased. What is far less clear, and far more doubtful, is whether the number genuinely governed by purpose has grown at anything like the same pace.

My own sense, based on more than two decades of working with organisations around the world, is that genuinely purpose-driven organisations remain relatively rare. If the benchmark is not simply having a purpose statement, or even claiming that purpose influences decisions, but being truly aligned and governed by purpose, then the proportion of organisations that currently qualify is probably closer to five to ten percent.

And yet the direction of travel is clear.

Why now? Partly because the world is changing. Trust in institutions has declined. Public frustration with inequality, short-termism and extractive capitalism has grown. Climate risk has moved from abstract concern to lived reality. Populism, polarisation and corporate greed have created a growing sense that something fundamental in the relationship between business and society is broken. Against this backdrop, purpose has emerged as both response and remedy — a recognition that business cannot sustainably prosper in a failing society.

But this is precisely where the first uncomfortable truth appears. Most organisations that adopt purpose never truly align themselves with it.

The reason is simple, though often overlooked: there is a profound difference between ‘having a purpose statement’ and ‘being organised around purpose’.

The former is relatively easy. With sufficient time, budget and facilitation, almost any executive team can craft a purpose statement that sounds inspiring, socially aware and commercially sensible. The latter is considerably harder because it demands change — not in language, but in behaviour.

Purpose only becomes real when it influences difficult decisions. It becomes real when leadership teams must navigate trade-offs between short-term financial performance and long-term value creation. It becomes real when revenue opportunities conflict with stated values. It becomes real when incentive structures need redesigning, governance models need rethinking, and leaders must accept that some profitable activities may no longer be compatible with who they claim to be.

This is why purpose, by itself, changes nothing. What matters is alignment.

Strategy must align with purpose. Culture must align with purpose. Incentives, behaviours, systems, governance and measurement must all align with purpose. Without this alignment, purpose remains little more than carefully managed theatre. Cosmetically attractive to customers, employees and investors perhaps, but largely disconnected from the way the organisation actually functions.

This is the problem with so much corporate purpose today. It often sits above the organisation rather than within it. It inspires presentations while leaving power structures untouched.

A business may declare that it exists to improve customer wellbeing while rewarding employees almost entirely on quarterly sales targets. It may commit to sustainability while continuing to allocate capital toward environmentally destructive activities. It may champion human flourishing while promoting internal cultures built on fear, burnout and aggressive competition. In such circumstances, purpose is not acting as an organising principle. It is acting as decoration.

This brings us to the second, and more uncomfortable truth.

Perhaps the challenge is not always one of execution. Perhaps some businesses are structurally incapable of becoming genuinely purpose-driven.

This is where the debate becomes particularly interesting. A common counterargument is that every organisation has a purpose because every organisation exists to do something. By this logic, purpose is universal. Even criminal enterprises have objectives, intent and direction.

At one level, that argument is correct. But it also renders the concept almost meaningless.

A cartel has purpose. A scam operation has purpose. A weapons trafficker has purpose. If purpose simply means intent, then the word loses all useful distinction. It becomes nothing more than a synonym for objective.

This is precisely why the International Organization for Standardization ISO 37011 – Guidance for the Governance of Organizations by Purpose, due for publication later this year, matters so much. It helps clarify what purpose actually means in a governance context.

Under ISO 37011, purpose is not simply about having an objective or ambition. It is about an organisation’s ‘reason for being’, expressed through the value it creates for stakeholders and society. That distinction is critical because it moves purpose beyond intent and into the realm of legitimacy.

In other words, purpose is not merely about what an organisation seeks to achieve. It is about whether the organisation’s existence creates genuine value beyond shareholder returns. Once viewed through this lens, another uncomfortable truth becomes hard to ignore.

Not every business model is inherently compatible with purpose as a force for societal value creation.

That sentence may unsettle those who believe purpose is universally available to all businesses, but it deserves serious consideration.

Consider industries whose economic models depend heavily on addiction, deception, exploitation or engineered dependency. Tobacco remains the clearest example. A tobacco company can improve governance, reduce emissions, invest in harm reduction products and articulate a sophisticated purpose statement. But if its core economic engine remains dependent on selling addictive products known to damage human health, there is an unavoidable contradiction at the heart of the business model.

The same question increasingly applies to certain parts of the gambling sector, exploitative payday lending, and even aspects of social media whose economics depend on monetising attention through outrage, addiction and division. Likewise, parts of the fossil fuel industry now face a difficult tension. Major oil companies frequently speak of powering a sustainable future, yet in many cases continue allocating the vast majority of capital expenditure toward hydrocarbon extraction. That does not automatically invalidate their intentions, but it does raise a legitimate question — when capital allocation tells a different story from corporate rhetoric, which should we believe?

Usually, the money.

That is not to say such businesses cannot improve. Many can and should become more responsible. Harm can be reduced. Practices can evolve. But becoming more responsible is not necessarily the same as becoming purpose-driven. Unless the underlying economics change, the contradiction often remains.

By contrast, genuinely purpose-driven organisations tend to exhibit something quite different: coherence.

Take Patagonia for example. Whatever one thinks of the brand, there is a clear alignment between what it says and what it does. Its environmental purpose is not confined to marketing language. It is reflected in product design, supply chain choices, activism and governance. When Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the company so future profits would support environmental causes, he did something few leaders are willing to do. He aligned governance with purpose. That is the real test that Patagonia can credibly claim to have passed. The company is not perfect—no business is—but it demonstrates something rare: coherence.

Critically, this is also why profit should never be framed as the enemy of purpose. Profit matters enormously. Without profit, businesses cannot survive, invest or create value at scale. But profit is an outcome, not a purpose. Profit is to business what oxygen is to life; essential, but not the reason for living.

The best organisations understand this instinctively. They recognise that enduring commercial success increasingly depends on creating genuine value for society, not extracting value from it.

Ultimately, purpose reveals itself not in language but in trade-offs. It becomes visible when leadership must choose between short-term gain and long-term legitimacy; between what is easy and what is right; between what can be justified financially and what can be defended ethically.

This, perhaps, is the deepest reason purpose remains elusive for so many organisations.
Genuine purpose is demanding precisely because it exposes contradiction. It forces organisations to confront the uncomfortable gap between what they say and what they are structurally designed to do. It requires courage, discipline and, above all, honesty.

And that leads to the question every organisation should periodically ask itself.
If this organisation disappeared tomorrow, would the world lose something of genuine value? Or would there simply be one less mechanism for extracting profit?

That final question cuts through branding with brutal efficiency. Because in the end, purpose is not about sounding good. It’s about being worthy of existence.

Neil Gaught On Purpose: In Conversation is a monthly interview series featuring leaders, thinkers and practitioners at the forefront of purpose-driven business.

Each conversation goes beyond the rhetoric to explore how purpose is being applied in practice, across strategy, governance, culture and performance.

At a time of growing complexity and uncertainty, the series brings together diverse perspectives to examine a simple but increasingly urgent question: What does it take to build a business that creates enduring value for both shareholders and society?

Qiulae Wong is a business leader, sustainability advocate and politician. Before becoming leader of Opportunity, she held senior roles in ethical business, climate action and systems change, including serving as Country Director of B Lab Aotearoa New Zealand and working in sustainability consulting at KPMG. A passionate advocate for a more inclusive, sustainable and opportunity-rich future, she brings a distinctive blend of business, environmental and social perspectives to New Zealand politics.

NG: You have spent much of your career in human rights, ethical business, B Corp, climate transition and the wellbeing economy. What made politics feel like the next necessary step?

QW: I feel like I’ve spent my career unravelling a big ball of yarn. Getting closer and closer to the root cause of some of our gnarly social and environmental problems. Politics feels like the next step here; it is the system change lever that we need to transition to a more sustainable, inclusive economy.

As a mum of two young girls, I am also so much more impatient for change than I’ve ever been before. I want the New Zealand they grow up in to be one that is more united and where we have a shared, aspirational vision for their futures.

NG: Political parties are often judged by their policies. But what role should purpose play in politics and how does that shape the way you think about and lead Opportunity?

QW: I think it’s a really interesting idea to bring the concept of purpose into politics. We know that in business it drives better performance and greater collaboration because everyone is working towards that North Star. For us, ‘Opportunity’ is literally our purpose; creating opportunity for every New Zealander to pursue their potential, in ways that are socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. I think that would be a great purpose for New Zealand as a whole!

NG: You have spent a lot of your career around purpose-led business. Do you think New Zealand businesses have a particular opportunity to lead differently, in a way that reflects who we are, what we value, and what New Zealand stands for?

QW: New Zealand has some awesome innate values; things like fairness, innovation, good work ethic, a quirky sense of humour. Many successful Kiwi businesses already demonstrate those values and I’d love for us to double-down on it even further. Particularly in a world where trust is being eroded in many places, our values-led — or purpose-led — approach could be a real competitive advantage.

NG: Political parties often talk about economic growth, housing fairness and environmental responsibility as if they are competing priorities. Do you think that tension is real, or are we still using the wrong frame?

QW: I think we’re starting to see clear evidence that that’s the wrong frame. Long term economic growth and prosperity is not possible if people can’t afford homes and nature is suffering. We’ve not been good at measuring those social and environmental things in the past but huge progress is being made on this. The challenge is that it requires a mindset shift for society to move to a model where we value our natural and human resources to the same degree as our financial resources. But we have to do that if we want a more stable and sustainable world.

NG: Politics is often framed through the lens of left, right and centre. But do those labels still help us solve the challenges New Zealand faces, or is there a case for a more purpose-driven approach to politics?

QW: The left-right framing of politics is extremely outdated and doesn’t capture the multitude of views one individual might hold. You could be a successful business person that believes in capitalism and also think that higher taxes are necessary. You could believe that governments should be small and also that we should devote more hours to community gardens. I think starting with either left or right ideology is dangerous and means we don’t look at all the possible solutions with an open mind.

Life was never black and white and it’s even less black and white today. We need an approach to politics that can respond to some big challenges like climate change, AI, and global instability and I do believe that a purpose-driven approach can achieve that. It means you can be nimble and responsive but also focused on the bigger picture of achieving your purpose.

NG: Opportunity has often been associated with detailed policy thinking. Under your leadership, how do you turn good policy into something people can feel, trust and belong to?

QW: People connect with people, not policy. We need to earn the trust of New Zealanders that we are the right people to represent them in Parliament so that’s our focus this year. If they want to validate that we are well-equipped to implement some very good policy, we’ve got lots of bedtime reading for them too!

NG: You have spoken about your daughters as one of your great sources of inspiration. When you think about the New Zealand they will inherit, what gives you hope, and what do you most want politics to make possible for their generation?

QW: I am filled with hope when I meet the countless New Zealanders who are innovating and contributing to a better future. Not because anyone asked them to, but just because they care about our country and their community, and because they love the challenge of solving these tricky problems. Solar aircrafts that help with natural disasters, plastic-free clothing, eateries focused on real community connection. I hope we can build a society where that is the norm and is celebrated as a part of everyday life.

In defence of purpose before policy

Why governments need an organising purpose before they can decide what to spend, what to prioritise and what kind of future they are trying to create.

The response to a recent LinkedIn post I made about defence spending surprised me. In just a few days, more than 27,000 people viewed the post and quite a few took the time to comment, react or share it. Many agreed. Some strongly disagreed. What interested me most, however, was not the level of support or opposition. It was the conversation itself.

The post was prompted by comments made by US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth regarding New Zealand’s defence spending. As a former soldier, I questioned why smaller nations are being encouraged to spend more on defence while simultaneously facing growing pressures in areas such as healthcare, education, housing and environmental resilience.

What followed was a fascinating debate. Some argued that New Zealand benefits from a security umbrella largely funded by larger powers and therefore has an obligation to contribute more. Others questioned whether the actions of those same powers sometimes contribute to the instability being used to justify ever-increasing military expenditure. Many focused on the difficult trade-offs facing governments as they attempt to balance competing demands with finite resources.

As I worked my way through the comments, it became clear that defence spending was merely the catalyst for a much bigger conversation. Beneath the arguments about military budgets, alliances and geopolitics sat a more fundamental question about how governments should decide what to prioritise.
Which led me to a question that sits at the heart of almost every political debate, yet is surprisingly rarely asked: What is the purpose of government?

The question sounds deceptively simple.

Governments spend enormous amounts of time discussing policies. Defence spending. Healthcare funding. Housing affordability. Education reform. Infrastructure investment. Climate action. Taxation. Economic growth. Yet what often gets lost is the question that should come first: What is the purpose these policies are intended to serve?

Over the past two decades I have argued that organisations perform best when they are guided by a clear purpose. Purpose is not a slogan or a marketing statement, but as an organising idea that helps leaders make decisions, allocate resources, navigate competing priorities and maintain direction through uncertainty.

The same principle applies to governments. Government is not simply there to administer budgets, pass legislation or win elections. Its purpose should be to create and sustain the conditions in which citizens, communities and future generations can flourish.

Once purpose is understood in those terms, policy begins to look different. Purpose comes first. Policy follows.

Indeed, one of the great misunderstandings of modern politics is the tendency to treat policies as ends in themselves rather than as means of achieving a larger objective. The political left tends to favour certain solutions. The political right tends to favour others. The centre attempts to blend elements of both. Yet left, right and centre are not purposes. They are competing theories about how best to achieve a purpose.

Just as two business leaders may share a common objective while disagreeing about strategy, political parties may share a broad desire to improve the wellbeing of citizens while holding very different views about how to achieve it. The problem arises when ideology becomes more important than purpose.

When that happens, policies begin competing with one another for attention and resources without reference to a larger organising idea. Healthcare advocates argue for more healthcare spending. Education advocates argue for more education spending. Defence advocates argue for more defence spending. Environmental advocates argue for greater investment in climate resilience and ecological restoration. Each can make a compelling case. Yet viewed in isolation, politics risks becoming little more than a competition between worthy causes.

Purpose provides the context within which those trade-offs can be made. It shifts the conversation from what we are doing to why we are doing it.

Defence, education, infrastructure and environmental protection are not objectives in themselves. They are investments. The question is not whether each is important — they all clearly are — but how each contributes to the broader purpose a government is seeking to fulfil. Without that connection, policy risks becoming a collection of competing priorities rather than a coherent strategy for national wellbeing.

Viewed through this lens, the recent defence debate becomes particularly interesting.

As a former soldier, I understand the importance of national security, military capability and preparedness. Nations have a responsibility to protect their sovereignty, their interests and their people. The world is becoming increasingly uncertain and it would be naïve to pretend otherwise.

But if government exists to create the conditions in which citizens and communities can flourish, then the question is not simply whether defence matters. The question is how best to achieve security in service of that purpose.
For some nations, that answer may involve significant military expenditure if their purpose is to project power, preserve strategic dominance or shape the international order. For others, geography, relationships, diplomacy, trade, development assistance, international cooperation and regional influence may deliver greater security relative to the resources invested.

Defence capability remains important. But it becomes one tool among many. The objective is not military strength for its own sake. The objective is national flourishing. This distinction matters because nations must constantly decide where to allocate scarce resources. As I indicated in my LinkedIn post, every dollar spent in one area is unavailable elsewhere.

The challenge therefore is not deciding whether defence matters, but determining the appropriate contribution defence should make relative to healthcare, education, housing, infrastructure, environmental stewardship and economic resilience in pursuit of a common purpose.

There is, however, another dimension to the discussion. Purpose is not only useful for helping governments decide what to do; it also helps them decide whose objectives they are serving.

In an increasingly interconnected world, nations are constantly influenced by allies, trading partners, international institutions and geopolitical realities. That is entirely normal. Yet before committing scarce resources, governments have a responsibility to ask whether the policies they pursue primarily serve their own purpose or help advance the purpose of others.

This is not an argument against alliances or international cooperation. On the contrary, purpose becomes even more important when nations work together. Countries that understand their own objectives are far better placed to build effective partnerships while remaining true to their own interests, responsibilities and long-term aspirations.

This, too, is a question of governance because good governance requires clarity of purpose before commitment of resources.

In business, organisations often lose their way when purpose becomes unclear and strategy becomes disconnected from it. The same, it seems, happens to nations.

Without a coherent organising purpose that aligns decisions, priorities and resources in service of a shared vision, governments risk becoming collections of policies rather than architects of a future.

When Purpose Meets Power

This week, in a California courtroom, two of the most powerful figures in modern technology fought over a question that may help shape the future of humanity itself.

On the surface, the case centred on the governance and direction of OpenAI. But beneath the legal arguments lay something far larger; who gets to shape the technologies now influencing how billions of people live, work, think, communicate and increasingly understand the world around them.

For all Silicon Valley’s wealth, brilliance and mythology, it remains a remarkably small bubble of power. Yet over the past two decades, decisions made there have profoundly reshaped politics, culture, economies, attention spans, human relationships and public trust itself through the rise of social media, smartphones, algorithms and now artificial intelligence.

At the centre of that bubble, Elon Musk and Sam Altman found themselves arguing not merely about technology or ownership, but about purpose.

Musk argued that OpenAI had abandoned its original mission as a non-profit organisation created to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity. OpenAI, led by Sam Altman, successfully defended itself, with the court dismissing Musk’s claims largely on procedural grounds, ruling they had been filed too late.

Legally, OpenAI won. But strategically and philosophically, the case leaves behind a much bigger question for us all to ponder. What happens when purpose collides with scale, competition and capital?

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research organisation with an unusually ambitious mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefited humanity as a whole rather than a small number of corporations or governments. That aspiration was not peripheral to the organisation. It was the organisation.

Yet within a decade, OpenAI had evolved into one of the most commercially powerful companies in the world, attracting vast investment, building deep partnerships with Microsoft and reportedly positioning itself for a future valuation approaching US$1 trillion.

In fairness, there is a practical reality here. Developing frontier AI requires extraordinary amounts of capital, infrastructure and talent. The costs are staggering. The argument from OpenAI’s leadership is that remaining purely non-profit was simply unrealistic and never commercially sustainable at the scale required to compete globally.

This is where the story becomes relevant far beyond artificial intelligence. Because many organisation begin life animated by an ideal. A belief. A cause. A desire to change something meaningful in the world. But as they grow real world pressures accumulate. Investors demand returns. Markets become more competitive. Governance becomes more complex. Scale introduces compromise and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the centre of gravity begins to shift. Purpose, once the organising idea, becomes the supporting narrative.

“The real goal of my companies is to maximise the possibility that humanity has a great future.”
Elon Musk, January 22nd, 2026

This is not confined to technology. It happens across sectors. Businesses launch with a mission to improve health, strengthen communities, transform education, build better homes or accelerate sustainability. Yet over time, commercial mechanics often begin to dominate the very purpose that originally drove initial interest in them.

The irony is that this frequently happens not because leaders are malicious, but because because growth, scale and commercial pressure exert their own gravitational force.

That matters because we are moving further into an era in which trust, legitimacy and long-term resilience are becoming increasingly tied to whether organisations are genuinely aligned to what they claim to stand for.

Recent research continues to reinforce this reality. Studies increasingly show that purpose-driven organisations outperform peers in areas ranging from employee engagement and customer loyalty to innovation, resilience and long-term financial performance. At the same time, public scepticism toward corporate rhetoric continues to grow. The gap between what organisations say and what they actually do is now under far greater scrutiny than it was even five years ago.

Artificial intelligence intensifies that tension dramatically. Unlike many previous technologies, AI does not merely influence products and services. It has the potential to reshape labour markets, political systems, education, creativity, security and even human relationships themselves.

Decisions made by a remarkably small group of organisations and individuals may affect billions of people.

Which is why the OpenAI case matters. Not because Elon Musk lost. Nor because Sam Altman won. But because it exposed, in full public view, one of the defining leadership tensions of our age — whether organisations can remain genuinely aligned to their founding purpose and be commercially successful.

The organisations that succeed in the coming decade are unlikely to be those that simply speak most loudly about purpose. We are moving beyond that phase now. Purpose itself is becoming operational, measurable and increasingly tied to governance, systems and decision-making.

Nor does commercial success require organisations to abandon purpose as they grow. In many cases, the opposite may prove true.

Some of the world’s most commercially successful organisations have demonstrated that a clearly defined purpose can help shape innovation, attract talent, build trust, strengthen resilience and create long-term competitive advantage. Companies such as Patagonia, Unilever and Musk’s Tesla have shown that commercial ambition and broader societal contribution are not necessarily opposing forces when aligned effectively.

The challenge is not whether organisations can be commercially successful whilst remaining purpose-driven. The challenge is whether leaders possess the discipline, governance and courage required to ensure that purpose continues to shape direction, priorities, incentives and behaviour as commercial pressures intensify.

That is where many organisations struggle. Because purpose is relatively easy to articulate when conditions are favourable. The real test comes when growth accelerates, investors apply pressure, markets shift and difficult trade-offs emerge. In those moments, purpose stops being rhetoric and starts becoming governance.

The real differentiator in the years ahead will therefore be whether organisations can maintain coherence between ambition, behaviour, incentives and long-term consequence as scale and complexity increase.

In other words, whether purpose remains the organising idea, or merely the origin story.