Remember what you are here for

Stuart Mills
May 16
4 min read

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Refugees arrived at a Salesforce training programme asking for help. They had been forced through something horrendous. They needed a path back into work. And at first glance, they looked like a problem – not in the budget, not in the plan.

Our primary purpose was to find talent for the Salesforce ecosystem. These people needed opportunity. We needed people. Our training classes were not full. Adding two or three seats cost nothing extra. We found the creative path.

That is a story about what happens when a leader remembers what they are there for.

The confusion at the heart of a crisis

The press is full of it: leadership in crisis. Trust collapsing. Institutions struggling to justify their existence. Yet the diagnosis rarely gets to the root.

The root is this: we have asked leaders to manage financial positions and called it leadership. It is not. It is administration in an expensive suit.

Leadership begins with a question most governance rooms never properly ask: what is this organisation actually for?

Apple is there to make devices that help people do what they want with them. The Royal Navy is there to defend a country and an ideal. A government is there to protect, educate, house, and enable its citizens. The money – vital as it is – is the fuel. It is not the fire.

When leaders confuse the fuel for the fire, everything downstream suffers: decisions become short-term, talent becomes a cost line, and citizens become fiscal variables.

A myth presented as a law

Shareholder primacy – the doctrine that a company exists primarily to generate financial returns for its owners – is not ancient corporate law. It is a specific ideological choice, crystallised by the Chicago School in the 1980s, that displaced a much older understanding: organisations as social instruments, chartered to deliver a specific utility.

Before that shift, this was well understood. Corporations were public-private collaborations. A debate in the 1930s between Berle and Dodd asked openly: to whom are directors responsible? That conversation was closed down, not resolved.

The myth is compounded by a legal misreading most boards have never questioned. Directors are not legally required to maximise shareholder value above all else. The Business Judgment Rule gives boards substantial protection to pursue long-term strategies. The case most often cited as proof of shareholder primacy – Dodge v. Ford – is routinely misread.

We built a myth. And then we started managing to it.

We inherited it, then chose not to question it. And we are living with the consequences.

Three logics – and where most leaders are stuck

Victoria Hurth, Ben Renshaw, and Lorenzo Fioramondi, co-authors of Beyond Profit – and Hurth one of the principal architects of ISO 37000, the first international standard on the governance of organisations – map the terrain most leaders are navigating without a map:

Logic 1 treats profit as the purpose. Social and ecological consequences are not the organisation's problem – they are externalities, priced elsewhere, by someone else.

Logic 2 adds ESG metrics and stakeholder commitments. Leaders acknowledge harm and try to reduce it. But the underlying governance structure – who is accountable, to whom, for what – remains unchanged. This is where many well-intentioned leaders are stuck: managing contradictory targets with high anxiety and no unifying purpose to guide them.

Logic 3 places long-term wellbeing at the centre. Purpose becomes the governing logic – and money assumes its proper role: a vital enabler of the work, not the point of it.

The trap of Logic 2 is that it is exhausting and ultimately insufficient. Most organisations inhabiting the headlines right now are caught here – enough awareness to feel the pressure, not enough structural change to resolve it.

The hardware and the software

Getting serious about purpose requires two things working in parallel.

The hardware is governance structure. ISO 37000 provides a framework: define purpose aligned with long-term social and ecological health, build oversight mechanisms that prevent quarterly pressure from silently overriding long-term intent, and establish accountability to stakeholders that includes future generations. The forthcoming ISO 37011 will provide even more specific guidance for purpose-led organisations – helping distinguish genuine transformation from greenwashing.

The software is leadership psychology. Leaders maintain distance from the consequences of their decisions through a set of well-rehearsed defences – what we might call "othering." Authentic listening dismantles those defences. Not structured stakeholder engagement sessions. Real listening – to the organisation as it actually is, to the communities you serve, and to what you yourself believe you are there for.

Neither works without the other. Governance without psychological honesty becomes compliance. Psychological work without structural change stays personal.

Three practical acts

If you lead from a boardroom or a cabinet room, here is where to channel energy first:

Name the ideology. Shareholder primacy is a choice, not a legal constraint. Saying so in the governance room opens space that most leaders do not realise they have been given.
Examine your governance hardware. Does your purpose actually govern decisions – including the difficult financial ones – or does it live in the mission statement and nowhere else?
Cultivate authentic listening. To your people, your customers, your communities, and to your own sense of why this organisation exists and what it is trying to ignite in the world.

The leadership challenge generating headlines is real. But it is a symptom. The underlying condition is a generation of leaders navigating by the wrong instrument – watching the money instead of steering toward the purpose.

As we say in England: a watched kettle never boils.

The refugees who arrived at that Salesforce training programme did not need charity.

They needed a leader who remembered what they were there for. So do our organisations. So do our governments.

Remember what you are here for.

Practical Acts of Leaders – Thinking, tinkering, leading transformation – so we get the future we choose.

This article was inspired by my discussion with Ivonne on the Progresivo Podcast. Check the clips out on:

Note: Links take you to time conversation at 37:25.