I have been writing and talking about the merging of enterprise and social enterprise for a long time. Evolved enterprises, firms of endearment, combined with doughnut economics or Buddhist economics, with social capital as a business tool, and a focus on longevity and legacy.
Irrefutable logic
All compelling with irrefutable logic. Movement-, legacy-, and purpose-driven companies are more productive, successful, innovative, resilient, adaptable, etc. Treating employees, customers, and communities creates exceptional financial results. An “enlightened” approach to business can create exceptional value. It makes no sense not to embrace those principles. But it rarely happens. I have been scratching my head for quite a while now.
Why make it difficult?
Running a company where sales fights with customer service, finance battles R&D, and employees distrust management is hard. Sustaining motivation when people feel they’re selling out their customers or themselves is difficult. Working in dysfunctional organisational cultures that are cutthroat or highly political in ways that undermine the work itself is near impossible. Companies as living zombies. The daily grind of herding everyone in the same direction through monitoring, incentives, and consequences is a pain.
Aspirational companies
When a company’s mission is genuinely aspirational, people think, “I want to be part of that world.” In a world of broken promises and corporate betrayals, trust powers magnetic attraction. A mission-driven company has alliances instead of competition, attracts talent, has customer loyalty and full employee alignment. Straight from the playbook of “Exponential organisations”.
Incorruptible
That is why “Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great” by Eric Ries is a must-read. It is excellent. Combines the principles as described above with the practical tools. Because it is technical, it is not an easy read, but it is super interesting.
Short-termism
Why do investors keep on prioritising short-term profits over everything else? Why the spiralling cost of transit construction, the gutting of local journalism, the malignancy of social media, the stubborn persistence of medical errors, the fact that the owners of your local sports team drive you crazy, the “social contagion” of corporate layoffs, and why customer service would rather put you on hold than solve your problem. We’ve come to accept that the gradual corruption of successful companies is as natural and inevitable as gravity.
There is hope
In almost every industry, there are outlier companies that remain purpose-driven despite massive scale: Vanguard, Patagonia in apparel, Costco, Cloudfare. In fact, once you understand how these exceptional organisations are structured, you will realise that they violate practically every conventional business “best practice” we’ve been taught.
Exceptional companies
What do exceptional companies do. They have:
- An ambitious mission to maximise human flourishing, aligned with the business model so the company only makes more money by accomplishing more mission.
- An ethos that includes an unwavering commitment to principled decision-making.
- A commitment to “figure it out” when challenges arise. They find solutions that are both economically sustainable and mission-maximising.
- These companies are just as greedy as any traditional for-profit business. They’re just greedy for mission.
Profit as the maximisation of human flourishing. No longer numbers over craftsmanship, no more efficiency over everything, and with the stock price as the score.
We are at an inflexion point
Eric Ries thinks we are at an inflexion point. The exceptions are about to become the rule. Because corruption breaks the logic of capitalism itself. Every Ponzi scheme, every hidden externality, every unit of extracted value is a drag on our whole economy’s potential. These corruptions don’t just harm their immediate victims; they erode trust, increase transaction costs, and destroy the civic infrastructure that makes efficient markets possible. Transactions are meant to create value instead of destroying it.
The end of extractive thinking
Cost pricing at full natural capital cost. Consider restorative principles to your (future) business model. AI will inevitably make your value chain, and its positive and negative impacts, completely transparent. Assume you will pay for the negative impact and assume that positive impact will be part of your revenue model. For example, Philip Morris has $7 billion in annual net income, which sounds impressive until you realise that the tobacco industry imposes over $600 billion in healthcare and productivity costs annually in the US alone. Such companies destroy far more value than they create. They are profoundly unprofitable, and soon they will be held accountable.
Two things
It starts with two things. First, create something worth protecting. An incorruptible organisation begins with an aspirational mission aligned with human flourishing. Second, build with structural integrity. And the second part is the trick. Create the protection against short-termism (and corruption). If an organisation has a weak structure, it is vulnerable to being captured. Stopping shareholders from dismantling the ethos that laid the golden egg.
Graveyard
There is a graveyard full of companies that were killed off by greedy capitalists. WholeFoods, Sears, Polaroid, Cadbury, Toys “R” Us, Boeing, Wells Fargo, Silicon Valley Bank, FedMart, Johnson and Johnson to name a few. The causes are hostile takeovers, boardroom betrayal, succession failure, temptation to harvest, and mission drift. So you need to create defence mechanisms to stop this from happening. An institutional longevity architecture. A structure that protects the ethos or soul of a company and enables collective and emergent intelligence. A super organism with a healthy culture and supportive leadership. A healthy place to work.
Culture and trust
Culture and trust are the last battlegrounds. Like physical health, ethos and culture require daily practice and constant discernment. Every day, ethos either strengthens or decays. There is no steady state. Take a moment to reflect on the organisation you work for. Does it have an ethos, or is it drifting without one? Does it fight for human flourishing or against it? Is it creating value or extracting it? Are you shaping its ethos, or is it shaping yours?
Codify
Every company should codify its culture, write a manifesto, credo or charter, and enshrine it in governance through a constitution. Check out my strategic box. If you are not alligned and don’t get governance right, nothing else you do when building your products or your company will matter for the long term.
The mission as a legal obligation
That means that purpose is not a mission statement or a marketing slogan. It’s a specific legal obligation that tells companies what they must maximise and optimise for. A unified direction. An aligned business model so that it can only profit and grow by achieving the mission. And protected from external forces that can force or tempt it to act in ways counter to its purpose. Principles-driven.
Devoted Health
Ries uses Devoted Health as an example. Customers repeatedly say they feel like Devoted Health literally loves them. Their employees love working there. The guiding principle: “When making any decision, visualise the faces of your own family members and loved ones, then ask yourself: If this decision impacted them, what would you do? Then go do that thing, big or small”.
It is this simple
Because they deliver spectacular, loving service, the customers trust them. Because they trust them, they accept our offers of help. Because they accept the help, they keep customers healthy and well. Because they keep customers healthy and well, their costs are the lowest in the industry. Because their costs are the lowest in the industry, they can invest in the best benefits and the best service, which enables them to grow super fast.
Mission drive
The truth is that most companies are, at best, mission-hopeful. To be actually mission-driven requires something more deliberate. Ries calls this mission drive. Mission-driven companies structure their measurements as diagnostic tools, not as automatic decision-makers. Also:
- Internalise the mission so completely for people that betraying it would feel like betraying themselves
- Apply complete value accounting. Track all value created, not just what is captured.
- For each fiduciary commitment, maintain metrics that track that promise
- Build in metrics that fight each other and create natural tension
- Build structural safeguards
- Create a culture bank or tust battery. Every action either builds or degrades culture and trust.
- Create a dynamic leader’s guide (a systematic mapping of the crucial stories)
- Apply a two-way review. Harvest thousands of stories every year in the employee review process.
- Create the department of corporate purpose. Who’s responsible for keeping this alive? Purpose without power is just poetry. Give it teeth, and it becomes destiny.
You can decode what companies truly care about by watching what they do consistently. It is the difference between being coherent or incoherent. Organisational flowscore.
Constitutional governance
This cannot happen or be protected without hard-coding this into an organisation. Governance, properly understood, is a means not for protecting a particular entity but for protecting a mission itself. A founder is more like a lawgiver than just a business owner. Their ethos has the potential to remain a living reality long after their death, no matter how far-flung its constituent parts. You can do this by encoding the mission directly into the corporate charter. By creating a public benefit corporation (PBC) for example. Where neutral charters inadvertently create a legal duty to maximise shareholder value, PBCs commit to a high-level public benefit. By appointing mission guardians with super voting rights. By introducing a directors’ oath or pledge, committing to use their broad discretion to support the mission and consider it in every decision. When embedded in corporate bylaws or proxy statements, these pledges have real legal teeth.
Other ways to enshrine this are
- Tenured voting. If you’re going to give power to investors, weight it toward the long-term ones.
- Economic shares. Some companies go even further by issuing “economic shares” with minimal or zero votes, cleanly separating voting (reserved for citizens) from economics (open to everyone)
- Codetermination. Give board representation to the employees
- Steward ownership. Rather than have investors and stakeholders compete for influence, make the stakeholders the steward-owners.
- ESOP
Spiritual holding company (SHC)
Imagine creating a spiritual holding company. A spiritual holding company is a separate entity with governance authority over one or more organisations, designed specifically to protect and advance their spirit and core mission over the long term.
- It’s a distinct entity. The SHC is embodied as a separate entity, apart from the for-profit engine(s)
- It has governance authority.
- Its existence is perpetual. The SHC is designed to outlast any individual founder, executive, or investor.
- It’s autonomous. The SHC operates with sufficient independence to resist short-term pressures that might compromise the mission.
- It enables raising external capital.
- It has a bidirectional relationship with each organization.
They already exist. Zeiss, LEGO, IKEA, Patagonia (of course), Mozilla Firefox, Nordisk, Rolex, Carlsberg, Vanguard, Tony’s Chocolonely, etc. It is growing. The Copenhagen Stock Exchange SHCs already account for at least 50% of the market’s total capitalisation.
Create a governance fortress
The solution is to combine many overlapping protections. Each element reinforces the others, creating what are called “auxiliary precautions” that guard against mission drift. Think of it as plate-mail armor with overlapping plates to ensure that, even if one is pierced, the others hold. Once that is done, you move up a level.
Create a constellation
Today, Mondragon is Spain’s tenth-largest business.With more than seventy thousand employees, operations on four continents, and annual revenues exceeding €11 billion in 2024, Mondragon has become an industrial powerhouse. By conventional metrics like growth, longevity, diversification, and global reach, Mondragon is a business success story for the ages. An example of what Ries calls constellations: multiple separate entities that orbit around a common purpose so tightly they appear to be a single organisation. Each entity maintains independence while exerting gravitational pull on the others, creating a coherent whole that customers, employees, and even investors perceive as one company. This structure is everywhere.
Create mission lock
Multiple entities, interdependent with a common purpose. The result is a mission-locked constellation, where each protects the others’ purpose. A mission-locked constellation redefines what we mean by a “company” altogether. When properly designed, the mission controls the entire constellation because the constellation’s very existence is a by-product of the mission. What would it look like to intentionally build this way from the beginning? And create a constellation so mission-locked that it could maintain its purpose for generations. With a mission-locked research entity, with its own board and governance mandate, would make this structural deception impossible.
Create mission transmission
Mission-driven organisations should embrace mission transmission as a core corporate discipline, as fundamental as strategy or human resources. It’s the systematic practice of ensuring that every transaction and relationship extends an organization’s values beyond its own walls. The following five can ensure any organisation transmits, rather than undercuts, its mission through every transaction:
- The first practice is simple: Consider mission in every transaction.
- Make mission the tiebreaker. When all other factors are roughly equal, value alignment should determine the choice.
- Third, clear the path for allies. Removing artificial purchasing barriers and investing in aligned partners builds an ecosystem that collectively amplifies the mission.
- Signal with costly commitment. People have to believe in the organization’s commitment, and the most credible way to accomplish this is through actions that require real resources.
- Create mechanisms for recourse. Give external partners real channels for redress when promises aren’t met. The most credible accountability comes through independent third parties: Companies increasingly use external certifiers like B Lab for benefit corporations, LTSE for governance standards, or Fairtrade International for supply chains.
Create coordinated action
It is all about the mission multiplier. The ultimate trick is developing industry standards. Standards are mission transmissions on a grand scale. They can reshape entire industries and reach lives on the other side of the world. They create value for everyone while positioning the creator as the permanent leader. You will need crystal clarity, independent verification, and aligned consequences. Think Volvo seatbelts, shipping containers, B-Corp, the Purpose Pledge, etc.
Finally, there is civic infrastructure
Civic infrastructure consists of organisations that facilitate the flourishing of other institutions and communities by creating beneficial constraints, building shared trust and connection, and solving collective action problems that enable public goods. If a particular organisation suddenly changed its rules, disappeared, or lost the public’s trust, would entire sectors struggle to function? If yes, you’re looking at civic infrastructure. Our civilisation depends, to a surprising degree, on the entrepreneurs who build the organisations that govern entire sectors—the infrastructure that society itself runs on. Examples usch as the long-term stock exchange, Cost Plus Drugs, Linux, Wikipedia, Credit Unions, and the Khan Academy
The last chapter of the book is about you
Consumerism. You are traffic. You have agency. Every transaction transmits force. Every moment of attention creates pull. Every choice adds mass to the order it supports. You, the customer, the subscriber, the potential investor, the employee, have power. And we give this power away so cheaply, so thoughtlessly. We buy from whoever has the slickest marketing or the most convenient platform. We work for companies we don’t believe in—sometimes because we genuinely cannot find any other viable option but often because we’ve been wounded into a cynical belief that it doesn’t matter or “that’s just how things are.”
Choose
Our individual choices can solidify and strengthen what is or draw energy away from the status quo and toward far better alternatives. Even when you think nobody is looking, every choice you make reverberates in gravitational waves. Selective pressure, carefully applied, can redirect whole organisations toward human flourishing. A company sees demand, competitors take notice, suppliers adapt, regulations follow. Standards don’t fall from the sky; they emerge from the gravitational pull of millions of individual choices. Your choices matter. You can lend your gravity to organisations that commit to maximising human flourishing, that embrace love and trust.
