When Business People magazine profiled Ambassador Enterprises, I made a joke: finally, my mother might understand what I do for a living.
It was a joke. Mostly.
The problem was not my title. The problem was the object of the work. Most companies can be introduced by what they make or sell. Shoes. Software. Steel. An investment firm turns capital into returns, but even that description leaves something important in the dark. Much of what an organization creates cannot be held in the hand, entered into inventory, or announced at the end of a quarter. It creates judgment and dependence, trust and suspicion, courage and the habit of looking away. It creates people who have learned what responsibility feels like, and people who have learned how efficiently it can be passed to someone else.
The article left me with a question that has followed me ever since:
What does a business make besides money?
Every enterprise produces two kinds of results. One appears in reports: products, services, jobs, revenue, and returns. The other walks out the door each evening, carrying the company home in its voice, its habits, and sometimes its sleep.
One result is measured. The other is lived.
The Company We Keep
Company is an intimate word. We keep company with friends. We seek company when silence grows too heavy. Then Monday arrives, and we say that we work for a company, as though the meanings had nothing to do with one another.
They do.
Company belongs to the same family of words as companion, whose roots evoke one who breaks bread with another. Before the company became a structure on an organization chart, the word remembered a table. Business may be conducted through contracts, capital, systems, and screens, but its oldest image is still human beings sharing bread.
Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher who placed habit at the center of moral life, argued that we become just by doing just things, courageous by doing courageous things, and temperate by practicing temperance. Character is not luggage we pack once and carry, finished, into the world. It is made through repetition.
Workplaces are architectures of repetition. The meetings recur. The deadlines return. The same kinds of truth are welcomed, softened, postponed, or quietly buried. Philip W. Jackson, an American scholar of education and psychology, called the unspoken lessons of a classroom its hidden curriculum. Companies have one too. Long before an employee can recite the stated values, the institution has taught what deserves attention, who may question power, which failures can be confessed, and how much honesty a room can bear.
This is why leadership development cannot end with competency.
Competency asks, What can you do?
Character asks, What will you do with it, and for whom?
An executive may be brilliant at strategy and still diminish every room they enter. A manager may reach every target while teaching a team that fear is the price of performance. An organization may become more capable while its people become less candid, less generous, and less able to act without permission.
Biology offers an unfriendly correction to the language of business: not everything that grows is healthy.
Alasdair MacIntyre, the Scottish American moral philosopher, distinguished between goods internal to a practice and goods external to it. Internal goods are the forms of excellence discovered by doing worthy work well. External goods include money, status, prestige, and power.
Institutions need those external goods. Capital permits investment. Authority permits action. Influence opens doors. Yet when the rewards cease to serve the work and begin to rule it, the institution slowly consumes the purpose it was built to sustain.
Money can feed a practice. It can also devour one.
Profit keeps an enterprise alive. It cannot tell us what the enterprise is alive for.
Charles Handy, the Irish writer and organizational thinker, described a good business as a “community with a purpose, not a piece of property.” Property can be managed. A community must be cultivated, which is slower, stranger, and far more demanding because the soil has opinions.
In the magazine interview, I expressed the same conviction this way:
“Success involves bringing out the best in others, rather than surpassing them.”
That is what I mean by integration: performance joined to character, enterprise success joined to human development, and ambition made large enough to include someone besides the person who possesses it.
But language this agreeable is always in danger of becoming wallpaper. The test arrives when the words become expensive.
What Purpose Costs
Purpose is easy when it agrees with profit. Its meaning appears when the two part company.
Organizations surround themselves with admirable nouns: integrity, courage, respect, responsibility. Employees learn the real vocabulary through verbs. They notice who gets promoted, what gets funded, which conduct is excused, whose warning is heard, and who is asked to become smaller so that a powerful person can remain comfortable.
They read the statement on the wall. Then they watch the decisions made in the room.
Every organization writes its purpose twice, once in language and once in consequence. Only the second version is binding.
Purpose behaves less like a slogan than a constitution. Its meaning is established through precedent. A valuable client asks for an exception. A gifted executive humiliates colleagues but continues to deliver. An attractive investment promises excellent returns while requiring the institution to become something it has repeatedly claimed not to be.
Each decision becomes case law.
None of these choices arrives dressed as villainy. Most arrive looking perfectly respectable, carrying a spreadsheet and asking everyone to be practical.
I know that temptation because I am not standing outside it. Urgency is persuasive. Prestige is flattering. Financial logic can make a compromise sound almost virtuous, particularly when the first concession is small and the second can be described as consistency. This is precisely why purpose needs practice. Good intentions are weakest at the moment we are most certain of our own.
Research by Claudine Gartenberg of The Wharton School, Andrea Prat of Columbia University, and George Serafeim of Harvard Business School, based on 456,666 employee responses across 429 publicly traded companies in the United States, found that purpose by itself was not associated with stronger financial performance. The more consequential pattern appeared when purpose was joined by clarity from management, especially in the perceptions of middle managers and professional staff.
In ordinary language, people must be able to find their work inside the purpose. They must know not only what the institution says, but what the words require on Tuesday morning when the budget is tight and the choice is inconvenient.
Purpose is not decoration around strategy. It is discipline placed upon ambition.
A purpose statement tells us what an organization believes. Its choices under pressure tell us whether anyone else should believe it.
The Balance Sheet We Do Not Publish
If decisions reveal an organization’s purpose, they also leave something behind in its people.
An enterprise leaves fingerprints on the nervous system. It changes what people notice, what they fear, what they dare to say aloud, and what they eventually stop noticing at all.
I have begun to think that every business keeps two balance sheets. The first records what the organization owns and owes. The second records what the work is producing in people: judgment or mere compliance, candor or strategic silence, agency or learned helplessness, trust or the exhaustion of having to perform trust while feeling none.
The first balance sheet is audited. The second audits us.
Some profits are purchased with losses that accounting cannot see. A business that creates wealth by impoverishing the judgment, courage, or dignity of those who create it has not escaped loss. It has chosen an accounting system too narrow to recognize the expense.
I now carry four questions into my work with leaders and institutions:
Are people gaining judgment, or merely becoming better at compliance?
Do our incentives make truth easier or more dangerous to tell?
Does success enlarge the agency of others, or concentrate it in fewer hands?
Would we want the habits formed here to follow people home?
These questions do not replace financial discipline. They complete it, because the future of an enterprise depends not only on what its people produce, but on what producing it is doing to them.
The View from the Summit
I once said that we do not climb mountains so the world can see us, but so that we can see the world more clearly.
I would add something now. The danger of altitude is not simply that we might fall. It is that people below can begin to look small.
Success gives leaders altitude. Worthy leadership turns altitude into perspective. It refuses the optical illusion by which human beings become headcount, communities become markets, and consequences become numbers clean enough to fit inside a cell.
Numbers matter. So does the stubborn reality that every number eventually returns to a human life.
If my mother asked me now what I do for a living, I would try a shorter answer:
I help leaders notice the second thing their business is making.
Long after the quarterly report has been filed and forgotten, that second result will still be walking around in the world.
The question is not whether business forms us. It is what we are becoming through it, and what others may become through us.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Third edition. Hackett Publishing, 2019. See Book Two.
Davis, Tammy. “Soul Purpose.” Business People. January 3, 2024. Photography by Jeffrey Crane.
Gartenberg, Claudine, Andrea Prat, and George Serafeim. “Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance.” Organization Science 30, number 1, 2019, pages 1 to 18.
Handy, Charles. “What’s a Business For?” Harvard Business Review 80, number 12, December 2002, pages 49 to 55.
Jackson, Philip W. Life in Classrooms. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Third edition. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. See chapter 14.
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. “Companion.” Oxford University Press.