This week’s Build seems to have inadvertently landed on a theme around the uncomfortable gap between corporate rhetoric and reality. These three articles share a common thread about the limitations of aspiration when confronted with the messy complexity of real organisational life. They challenge us to move beyond comforting abstractions that founders tend to rely upon on towards harder, more honest questions about how we lead and what we’re building.
RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #1
Purpose is pointless
Margaret Heffernan looks at how Johnson & Johnson – a business once celebrated for its ethical credo and corporate purpose – systematically endangered consumers through products including talc-based baby powder and opioids despite decades of internal warnings. She raises fundamental questions about whether purpose can ever meaningfully make a difference to people’s behaviour in businesses.
My take:
I love Margaret’s writing as it really forces founders to think. In this article I liked her call to abandon “magic words” and instead ask adult questions about how profits are achieved. If you still believe that articulating values alone can shape organisational behaviour, you need to read what she says about acknowledging trade-offs rather than hiding behind abstract nouns.
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RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #2
The paradox of organisation building
In this article Andrew Ormerod explains that building organisational capability is the CEO’s most important responsibility but it rarely appears explicitly in their diary – because it happens through everything they do rather than as discrete tasks. He suggests that having a clear vision for the kind of organisation you want to build and maintaining it through regular conversations rather than delegation to HR is what enables founders to shape behaviour and make consistent decisions that actually build organisational capacity.
My take:
I wish I’d written this article myself. It’s spot on and is also a refreshingly practical counterpoint to Margaret’s article, acknowledging that organisation-building can’t be reduced to statements or systems. It has to be actively maintained through dialogue and vision. I liked Andrew’s paradox that the most important work is never explicitly scheduled, but I did wonder whether the emphasis on conversation and vision might itself become another form of comforting abstraction unless used alongside more specific. accountability mechanisms
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RECOMMENDED THIS WEEK #3
Work: The four big shifts
Rishad Tobaccowala identifies four fundamental transformations reshaping work: the uncoupling of work from traditional jobs, the shift towards agentic and fractionalised employees, the need for leaders to develop learning and unlearning capabilities and the emergence of AI-first organisational designs.
My take:
I included this piece as it forces founders to think about how building organisations must now take account of workforces that are predominantly non-human or distributed. When reading Rishad’s line about reconsidering “every aspect of our work and career” alongside the other articles, I found myself pondering whether this disruption offers an opportunity to build something genuinely better rather than simply automating many of our existing dysfunctions at work.
