Our Bright Future
How purpose-driven businesses win in chaotic times
(and why you can’t just market your way out of this mess)
TL;DR: The future is bright for purpose-driven businesses, but only if they have real and verifiable alignment between what they say externally and what they do internally.
We all feel it – the world is a lot right now.
Late-stage capitalism, climate crisis, wars, inflation, global destabilization, growing authoritarianism. The term “polycrisis” has entered our everyday lives, and for good reason: We’ve been experiencing truly unprecedented levels of unprecedented situations.
No doubt, leading an organization through this volatility is hard. It’s not just a bad quarter or a rough news cycle – it’s now the air we breathe, the water we swim in. But especially for those businesses that claim to care about more than profit – the ones marketing a triple bottom line approach – how you move forward during this time matters. Because when trust is low and people are skeptical, just claiming yourself “purpose driven” or “mission led” no longer gets you a pass.
That playbook that told you if you just articulate your purpose clearly enough, be compelling enough – then people will trust you? It worked once. But it was made for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. One where trust was not nearly as shaky as it is now.
Everything we’ve experienced the last several years is telling us loud and clear that we need something different – something calibrated for the times we’re actually in, not for a glorified past that will never return. Now is the moment that will divide organizations into two clear categories: where one retreats into louder messaging, tighter control, and more elaborate performance, and the other lets the old playbook die and builds something more real, more purposeful, more made for the future.
The organizations that will define this era will not be the loudest. They will be the ones whose internal reality matches their external brand promise.
All of these conditions lead us to the truth behind this essay and my entire practice:
Faking purpose causes more harm than honest indifference.
Organizations that want to matter – and want to last – have to stop declaring values and start earning them. They have to build bold inside, so that they can stand bold outside.
The Pre-2020 Playbook Isn’t Working
What we’re living through right now is not just a change in vibes or preferences. It’s a structural decline in trust, where many of the institutions once granted legitimacy by default (media, government, the social contract itself) are now openly met with suspicion.
But alongside this trust collapse, there’s something worth paying attention to in the business space: the organizations that are winning are not necessarily the biggest or the most visible. They’re the most resonant, precisely because they’re leading with values, and also because they can demonstrate the most alignment between their external presence and their internal reality
What the data tells us about trust, purpose, and proof
According to a 2025 report by Givsly, we’re seeing consumers abandon brands that merely declare values and instead flock to those that earn them. (Remember how people responded with their dollars when Target ditched DEI and Costco doubled down on it?)
At the same time, employees are trading higher salaries for roles with clearer missions and workplaces with better cultures. A 2025 Deloitte survey found that 44% of Gen Z and 45% of millennials had left a role because they felt a lack of purpose. And in mission-driven workplaces where career paths are clear, that pattern reverses: 65% of employees are not considering leaving.
On the topic of purpose and profit, a 2025 analysis of S&P Global 1200 companies found that organizations with a defined corporate purpose delivered revenue 58% higher than those without one. But this same report reveals that the outperformance doesn’t come from declaring a purpose. It comes from actually embedding purpose into decision-making, strategy, and resource allocation.
Amidst all of this, the B Corp movement continues to grow because it has become a proxy for the one thing that’s now scarce: proof that a system truly works the way it claims to.
These shifts are all happening under structural conditions where people have stopped trusting anyone outside their own bubble. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that 70% of people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust anyone who doesn’t share their values or information sources.
Taken collectively, this is more than just a trend; it’s a change in how legitimacy and trust are earned in the first place. We’re seeing communities vote with their labor, their attention, and their dollars – for alignment over performance – again and again.
Purpose-driven organizations that walk their talk have the advantage
While trust in media and government continues to decline, employers are the only institution seen as "brokering trust" effectively by a majority. It’s as if the office has become one of the last safe spaces to discuss difficult topics because it’s one of the only environments left with shared rules for behavior, and often, shared values.
This is precisely what gives purpose-driven organizations a massive competitive advantage. But it also hands them an extraordinary responsibility.
If your organization is aligned – if the internal reality matches the external promise – you can become a rare refuge in a fragmented world: one where your employees become your most effective ambassadors. But if it doesn't match, those same employees are the first to broadcast that information to the networks they do trust.
The real question worth considering is not whether purpose-driven business works – there’s ample proof that it does. The question that matters most is how we go about creating one that’s made for the future.
Sorry, but… It’s not just a marketing problem
When leaders feel their grip over their business slipping they’ll often reach for the marketing megaphone. Mistaking their alignment and coherence problem for a visibility or messaging problem, they rebrand, campaign, amplify – and ignore what’s really happening inside.
As someone who spent many years in marketing, I understand this instinct. And I’ve even fallen into the trap myself. It’s human nature to start here because it's easier to focus on external factors than to do the harder, and often messy, work of looking inward.
Marketing tactics feel strategic because they’re visible, action-oriented, and give everyone something concrete to point to.
But more often than not, the problem sits somewhere deeper.
The longer I spend inside mission-driven organizations (in my case, mostly mid-size design firms and growing social impact nonprofits), the more I’ve noticed a pattern I now can’t unsee. Values are easy to declare in the early days, but hard to uphold during periods of growth, transition, or evolution.
I’ve witnessed organizations whose external mission and message got louder while their internal validation of that same mission withered – like a community design firm I worked with whose employees started asking why “liberation” and “empowerment” were part of the external work and mission, but not equally applied to the employee experience. It’s a valid question, and once asked, has to be addressed. Because left unattended, this fracture will only grow.
The thing I will repeat over and over again: Once you’re in this mess, you can’t market your way out of it. Every dollar spent on external amplification while internal operations remain misaligned just accelerates the loss of trust. The misalignment itself creates vulnerability – it breeds employee cynicism, erodes trust with stakeholders, weakens market positioning, and ultimately threatens the organization's resilience.
And this is exactly how faking purpose causes more harm than honest indifference: People don’t forgive hypocrisy the same way they forgive mediocrity. So the more loudly you proclaim a purpose that isn’t backed up with the truth, the more your employees, partners, and closest allies become real cynics.
This presents a different kind of opportunity than the one the old playbook was made for. One where purpose isn’t experienced through a campaign, but through the often invisible reality of an organization’s internal decisions. And if those decisions don’t serve the stated purpose and values, no amount of message refinement can bridge the gap.
Don’t get me wrong, marketing does play a crucial role in building a successful purpose-driven business – it just can’t be used as a megaphone to cover for what’s going on behind the facade. Instead, it needs to be real, authentic, and embedded.
To address this, I’ve developed a philosophy and framework (which I share in more detail later) which essentially places marketing exactly where it needs to be: holistically integrated into the core of the business – as a positive influencer of change, not just a broadcast. I refer to this as the Old Way vs. the Bold Way, where marketing in the Bold Way gets treated less like a megaphone, and more like the DNA of the organization.
This framework will show us that the solution is not a new campaign or topical communications plan, because this is more than a messaging issue. It’s a design problem.
The Cost of Faking It
When the gap between mission, stated values, and operations first shows up, it’s natural to downplay it at first – believing it’s a perception problem to fix, or a normal growing pain.
But this is actually an important moment to take a step back and recognize what’s really happening beneath the surface. It’s a time to get honest about where you are, not just where you want to be, or used to be. It’s about naming the gap for what it is – a contradiction between your external promise and your internal reality – so that you can address it before it’s too late.
The internal dynamic
Naturally, your employees will feel the gap before your customers do. They sit in the meetings where leaders waffle on funding new culture initiatives. They see the marketing campaign about values while they know in reality, people are being rewarded for the opposite behavior. They know, in specific and granular terms, where the organization contradicts its own claims.
The damage here usually trickles in quietly, unremarkable at first. Participation in “culture building” activities starts to decline. There’s a vague sense of apathy and disengagement. Someone unexpectedly resigns. But as momentum grows, so does the reputational impact. One more resignation, then another. And before you know it, the people who could’ve been your biggest champions have turned against you.
I’ve personally worked in environments like this. I’ve seen it play out firsthand. It starts as a slow decline – growing gossip and murmurs among colleagues – and eventually erupts into full organizational chaos and degradation. I bet you’ve seen it too. I bet we all have. The point is not that this situation is unique.
But in an era where many people see the workplace as the only institution even remotely worth trusting, your employees aren’t simply your workforce. They’re your credibility. When they detect that your marketed values don’t match their lived experience, their private conversations become the stories that shape your reputation.
The external cost
While the internal dynamic creeps in quietly, the external cost is often sudden.
Back to the Target vs. Costco example: It only took a matter of days for the narrative about Target’s misalignment to be exposed, and the boycotts began shortly after. At the same time, the positive narrative about Costco grew louder, as they were presented as a conscientious alternative to Target, specifically because of their alignment. They showed that the values they stated publicly are backed up internally, and that mattered.
The same dynamic has played out in countless other industries, including one I’m intimately familiar with: architecture. In March 2026, employees at DLR Group discovered the firm was linked to ICE detention work, including a former Oklahoma prison conversion. Within a week, more than 75 employees spoke out, and leadership backtracked. I wrote about this at the time – the story is worth reading in full here – but the pattern is what matters: a firm's declared values were exposed by the people who worked inside it.
And in a contrasting example, mid-size Texas firm Lake Flato Architects in 2023 became the first architecture firm in the state to earn B Corp certification by proving its equity and labor practices through third party verification. Where DLR's brand was exposed by its own people, Lake Flato's credibility was earned and independently validated.
The old playbook assumed you could control the narrative (with the right messaging, you could shape what people believe), but that tactic isn’t very effective in a world where trust is not easily earned. Like it or not, the narrative is controlled by whoever has the most credible evidence, and employees have evidence. So when the pressure arrives, the organizations that survive are the ones whose inside and outside are indistinguishable. The ones that have no gap to be called out in the first place.
So what does getting it right actually look like?
The Design Brief
A few years ago, I would have told you that it’s as simple as looking at everything inside your organization as marketing.
How you treat your employees. Your leadership structure. Your benefits. Your culture. All of it is signaling. All of it shapes how you're perceived. And while I still see that as truth, I was only half right.
I now know we need to frame this more holistically as a design problem: If the organization isn’t designed to deliver on its promises, failure is almost inevitable.
But getting this alignment piece right can also be tricky. Because if you accept that faking purpose is actively destructive, it’s easy to decide that the only safe move is radical honesty. This often translates into being quiet and bland, and is its own trap: it feels like integrity, but mostly results in paralysis. It keeps organizations small, incremental, and invisible. It teaches leaders that any gap between what you say and what you do is a moral failure rather than a design condition to be addressed.
The irony is that this trap is the mirror image of the megaphone problem referenced earlier. Both assume that aspiration and reality are opposites that have to be reconciled before anyone is allowed to speak. But rather than opposites, they’re just two forces in a system.
How to design around your aspirations
I heartily believe that when treated right, these two forces can exist in a generative feedback loop where each builds on the other and the whole system becomes stronger for it.
While this may sound heavily theoretical, I came to this understanding and position from a really practical place: I was a marketing leader inside an organization that wanted to be perceived a certain way, and it was my job to create that perception. But friction and discomfort showed up when I started feeling like what I was saying externally – about the organization’s culture, its commitments to equity – was being undermined by decisions made internally.
The gap between what we were saying and what we were doing started to show its face.
When the friction just started and wasn’t yet at an unmanageable level, I was able to use the marketing desires as leverage. Leverage to say, “ok then – rather than not say this, let’s make what we’re saying true.” This led me deeper into organizational design and culture-building work: designing a social responsibility program, creating internal equity and workplace culture groups and policies, leading the company toward impact certification programs that created transparency about their reality.
Actually designing the organization around its aspirations.
And now, this experience of learning firsthand how to leverage marketing desires to influence change is the foundation of all of the theories and frameworks that I operate under inside my own practice, The Bold Work Collaborative.
But this can also be a slippery slope, because there’s often a point when the gap between aspiration and reality moves beyond friction that can create leverage and into outright mistruths. That’s a much bigger problem, and is precisely the thesis of this whole argument: that faking purpose causes more harm than honest indifference.
When used with integrity, your aspirational external voice isn’t a lie – it’s your design brief.
And this is what organizational design actually looks like. Not a fancy rebrand or a values exercise. But a living, breathing system where inside and outside are in constant, productive tension. The aspiration and the organization pull each other forward in a generative feedback loop, each one raising the ceiling for the other.
The Generative Feedback Loop
Marketing as DNA vs. megaphone
At the core of this whole philosophy I’m describing is a fundamental reframe of how marketing lives within an organization.
Because in order for it to serve the aspirational purpose I’ve described, it can’t be an afterthought, and it can’t be relegated to the megaphone that simply announces everything that’s already baked. Marketing has to become more like the DNA of the organization.
A megaphone is external. It’s loud, visible, and detachable. You can turn it on and off. You can hire someone to operate it. You can measure its reach in impressions and sentiment. But it doesn’t change what the organization is.
In contrast, DNA is structural. It’s invisible, but it determines everything visible – how decisions are made, who gets promoted, what gets funded, which initiatives actually matter. It’s not a communications layer – it’s the operating system.
Values: Have your earned them, or just declared them?
At the heart of this framework is the distinction between what’s earned and what’s declared.
Declared is just what you say, but earned is what your reality proves. And the gap between them is either a liability or generative tension to be leveraged for good.
The question, again, is not whether you have a gap. (Truth is, every organization does, to a certain degree.) The question is what kind of gap you’re managing, how big it is, and most importantly, how you’re addressing it.
One of my favorite examples of an organization with compelling, unique, and bold marketing and a really clear purpose and values-based business model is Who Gives a Crap. Yes, the toilet paper brand. (They’re a toilet paper brand but more accurately described as a social enterprise focused on bringing clean water and toilets to people around the globe).
I first discovered this brand during the COVID-19 pandemic, when toilet paper shelves sat empty at supermarkets across the U.S. Who Gives a Crap offered delivery to my door, a strong environmental and social mission, a good product, and to top it off – cute, well designed plastic-free packaging. Over six years later, I’m still on their subscription program – no doubt paying more than I would to buy toilet paper at the supermarket.
The product is good, and I feel good about the mission I’m supporting at the same time. The company donates 50% of its profits to their social mission (almost $15 million as of this writing), are transparent about the details, and have no history of greenwashing accusations. Who Gives a Crap is actually a social and environmental activist organization, operating as a toilet paper company – and I love them for it.
All that being said, a bit of research into their employee experience indicates that they have a gap. Glassdoor reviews and Reddit threads tell us that some employees who came to the company for their mission are dissatisfied with a growing disconnect between what the external mission states and what the internal reality proves. They’ve noted layoffs in the U.S. and UK being followed by hires in cheaper labor environments like The Philippines; issues with career stagnation and compensation dissatisfaction; and a general disconnect between mission and management.
What the company projects externally about its social mission – and backs up with transparency about how they’re achieving it – is clear and coherent. But it also appears that as the company has grown, so has their internal / external gap. There’s an accountability structure in place for the external promise they’ve made to the world, but where is the accountability for the internal proof? Employees are bringing it.
Truthfully, I wanted to use Who Gives a Crap as a “hero” example. That was my intention, until I went looking for employee specific data. Rather than scrap the example, I’m choosing to use it as another cautionary tale. Employees will call you out first, and it usually catches up.
So what’s the lesson here? Have no heroes? Maybe. But I think it’s more nuanced than that. I think we need to recognize that growth without very careful attention to values alignment will cause these fractures to show up. And it’s all about what we do with them when it happens.
The Makers of Our Bright Future
The organizations that are getting this right do exist.
They are not unicorns. They’re simply organizations that either chose from the beginning, or later made the shift: from megaphone to DNA, from declared to earned, from marketing-as-communication to marketing-as-structure.
The founder who paid every employee a living wage before ever posting a values statement about "taking care of our people.”
The leadership team that realized having a “culture of feedback” is not just a top-down, one-way street.
The creative studio that shifted how they make hiring decisions – from leadership only, to a more inclusive committee-based decision making process.
The employee resource groups that moved from hosting listening sessions to having an actual seat at the table where decisions get made.
These organizations are not always the loudest, but they are always more coherent. And coherence compounds in a way that volume never can.
All told, I’ve spent decades inside rooms where this way of seeing things either caught hold, or it didn’t.
I’ve watched leaders who really care, and leaders who clearly don’t. Leaders who think they’re getting it right, but could use a nudge or supportive challenge to their thinking. And I have watched the rare ones who understood the difference, who let the old playbook die and redesigned their organization from the inside out. The ones who built bold inside so they could stand bold outside.
We've been told that the best leaders are the ones who perform under pressure, or rise as heroes in a crisis. But I’ve come to see this framing as completely backwards.
The most impactful leadership work I’ve ever done or witnessed didn’t happen because a crisis was already underway. It happened in the quiet stretch before crisis was ever a concern. It happened when people started asking questions, getting curious. Saying “what if?” and “could we try this?” and “wouldn’t it be great if…?”
Because by the time it’s urgent or a crisis has struck, you’re not just building – you’re deconstructing, patching, and then rebuilding under pressure, often with broken trust and a demoralized team.
Doing the foundational work of alignment before a crisis hits shouldn’t be seen as a luxury. Building your purpose into your org chart, your incentives, hiring practices, and daily decisions – before anyone is calling you out – is fundamentally how you design your organization so that it stands tall through the chaotic times we’re in.
I like to think of this work as world building. We get to literally ask ourselves what kind of world do we want to be part of making? How do we want it to feel? To function? What do we want to achieve? How do we want to lead? Be known? These are the big questions that define your aspirations, and become your design brief.
The organizations that are doing the real work right now are designing the template for what business becomes. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re not waiting for the crisis to force their hand. They are building bold inside, so they can stand bold outside. And they’re doing it now, while everyone else is still arguing about the messaging, or whether any of this even matters.
So what does this look like when it’s actually built?
I have spent my career refining an answer to that question.
I now call it Bold Work and it comes with a guiding framework: values at the center, leadership with courage, integrated systems, impact not fluff, and an authentic voice that is earned, not declared. It’s not a checklist. It is both the philosophy and the architecture of the organizations that are becoming the best examples of what’s possible.
I know firsthand that this work is not easy. It’s slow. It requires looking at parts of your organization that don’t photograph well. But there is a particular kind of energy that comes from building something real, something that holds up when nobody is watching, something that doesn’t require a performance to sustain. The leaders who choose this path have a different posture. They’re not managing a crisis – they’re designing a better world. A world that contributes to our collective bright future.
The question for these chaotic times isn’t whether the future will be built on purpose and alignment. I’m putting my stake in the ground and saying that it will. The question is whether you’ll be one of those helping to build it.
We’re at a pivotal moment right now, where the noise outside is loud – the polycrisis, the insularity, the collapse of trust. But inside your organization, the decision to make change can be quiet. It’s the decision between treating your workplace like something that just happens vs. treating it like a whole world you get to build.
If this resonated, I write one long-form essay a month on purpose, strategy, and the work of building organizations that match their ambition. Get it in your inbox.