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We often measure business success through revenue, profitability, growth, market share, and shareholder returns. These measures are important. They help us understand whether organizations are financially sustainable, competitive, and capable of creating economic value. Yet they tell us relatively little about the quality of the lives being shaped by that economic activity. A company can improve its financial results while employees lose opportunities to develop, communities experience disruption, or customers become subject to practices that undermine their interests. Economic success and human progress can reinforce one another, but they are not automatically the same thing.
This distinction matters because businesses are among the institutions that shape modern life. They provide employment, develop technologies, create products and services, influence communities, and determine how considerable economic resources are used. Their decisions affect people's livelihoods, opportunities, security, relationships, and environments. The consequences extend well beyond the boundaries of the organization. Recognizing this influence gives us a compelling reason to consider human flourishing alongside traditional measures of business performance.
By human flourishing, I mean people having meaningful opportunities to develop their capabilities, exercise agency, maintain dignity, build relationships, contribute to society, and pursue lives they have reason to value. Human flourishing is not simply happiness, comfort, or the absence of difficulty. People can experience hardship while living meaningful and worthwhile lives. Nor does flourishing require organizations to eliminate competition, guarantee employment, or satisfy every individual preference. It asks leaders to recognize that people have legitimate interests extending beyond their immediate economic usefulness.
There are practical reasons to take these interests seriously. Research on autonomy, fairness, trust, social support, and meaningful work shows that aspects of the environments surrounding people are related to their well-being, motivation, participation, and performance. The Nordic countries offer an institutional example: their consistently strong life-evaluation rankings have been associated with dependable institutions, personal freedom, social support, and trust. These findings do not establish a universal formula for flourishing, but they reinforce an important observation. The systems we build around people influence the opportunities available to them and the quality of their lives.
The responsibility becomes more consequential during what I call the Sixth Great Transition. As developments across technology, science, economics, geopolitics, society, philosophy, and the environment interact, organizations are redesigning work and making decisions that will influence future generations. Artificial intelligence illustrates the significance of these choices. Leaders are deciding what machines will do, what responsibilities people will retain, what capabilities organizations will develop, and how the benefits and burdens of technological progress will be distributed. These are decisions about the kind of future we are constructing.
If human flourishing is one of the purposes progress should serve, it deserves a meaningful place in those decisions. This does not diminish the importance of profitability, efficiency, innovation, or organizational survival. Those objectives often make valuable human outcomes possible. It does require recognizing that they can also conflict with human interests, particularly when incentives reward immediate results without adequately accounting for their wider consequences.
The Powerful Motivations That Compete with Human Flourishing
Organizations operate under powerful economic and institutional pressures. Investors seek returns, executives face performance expectations, customers want affordable products and convenient services, and competitors continually search for advantages. Employees pursue financial security, career advancement, recognition, and meaningful work. These motivations are legitimate, but they do not always lead in the same direction.
The tensions become visible in everyday decisions. Higher profit margins may compete with compensation, adequate staffing, or development budgets. Efforts to maximize efficiency may eliminate the time employees need for mentoring, experimentation, or recovery. Rapid implementation schedules may leave people insufficiently prepared for new responsibilities. Centralized control can improve consistency while restricting professional judgment and meaningful influence. Customer demands for immediate service and low prices may place considerable pressure on workers and suppliers.
None of these tradeoffs means that profitability, efficiency, speed, or control is inherently opposed to human flourishing. Financial strength sustains employment and investment. Efficiency can eliminate unnecessary work. Growth can create opportunities, and well-designed controls can improve safety and fairness. The difficulty arises when one objective becomes so dominant that its wider human consequences receive little consideration.
Incentives can intensify these conflicts. A manager rewarded for quarterly cost reductions may have strong reasons to eliminate training whose benefits would appear years later. A service organization measured primarily on processing speed may discourage employees from spending time understanding difficult customer situations. An executive whose compensation depends on a rapid transformation may have little immediate incentive to recognize that employees need more time to adapt.
These are examples of how reasonable performance measures can become incomplete guides to organizational behavior. What an organization rewards helps determine what its people prioritize, sometimes at the expense of purposes the measures were originally intended to serve.
A well known bank's unauthorized-account scandal provides a documented illustration. Systemic sales pressure and excessive goals contributed to employees opening accounts and providing products customers had not authorized or wanted. The resulting misconduct harmed customers and demonstrated how incentives could reward activity detached from legitimate customer value. The problem extended beyond individual behavior to the institutional arrangements that encouraged and tolerated it.
When Organizational Goals and Human Flourishing Reinforce Each Other
Not every tension requires a sacrifice. Some arise from how work is designed rather than from an unavoidable conflict between people and performance.
A randomized experiment involving 28 retail stores examined a package of scheduling practices intended to improve predictability, consistency, adequate hours, and employee control. The published study reported a 5.1 percent increase in store productivity and a 3.3 percent increase in sales. Although the results came from one retailer and cannot be generalized automatically, they demonstrate that better working arrangements and improved business performance can sometimes occur together.
This possibility deserves greater attention during the Sixth Great Transition. Artificial intelligence and automation are expanding the range of work organizations can redesign. Leaders can use these capabilities to eliminate burdensome tasks, improve access to knowledge, strengthen learning, and create products and services that were previously too expensive or difficult to provide.
The opportunity extends beyond replacing human labor with technology. Organizations can reconsider problems they previously lacked the capacity to address, services they could not economically deliver, and forms of human contribution they could not adequately support. The important question is whether these new capabilities are being directed toward worthwhile outcomes.
At the same time, genuine conflicts remain. A company facing financial distress may need to reduce employment to survive. New safety requirements may restrict individual discretion. Environmental responsibilities may require changes that disrupt established industries and communities. The interests of customers, employees, shareholders, and society will not always align.
Responsible leadership must recognize these conflicts rather than disguise them. It must examine alternatives, distinguish necessary sacrifices from avoidable ones, and consider how burdens and benefits are distributed.
Flourishing Together as a Leadership Purpose
In my book, The Future of Human Leadership: When Intelligence Is Everywhere, I introduce the Flourishing Together Framework as a way to connect organizational progress with the well-being of People, Organizations, Societies, and Ecosystems.
The framework recognizes that these domains are interdependent. Organizations need financial strength, capable people, dependable institutions, and functioning natural systems. People need opportunities, security, relationships, and environments in which they can develop and contribute. Societies need institutions that maintain legitimacy and enable cooperation, while ecosystems provide the physical foundations upon which human activity depends.
Flourishing Together does not promise that every decision can benefit everyone equally. It provides a broader purpose against which leaders can evaluate the choices they make. A financially attractive decision may still impose costs that deserve attention. A difficult restructuring may remain necessary while requiring fair treatment, clear explanations, and credible support for affected employees. An investment in automation may improve productivity while creating new responsibilities to preserve learning, develop expertise, and maintain meaningful human authority.
The framework also encourages leaders to examine the longer-term consequences of their choices. An organization can improve immediate performance while weakening capabilities it will need in the future. It can transfer costs to suppliers, communities, or natural systems that do not appear prominently in its financial measures. Considering flourishing makes these consequences more visible and gives leaders a reason to evaluate them.
Finding the Best Balance We Can
Leadership during the Sixth Great Transition requires balancing motivations that are sometimes complementary and sometimes genuinely competing. Profitability, growth, efficiency, innovation, and organizational survival remain essential considerations. They provide resources, opportunities, and capabilities that can contribute greatly to human well-being. Yet none of them, by itself, establishes that the resulting progress serves humanity.
Human flourishing deserves a place in organizational decisions because people possess value beyond their economic usefulness, because the conditions surrounding them influence their opportunities and contributions, and because today's institutions are helping shape the world future generations will inherit.
The practical responsibility is to make these competing interests visible, examine alternatives, establish appropriate boundaries, and seek arrangements that improve both organizational performance and human well-being wherever possible. When sacrifices cannot be avoided, leaders should explain their reasoning, distribute burdens responsibly, and reduce unnecessary harm.
We should not expect perfect alignment among every organizational objective and every human interest. Nor should we allow the difficulty of achieving that alignment to become an excuse for ignoring human consequences.
The goal is to pursue organizational success while enabling as much human flourishing as reasonably possible. That requires continuous judgment, learning, and a willingness to reconsider decisions when their consequences become clearer.
As intelligence and technological capability expand, leaders will have more possibilities available to them. What those possibilities are used for will remain a fundamental question of purpose and responsibility. Our task is to ensure that the progress we create serves the people, communities, societies, and living systems whose futures our decisions are helping shape.
*I use AI in all my work.
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Kevin Benedict
Futurist, and Lecturer at TCS
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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