Finite Games and Burnout: The Human Cost of Constant Competition

The Difference Between Playing and Surviving

At some point in the labyrinth of most lives, one comes to understand that much of the modern workplace operates according to rules nobody bothered to write down but everyone somehow knows. They aren’t natural laws, nor do they have the permanence of gravity or the cyclical dignity of the seasons. Instead, they have the thin and brittle authority of something invented by people who don’t know how to stop. Competition masquerading as purpose. Busyness mistaken for virtue. Promotion wrapped up in the language of destiny. What we’re left with is a culture that confuses survival with winning: a game people didn’t sign up to play but can’t quite seem to quit either.

James P. Carse’s theory of finite and infinite games pulses quietly beneath the surface of all this. His words, written in the 1980s but sounding rather like something an ancient philosopher might have muttered over wine and olives, make a simple distinction. Some games are played to win, whereas others are played so that the play may continue. The difference seeps into the fibres of how organisations think about people, time, and exhaustion.

To put it simply, finite games have boundaries, set players, agreed-upon rules, and a clear endpoint. Somewhat like an election or a chess tournament, where the purpose is completion, closure, and victory. Infinite games, on the other hand, exist to be sustained. Conversation, culture, love — these are infinite in spirit. Their purpose is renewal, and they persist by adapting, absorbing, evolving. The goal is not to end but to continue.

Somewhere along the line, corporate culture became a theatre of finite games. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) as scoreboards. Quarterly reports as seasons. Rival companies framed as opponents who must be beaten, vanquished, and outmanoeuvred. Internally, colleagues become competitors, even friendships within these spaces are inflected by the low whispers of strategic alignment: who knows whom, who gets invited where, who is quietly advancing while others tread water. Everyone plays because to refuse is to disappear. And disappearing, in the language of corporate success, is “failure.”

I do find there’s a peculiar violence in it, though it rarely wears a violent face. Instead, it comes dressed in motivational slogans and the cheerful tyranny of LinkedIn. Hustle harder. Deliver more. Break boundaries. Shatter ceilings. The lexicon of progress sounds suspiciously like the lexicon of war. There is always a target, always a metric, and perhaps always a deadline barrelling towards you like a freight train you’re expected to outrun, no matter how tired you are.

The people caught inside these finite systems begin to erode in familiar patterns. First, the cynicism, which is veiled as comedy and is mild at the margins. Then the fatigue, poorly hidden beneath caffeine and corporate wellness schemes. Finally, the unvoiced acceptance manifests as the realisation that your endeavours perpetuate a system engineered to never acknowledge triumph. There is no conclusive signal. No accolade. Only the next quarter, the next financial year, the next, the next, the next.

Survival becomes the only strategy. Neither flourishing nor advancing, and frankly, not even acquiring knowledge, but persevering. The irony, of course, is that finite games promise closure but in these environments offer none. Rather than true endings, what remains is exhaustion, carefully costumed as perseverance.

And yet, some organisations have begun to understand the futility of running businesses like sprint relays with no finish line. The shift is slow, often tentative, but it exists. These are companies thinking in infinite terms, which understand that sustainability cannot be outsourced to the environmental policy or buried in the footnotes of an ESG report. It must centre people: their energy, their mental health, and their capacity to sustain both meaningful work and a meaningful life. Such companies understand time not as a resource to be maximised or squeezed dry, but as a space within which good things — creativity, wellbeing, and success — are allowed to unfold at their proper pace. They do not regard employees as pawns to be strategically advanced or discarded, but as individuals to be nurtured, challenged, and at times shielded from the more destructive impulses of unchecked ambition.

I think often about how much contemporary work would terrify a medieval peasant. Not for its demands (as feudal labour had its own horrors) but for its absurdity. To work so frenetically, so endlessly, without growing food, building shelter, or crafting anything tangible, would strike them as madness… and perhaps it is. The difference between playing and surviving feels small when you’re inside the machine. From a distance, it looks enormous or somewhat like the difference between life and something colder.

No one is truly winning these games. Some are simply better at appearing undefeated.

Cultures: How Organisations Inherit Exhaustion

Cultures are not invented so much as absorbed. Like mildew creeping up a bathroom wall, they form quietly, almost imperceptibly, until one day the whole place probably stinks of damp. Workplaces inherit exhaustion through years of ritual, performance, and repetition. Rarely is it written down. I mean, at least I would like to believe it is a bit daft if a manager stands up and says, “Welcome, new recruits, to our culture of overwork and very likely breakdowns.” Instead, it seeps in through sly remarks about dedication, reward systems that prioritise hours over outcomes, or merely silence around burnout. As though fatigue were a personal failing rather than a structural inevitability.

Finite-minded organisations specialise in this kind of inheritance. Obsessed with quarterly targets, KPIs, and relentless market expansion, they have perfected the art of rebranding exhaustion as excellence. There is a kind of poetry in how such environments talk about people: human capital, talent resources, headcount. Language doing its neat trick of turning individuals into consumables. In these cultures, a person’s value is in their output, and their output is in direct competition with time. The logic is quite straightforward: work faster, work longer, produce more. The reward for this relentless effort? Simply more work.

Statistics sit quietly behind this, waiting for anyone who still doubts it. In 2019, the World Health Organisation classified burnout as an “occupational phenomenon,” not a medical condition but a workplace-created state. Surveys across Europe highlighted that more than half of employees reported feeling exhausted by the demands of their jobs. Britain, proud flag-bearer of post-industrial productivity myths, continues to record alarming rates of stress-related illness, with mental health absences costing employers billions each year. It’s a curious paradox: businesses obsessed with efficiency create systems that erode it from within.

What drives this is a belief, seldom questioned, that growth must be constant. Like an empire building outwards until it collapses under its own weight, finite organisations pursue market dominance as though it were oxygen. Shareholder value replaces shared humanity. When people burn out, they are quietly replaced. Hushed departures, polite farewells, HR-sanctioned tributes to their ‘great contribution’. No one speaks of the afternoons spent crying in stairwells, the panic attacks before meetings, the sleepless nights spent wondering if it’s possible to fail at life simply by being too tired to care anymore.

The rituals of exhaustion are everywhere. Early mornings framed as dedication. Late nights framed as loyalty. Holidays monitored. Emails checked obsessively from beaches, sick beds, and maternity wards. The boundary between work and life collapses, not with a bang but with a cheery Teams notification. Ambition is packaged as self-improvement but functions more like self-erasure. How many weekends, relationships, even personalities have been surrendered to the grind? 

What fascinates me is how these cultures resist change, even when faced with their own failures. Productivity crashes, innovation stalls, morale evaporates — and still, the response is often to double down. More KPIs. More metrics. More systems to monitor the systems monitoring the systems. It becomes a labyrinth designed by people who’ve mistaken their own panic for genius. There’s a bleak comedy to it perhaps, as I would imagine somewhere, a committee of executives is probably holding a PowerPoint presentation on “Employee Well-being: Challenges and Opportunities” while their assistants cry quietly in the toilets.

Some companies posture as progressive, through events such as “Wellness Wednesdays,” mindfulness apps, or maybe mandatory resilience training. As though meditation can undo decades of inherited dysfunction. These gestures skim the surface of the problem without ever admitting its depth. The issue isn’t that people lack coping mechanisms. It’s that they are being asked to cope with the absurd in a system that chews through the former while denying the reality of the latter.

When organisations run on exhaustion, what they really inherit is fragility. Teams break, individuals fracture. Good people leave, not because they lack ambition, but because they refuse to be complicit in their own undoing. Some escape into quieter industries. Others disappear into freelancing, hoping that autonomy might succeed where HR failed. A few stay and survive, fashioning small rebellions in the form of boundaries, slower mornings, fewer apologies for leaving on time.

There is, of course, another way to work. Cultures that value sustainability (of people, beyond just profits) exist. They understand that burnout is not a badge of honour but a symptom of deeper dysfunction, and treat it as a mistake to be corrected. Such companies tend to keep their people longer, draw out their best ideas, and cultivate environments where ambition and wellbeing are not at war. Of course, they are not perfect. Nothing is. But at least they do not expect their employees to mistake collapse for success.

Work should not feel like drowning with a smile on your face. Yet, in too many organisations, it does. And everyone pretends otherwise until someone disappears. Only then, briefly, does the room go quiet.

Metrics: Productivity at the Expense of People

Somewhere between the spreadsheets and the dashboards, human beings vanish. First as a headcount, then as a percentage, finally as a line item beneath the quarterly report. The modern workplace loves to measure things, yet remains oddly uninterested in what those numbers mean for the people behind them. Output, efficiency, targets, benchmarks, performance indicators. These are the sacred relics of the corporate faith. Worshipped, tracked, audited. And like all forms of worship, they require sacrifice.

Work becomes a numbers game long before anyone notices they’ve stopped calling it work. Sales figures. Conversion rates. Engagement statistics. Billable hours. Productivity metrics are rarely about the quality of what is produced but about its frequency, speed, and scale. An endless cycle of how much, how quickly, how often. The factory may have evolved into an open-plan office, the punchcard replaced with digital analytics, but the obsession with counting remains unchanged. More is always better. Faster is always better. Efficiency is next to godliness.

People, of course, are not machines. They have limits — inconvenient ones. Fatigue, illness, distraction, grief, boredom. None of which fit neatly into the cells of a spreadsheet. So, organisations build systems designed to ignore those realities. Algorithms that monitor keystrokes and screen time. Targets that escalate regardless of circumstance. AI that tracks performance in real-time, reducing creativity and labour to patterns and outputs. We invented machines to make life easier, and then designed systems that expect us to behave like them.

The consequences are predictable. Presenteeism thrives. People show up even when they’re unwell, exhausted, or mentally unravelling, because absence skews the metrics and metrics skew perception. Better to be visibly miserable at your desk than risk becoming an invisible statistic in someone’s attrition report. Mental health collapses beneath the weight of constant measurement. Across Britain, surveys continue to confirm what everyone already knows: people are exhausted, disengaged, and unsure whether work is worth the price it demands.

Metrics are designed for finite victories. Quarterly targets. Annual growth. Short-term wins packaged as long-term strategy. Although, we should remember that people do not live in quarters. Their health cannot be paused or rebooted at year-end. Sustainable work — work that nourishes rather than depletes — rarely fits into the neat metrics beloved by executives and investors. Yet, the obsession persists through increased data, measurement, and control. As though if we could only quantify every action, we might finally understand productivity’s elusive secret.

There is a cruelty in how these systems flatten human complexity into numbers. A teacher’s impact reduced to exam scores. A nurse’s value measured by patient throughput. A writer judged by clicks and engagement time. Only the numbers remain, and when those numbers fail to rise, blame rarely falls on the system. It falls on the people caught inside it. Work harder. Be more efficient. Manage your time. Optimise your outputs. The vocabulary of self-improvement disguises a deeper rot: the refusal to question whether the system itself might be the problem.

I wonder sometimes if those building these systems understand their own vulnerability to them. The senior managers obsessing over dashboards are often just as trapped, their own performance metrics tied to the growth targets they impose on others. It’s somewhat of a pyramid scheme of exhaustion, and no one quite knows how to climb down.

Of course, there are exceptions. Some organisations experiment with metrics that prioritise wellbeing. Four-day weeks, flexible hours, performance reviews focused on development rather than punishment. But these remain the outliers, spoken of with the reverence usually reserved for utopias. The mainstream marches on, driven by spreadsheets and the unshakeable belief that anything unmeasured cannot matter.

Work has become a place where people perform productivity rather than experience it. Long hours logged. Emails sent late at night as proof of commitment. Efficiency masquerading as exhaustion. No wonder so many feel disconnected from what they do. When the goal is always more, always faster, there is little room for meaning.

And yet funnily enough, meaning is what people crave — purpose, connection, dignity. Things no algorithm has yet learned how to measure. 

Bodies: The Physical Toll of Infinite Demands

“The Body Keeps the Score”. It’s a phrase borrowed from trauma theory, but it fits neatly into the conversation about work. The body records what the company report omits. Cortisol in the bloodstream. Heart palpitations at 3am. Hair thinning in clumps down the shower drain. Muscles stiffening into a kind of permanent brace against another email marked “urgent”. While organisations measure outputs, profits, and productivity, bodies quietly tally up their own numbers: migraines, panic attacks, ulcers, exhaustion so profound it leaves teeth aching.

Burnout is a medical reality with symptoms mapped out in scientific journals and psychiatric manuals. Chronic fatigue, insomnia, anxiety disorders, digestive problems, compromised immune systems — all become common souvenirs of life spent inside workplaces addicted to infinite demands. The World Health Organisation has described burnout as an ‘occupational phenomenon’, rooted explicitly in chronic workplace stress. But that’s a sanitised description. It sounds neat and containable, yet the truth feels messier. Burnout is less a phenomenon and more a slow erosion. A person diminishing over months or years until even joy feels exhausting.

There is something almost Victorian about how we’ve returned to treating exhaustion as a sign of moral virtue. The Protestant work ethic, rebranded through the glossy aesthetics of tech start-ups and corporate wellness initiatives. Work until collapse. Collapse stylishly. A quick yoga retreat in Bali, a mindfulness app on your phone, and back to it. Meanwhile, the body is quietly staging a protest, one symptom at a time. Sleep becomes fractured. Hunger becomes erratic. Focus turns to fog. Relationships fray because you’re too tired to care, and too wired to rest.

Studies link long working hours to heart disease, strokes, and increased mortality rates. In 2021, the World Health Organisation reported that working 55 hours or more a week increases the risk of stroke by 35% and heart disease by 17%. These are not small numbers and are statistics written in blood pressure readings and death certificates. And yet, they rarely appear on PowerPoint slides. HR policies speak of resilience. Executives speak of high performance. The body speaks in migraines and chest pains and breathlessness. However, no one listens to the body until it stops speaking altogether.

Insomnia is something I personally suffer with, I can merely describe the cruel poetry of it. Exhaustion so complete you could weep, and yet sleep circles you warily, refusing to land. Minds trained to stay on high alert for deadlines and demands don’t suddenly switch off at midnight. They ruminate. Rehearse conversations. Draft imaginary emails. Revisit errors from last week or last decade. Screens glow into the early hours. Blue light tangled up with blue thoughts. A culture that praises ‘grind’ and ‘hustle’ breeds people who forget how to rest, then punishes them for being tired.

Stress, left untreated, reshapes the body’s chemistry. Cortisol spikes. Inflammation rises. Gut health deteriorates. Libido vanishes. Memory falters. None of this is theoretical. It’s written in hospital charts and prescription notes, and precisely why stress clinics exist, why so many are now prescribed medication to simply survive the working week. Yet, few workplaces acknowledge the depth of this damage. Wellness schemes sprinkle vitamins on top of a poisoned system. Gym memberships offered as compensation for lives lived hunched over desks. As if cardio could undo the damage of being permanently on edge.

There’s something darkly comic about how modern work expects bodies to behave. As if they are machines with an infinite battery, capable of endless upgrades. Rest becomes a luxury. Illness an inconvenience. Recovery time a weakness to be scheduled around deadlines. And so people work through chest infections, through grief, through mental breakdowns in polite silence. They book meeting rooms to cry in. They compose emails with shaking hands. They smile on Teams calls while wondering why their body feels like a foreign country.

And when bodies finally refuse? When illness becomes unignorable? Organisations react with the kind of shock usually reserved for acts of God. How could this happen? Why didn’t they say something sooner? As though the signs weren’t there, stitched into every late-night login, every ‘just pushing through’, every conversation cut short because ‘I’m so slammed right now’. Bodies speak plainly. It is the systems that refuse to listen.

Work is supposed to sustain life, not deplete it. Yet too often it becomes a machine into which people feed their health, their energy, their futures, in exchange for temporary metrics of success. There is no profit worth the cost of a life slowly unravelled by exhaustion. And no quarterly result worth more than a body’s quiet, steadfast demand to rest.

Belonging: The Illusion of Team in Finite Systems

Belonging is a word companies love. It appears in mission statements, slideshows, corporate away days, branded water bottles. We belong. You belong. Together, we are stronger. The messaging is clear: you are part of something bigger than yourself. A family, a tribe, a team. And yet, beneath the pastel-coloured slogans and carefully curated values, something colder often lurks. In finite organisations — those obsessed with measurable victories, market share, and short-term gains — belonging is frequently little more than a performance. A convenient fiction that papers over the cracks of competition.

Teams, in these environments, are less like communities and more like micro-markets. Individuals positioned not alongside one another but against. Collaboration might happen, but it is rarely the point. Promotions are limited. Bonuses are finite. Recognition is scarce. Behind every cheerful team-building exercise is the quiet knowledge that someone’s success will inevitably eclipse another’s. Colleagues smile over coffee while mentally calculating whose failure might create their next opportunity. The language may speak of unity, but the architecture is built for rivalry.

For example, the annual performance review is a ritual masquerading as evaluation but functioning as judgement. Metrics sliced and diced, achievements ranked against peers, potential weighed in competition with the person seated two desks away. Even feedback becomes a weapon, couched in phrases like ‘visibility’ and ‘impact’ are codes for how well you’ve performed on the internal stage. There is no genuine safety in these structures, only temporary alliances and polite one-upmanship. Everyone is encouraged to run faster, climb higher, deliver more. Togetherness becomes a liability when the ladder has room for only one at a time.

Presenteeism thrives here, not just in hours clocked but in presence performed. Endless meetings to ensure you are seen. Volunteering for projects that stretch capacity to breaking point. Visibility becomes currency. Exhaustion becomes proof of commitment. And beneath it all, a quiet loneliness settles in. Because genuine belonging cannot survive where competition is the unspoken rule. In these cultures, people rarely admit vulnerability, rarely share doubts. To confess struggle is to risk status. To show weakness is to jeopardise future prospects. Better to keep smiling. Better to keep running.

On the other hand, at organisations structured around infinite thinking, the aim is endurance, rather than victory. Collaboration is beyond a buzzword but a necessity, because the goal is continuity, improvement, and mutual growth. Success is measured not in quarterly triumphs but in the longevity of relationships, the depth of trust, the sustainability of pace. In these spaces, belonging feels less like a performance and more like a reality. Teams operate with generosity because there is no finish line at which one person claims the prize. There is only the shared task of keeping the game in motion.

Such organisations understand that people do their best work when they feel safe, valued, and connected. Psychological safety is a foundation. Mistakes are treated as learning, not ammunition. Success is celebrated collectively, not hoarded by individuals. Time is given for recovery, reflection, and recalibration. The energy spent on guarding status or polishing personal brands can be redirected into creativity, collaboration, and genuine care for one another’s well-being.

I’ve heard people speak of workplaces where colleagues help one another without ulterior motives. Where ideas are shared freely, and credit is distributed with grace. These places sound almost mythical, but they exist. They are quieter, perhaps less headline-grabbing, but they build something more lasting than profit alone. A kind of dignity in how they treat people, a recognition that work is part of life, not its enemy. In such cultures, belonging is cultivated instead of weaponised.

Ultimately, the difference is philosophical. Finite organisations view people as players on a board, moved strategically towards short-term wins. Infinite organisations see them as stewards of something larger, something enduring. One requires performance; the other encourages participation. One rewards individual conquest; the other nurtures collective resilience.

Belonging cannot be faked indefinitely. It requires trust, safety, and a shared purpose beyond quarterly metrics. Where these are absent, the illusion of team shatters eventually, leaving behind burnt-out individuals wondering why they ever believed in the slogans. Where they are present, work becomes not just a place to survive, but somewhere to build, grow, and, perhaps, finally belong.

Purpose: Beyond the Bottom Line

Purpose has been through a difficult adolescence. Once earnest, then hijacked by PR departments, it’s now trying to make a quiet return to adulthood with a little more dignity. Infinite organisations — the ones who think beyond market cycles and shareholder returns — tend to treat purpose less like a buzzword and more like a structural principle. They understand that people, much like ecosystems, do not flourish in conditions of constant extraction. Sustainability, for them, is not confined to recycling bins and carbon pledges, rather extending to how they treat their employees, how they think about time, how they view success across decades rather than quarters.

The contrast with finite organisations is stark. Where short-term models treat people as fuel to be burned through in pursuit of rapid gains, infinite organisations move slower, more deliberately. They think in terms of longevity. Longevity of products, of people’s careers, of the communities they touch. This orientation shapes everything from hiring practices to leadership decisions. It’s about building resilience into the very architecture of the business over being ‘nice’. A resilience that extends to bodies, minds, and societies, not just bottom lines.

We see it in policies that treat flexibility as a right, such as structures that allow for parental leave without career sabotage, or in health schemes that consider mental well-being as important as physical. These are the organisations where employees aren’t expected to apologise for having lives, where burnout isn’t glorified as proof of loyalty but regarded as a sign of systemic failure; where performance isn’t measured solely in outputs but in the sustainability of those outputs over time.

Beneath these practices is a simple but radical idea: work should serve life, not consume it. Infinite organisations embed this into their cultures through purpose that looks outward, not merely inward. Environmental responsibility becomes more than a glossy sustainability report. It becomes a question of how supply chains are structured, how resources are consumed, how waste is minimised not for headlines but because the future matters. Social sustainability is not outsourced to the CSR team, therefore should shape decisions about who the company partners with, how it supports communities, how it speaks in public.

Human sustainability — the quietest, perhaps most neglected of the trio — is woven through how people are allowed to work. Trust replaces surveillance. Autonomy replaces micromanagement. The expectation is to simply do well within humane limits, and allow space for rest, for recovery, for learning. Infinite organisations understand that creativity cannot be forced out of exhaustion, that innovation rarely emerges from fear.

However, it’s worth noting these organisations are not utopias. Of course, mistakes happen, people might leave, and difficult decisions are still made. But the orientation is different. The horizon is further away, and so the steps are steadier. Profit matters, of course. Bills need paying. Salaries need funding. Growth is not a dirty word. But growth becomes part of a larger purpose, not its solitary driver. Profit enables the mission instead of eclipsing it.

For example, companies like Patagonia, whose environmental commitments shape their business decisions to the point of limiting expansion. Or B Corps, certified not just for financial performance but for social and environmental impact. These models suggest another way is possible, even if not universally adopted. They remind us that business can have a conscience without sacrificing competence, and that purpose need not be an afterthought pinned to the office wall beneath the corporate logo.

Infinite organisations tend to attract people who share these values, which creates a kind of reinforcing cycle. Employees who feel seen, respected, and trusted often offer loyalty not out of fear but out of genuine investment. They stay longer and contribute more thoughtfully. They take risks without terror and recover from setbacks faster because they aren’t already stretched to breaking point.

Purpose, properly understood, requires patience and leaders who can tolerate ambiguity, who can resist the pressure to sacrifice long-term integrity for short-term applause. It urges organisations to shift their rhythm — to measure by meaning rather than metrics, to redefine what it means to succeed. The payoff is sturdier: endurance, trust, a name that holds, and a culture that can weather the storm. And, perhaps most importantly, people who leave work with enough energy left over to live.

Leadership: From Extraction to Stewardship

There’s something quietly violent about the way most modern organisations are run. A violence that wears a suit, speaks in quarterly targets, and sips black coffee with a clenched jaw. We’re so used to the aesthetic of leadership being about sharp decisions and faster results that we forget to ask: where, exactly, are we rushing to? And who’s being left behind in the process?

Finite leadership — the kind obsessed with winning, with dominating markets, with being number one in whatever category they’ve invented — runs like a machine that has mistaken humans for parts. People become assets, or worse, liabilities. The measure of success narrows to growth graphs and shareholder smiles. You can feel it in the breathlessness of company cultures where managers sprint from meeting to meeting like stockbrokers at the end of the world. It’s always urgent. Always now. And always costing someone something, whether that’s an unpaid lunch break, an unspoken anxiety disorder, or a child’s birthday missed for a pitch that no one remembers a month later.

Leaders in these systems often behave like high-functioning pirates: charming, charismatic, and ready to plunder. But extraction isn’t always loud or obvious, it happens beyond in sweatshops or oil fields, it also happens in HR policies that punish slowness. In calendars booked to the minute. In cultures that celebrate burnout as dedication. The extraction is of energy, of time, of emotional availability. What remains are the hollowed-out professionals who smile through the video call but privately fantasise about disappearing to a farmhouse in Wales to grow vegetables and forget Slack exists.

But stewardship (real stewardship, not the soft-focus, LinkedIn-post kind) is a different rhythm entirely. It is slower, often quieter. Less obsessed with immediacy and more concerned with durability. Stewardship is leadership that understands its role not as a commander at the front of a war, but as a custodian of something precious: people’s trust, their development, their ability to still feel like themselves when they leave the office.

It’s the difference between using people and being accountable to them.

Steward-leaders are those strange creatures who remember their team members’ children’s names and mean it when they say “don’t worry, we’ll figure it out.” They’re the ones who create conditions for good work to happen, rather than demanding it out of nowhere like magic from a hat. They don’t outsource care to the culture committee. They carry it in how they give feedback, in whether they make eye contact, in whether they’ve learned to shut up in meetings and let others speak without feeling threatened.

There’s a certain tenderness to that kind of leadership. A sensitivity that has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with emotional intelligence. It’s rarely celebrated in shareholder reports because it’s hard to measure, and harder to fake. But people know when they’re being led by someone who sees them. You can feel it in how problems are approached, how conflict is handled, how failure is treated — not as a sin, but as part of the texture of real work.

The thing is, people don’t forget how you made them feel. Not really. They remember the boss who protected their workload when their parent was dying. They remember the leader who called just to say “you’re doing alright, I see you.” That stays with them longer than any performance bonus ever could. Because in the end, leadership is a two-way relationship.

Besides, relationships built on extraction eventually collapse. Sometimes dramatically, sometimes quietly, over years, like a slow rot in the beams. The leadership that survives — the kind that leaves legacies rather than just profits — is the one that invests in what can’t be stolen: trust, meaning, patience.

It’s easy to be cynical, of course. To say that this kind of leadership sounds lovely in theory, but the real world demands tough decisions, cuts, urgency. And yes, the real world is messy. Budgets exist. Crises happen. People fail each other. But stewardship doesn’t pretend otherwise. It just refuses to make brutality a strategy.

And perhaps the most radical act a leader can commit today is to resist urgency when it’s unnecessary. To pause. To listen. To refuse the cheap dopamine hit of performance metrics and instead ask a more terrifying question: what kind of organisation are we becoming? What kind of people are we shaping? What kind of future are we helping to build, and who gets to belong in it?

Therefore I say, the best leaders aren’t the ones who shine brightest. They’re the ones whose light helps others see more clearly. Not saints, not saviours — just people who’ve understood that leading isn’t about being in charge. It’s about being responsible for what your leadership does to the lives it touches.

Futures: Towards Work That Doesn’t Destroy Us

The future of work shouldn’t feel like a slow death in polite clothing. Instead, it should feel like something you can survive, even grow inside. The shift towards infinite games won’t arrive with fireworks or HR memos about “new strategic paradigms.” It will arrive quietly, in the form of changed priorities and altered rhythms. Workplaces that stop chasing speed like it’s a deity and begin honouring steadiness, endurance, and care.

Success, in this future, is measured in years people choose to stay — not because they’re trapped, but because they’re thriving. It’s visible in teams that can disagree without breaking, in leaders who create room rather than take up all the air. Adaptability becomes more than a panic reflex, hence it becomes culture. A way of saying: we will change, not because we’re losing, but because we’re learning.

On the other hand, care, once the domain of overworked HR officers and underfunded wellness schemes, becomes central. Embedded in time off policies that are actually used. In flexible hours that don’t need justification. In workloads built for humans, not machines with serotonin deficiencies.

The businesses that survive long enough to matter won’t be the fastest. They’ll be the ones that found a way to make longevity livable. Companies that saw people not as resources but as relationships. Organisations that understood the future isn’t won. It’s tended to. Like a garden. Like a friendship. Like something worth keeping.

And if we’re lucky, we’ll look back one day and realise that work no longer had to hurt in order to mean something. That it became, finally, a space where life was allowed to unfold — and not just disappear.

S xoxo

Written in New York City

4th April 2025