Can Business Actually Be a Force for Good?

For the last 50 years or so, we've operated under a single dominant idea: the purpose of business is to maximize shareholder value. We live and die by the quarterly earnings, and everything else is basically secondary. And most of us have accepted this as just the natural order, as though business has always worked this way. But it hasn't.

Before the 1970s, businesses were embedded in their communities. They created jobs. They built trust. They contributed to the places they operated in. And profit was an outcome of doing those things well, not the singular obsession. So what happened? And more importantly, what if this whole era of extraction and short-termism isn't actually the norm at all? What if it's just a blip?

I've been sitting with this question a lot lately, especially as I watched the social impact sector struggle with funding cuts and political turmoil, and just a broader cultural retreat from purpose. We spent a lot of time on this show talking to nonprofits and philanthropies, but what about the largest and most powerful force shaping our society? What about business itself?

Sarah Gillard is the CEO of A Blueprint for Better Business, a UK charity working with some of the biggest companies in the world to help them rethink what they're actually for. Before that, she spent 25 years inside major corporations, including leading purpose strategy at the John Lewis Partnership.

Episode Highlights:

[00:01:56] Why Eric calls "business as a force for good" an underrepresented voice in social impact 

[00:02:42] Two very different business models: profit maximization vs. employee ownership, from inside the same industry 

[00:05:17] Business as the most powerful force shaping the future — and what it means to point that power toward solving complex problems 

[00:06:37] The ESG rollback in context: what the data actually shows about corporate commitments 

[00:09:03] The forces of gravity that act on companies as they scale, and why purpose requires active, structural defense 

[00:12:17] The 70% problem: why intangible assets dominate organizational value but get almost no attention 

[00:15:27] Rethinking the social contract: why government, business, and civil society can no longer afford separate swim lanes
 
[00:20:48] What the theory of change actually looks like: narrative, regulation, culture, or something else? 

[00:22:00] Why imagining a better future matters as much as warning about a worse one 

[00:27:07] AI as a force for good or fragility: the questions businesses aren't asking but should be 

[00:37:58] The two foundational ideas behind Blueprint for Better Business, and why neither is as radical as it sounds
 
[00:40:08] Why good intentions aren't enough: the case for legal and governance structures that protect purpose under pressure
 

Notable Quotes:

[00:14:20]: "The first one-person billion-dollar company: great for shareholders, but horrible for society." Eric Ressler 

[00:24:05]: "Trying to hold off dystopia is not particularly energizing. A yearning for a better future is what's actually going to help move the dial." Sarah Gillard 

[00:25:20]: "We need more in culture imagining what that future could and should be, instead of constantly only warning about what it's looking like it's going to be." Eric Ressler 

[00:38:40]: "Historically we will see these last 50-odd years as an odd blip. How do we take the most powerful shaper of our societies and just go: just focus on the money? Just weird." Sarah Gillard 

[00:39:00]: "Ideas are first ignored, then ridiculed, then accepted as common sense." Sarah Gillard 

[00:40:00]: "If you can attract investors who believe what you believe, you won't have that conflict later on." Sarah Gillard 

[00:40:20]: "Good intentions are necessary, but not sufficient. You need legal and governance mechanisms that keep you on track even when there is significant pressure to move." Sarah Gillard 
 

Resources & Links:

• Blueprint for Better Business — Sarah's organization; the one-page AI framework for boardrooms is available on their website
• John Lewis Partnership — The UK's largest employee-owned business, where Sarah led purpose strategy
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson 
• Dear Alice: Utopian anime yogurt commercial — mentioned by Eric as a rare example of positive future imagery

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01:35]: Sarah Gillard, welcome to the show.

Sarah Gillard [00:01:40]: Thank you very much for having me.

Eric Ressler [00:01:40]: So I think what I'd like to start today is you have an interesting and unique vantage point on this work, and I think that you're actually our first guest on the show that specifically focused on business as a force for good, which I feel like is an underrepresented voice and topic, and one that I'm actually quite overall a big proponent of in the social impact space. Even describing the space that way versus the charity space or the nonprofit space is a really intentional choice that we've always made at Cosmic in supporting social enterprises, government organizations that aren't necessarily nonprofits. I'd like to hear from you in this moment: what do you feel like is the general state of play of business as a force for good?

Sarah Gillard [00:02:25]: That's a good question. Well, just to take a brief step back, before I got into this sort of work, I spent 25 years in retail. And in it I experienced two very different business models.

I experienced the business as a machine for profit maximization model, and I saw the impact on people and it wasn't good. Employees crying in the toilets and suppliers having their trust undermined and communities not feeling great about the retailer being there. I saw the impact on the business itself — the brands became a lot less valuable, and eventually in the particular retailer I was in, the multi-billion pound empire was sold for £1.20 years later. So it was not good for business and it was not good for society. I could see business operating in this extractive, short-term, profit-maximizing way was not a good outcome for society.

But I ended up in the retail industry working for the UK's largest co-owned business, the John Lewis Partnership. It's department stores and grocery stores, and it had at the time 80,000 employees who all owned the business. And it was the same industry, same amount of disruption from the internet and intermediation of the high street and all the rest of it. But I could see that the impact on people was very different. There were not people crying in the toilets. There was a ukulele orchestra in the foyer when you walked into the head office. I thought, this is different.

The impact on the business itself was really evident. It was able to adapt to changing circumstances way better because it had the trust of the stakeholders, so employees wanted to help it change. The suppliers wanted to. The customers did. There was a general sense that it would be useful if this business survived because it was mutually beneficial to all the stakeholders. And I could see the society business was genuinely acting as a force for good. The founder's intent was 120-odd years ago. It was founded as an experiment in whether business could be a force for good.

Up until that point, I hadn't seen a huge amount of evidence in my career that it was possible. I'd seen businesses as very extractive, competitive, financially focused — seeing people as walking wallets, or if they're employees, as assets or resources, or in the worst cases, liabilities. A very dehumanizing way of seeing business, a very financially focused way. But then I'd experienced what it was like to work in a company that genuinely saw things differently. Hence my exploration in the business as a force for good movement as a whole, because I thought not only would this be quite useful for people if more businesses thought this way, but it would be good for businesses and it would be good for society.

At the time, which was four or five years ago, I was thinking it would be quite useful if business, which is arguably now the most powerful force that we have in the world for shaping the future — if business thought in this way, that our primary role is to create value for society and make money as a result of doing that. We're not a charity, but make money in that way. It would be quite useful if business turned its attention to solving some of the most complex, interconnected, wicked problems that we are now facing. And to do that as an intended design outcome, rather than a hoped-for byproduct through some ESG strategy or a bit of CSR on the side.

So having experienced what it's like to not be in business as a force for good, it's strongly reinforced my belief that it's possible and that it would be better if there was more of it.

So having said all that, I think the last couple of years have been challenging for that movement in general. And yet I'm going to give you my optimistic version. The overarching narrative has been that there's been this huge rollback in the corporate world, particularly around ESG commitments, DEI commitments. And to some extent, that was true. Some big global studies published in the last six months or so said about 10% of the top 150 global companies had rolled back on climate commitments or DEI commitments because of the direct pressure they were under, either political pressure or investor pressure.

However, about 60% of companies that had been reviewed were carrying on as before. They may change the language in order to not attract attention. They may have reframed what they're doing, but they were recognizing that this is not a sort of nice-to-have. It is a fundamental of how to do business well in a changing world. This is going to be good for your long-term business resilience. So they might be calling it different things, but they were still really committed to those businesses as force for good strategies. And then about 30% of businesses were actually doubling down, because they could recognize the strategic advantage it was giving them in a changing world.

So the businesses as force for good hushing that we've seen over the past couple of years has not been useful. It's not neutral. It has reduced the momentum and the sense of social contagion that was beginning to happen. A lot of coalitions have broken down. So none of that is good. However, on the positive side, what we are seeing is an integration of this way of thinking into just strategy. It's not called sustainability. It's not called ESG. This is just strategy. This is now, in a changing world, how is it that your business is relevant and resilient and adaptable? And it turns out that if you know how you're useful and you're building trust with stakeholders, which is basically what businesses as a force for good means, it's more likely that you're going to be able to adapt and change in the world. So this is now becoming a matter of strategic necessity, rather than just a kind of moral ambition or a regulatory one. It's a strategic must-have.

Eric Ressler [00:09:00]: I love it, so many good threads to pull on there. I want to start with a fundamental one, which is that at its core — and this is my point of view, even from my early days running Cosmic, working with a lot of startup organizations in Silicon Valley — when I work with organizations that are in that early stage, that founder-led stage, almost all businesses start because a founder sees a problem and they think they have a solution to that problem. And I would go a step further: for it to be an effective business, that is a marketable problem. It is a problem that a business owner thinks is valuable enough to solve that they can market it, they can sell it, they can make a profit on it.

So I think a lot of business starts that way. And then as businesses become more successful and measure success around quarterly earnings, especially by the time you get to a public company, that's where I think we start to stray away from that core truth around what even is the value proposition of the business — what is the original problem or scope of problems that it set out to solve? And are we providing a net benefit to society and holding ourselves to the standard of are we creating value for the world and for our customers, versus are we creating value for our shareholders and for our investors?

And I think that is where I see, even to take it back to my Silicon Valley corollary, this tension that startups in the Valley face where they have a direction, but they've brought on Series A, Series B funding, they have a series of funders who are pushing them to figure out how can you 10x this now. And then you start to see these cycles where no longer is the priority around serving the customer or value to the world at large — it's about maximizing profits at all costs.

Sarah Gillard [00:11:00]: Yeah, I agree. And I think the forces of gravity that act on a company as it scales are very hard to defy. When there's just ten of you and you can share a pizza and you've all got a common mission, and you share the purpose of the organization, and the human relational aspect is there in the room. But when there are 10,000 of you and you're relying on processes and procedures and rulebooks and KPIs and measurable objectives, it can be much harder to retain that unifying goal of what are we actually here to achieve. It all becomes broken down into measurable things. So as you scale, you have to acknowledge it and fight it by intentionally reminding everybody about what the actual point of the organization is and why we're here.

Having a purpose statement that is flat on the wall is not sufficient. It has to be lived, and it has to be experienced by people in how decisions are made, how success is reported, what's valued, what's tolerated, what's not tolerated, and the partnerships that are created. Is the company actually living the original founder's intent about how we want to show up in the world and the value that we want to have?

I think the other problem is that so much of this is intangible, and when you're short on time or you're trying to communicate to a lot of people or you're talking to investors, it's a lot easier to focus on the measurable metrics, which tend to be the financial ones. And yet we know that a vast proportion of the value now of large organizations is in intangible assets. It's their reputation. It's the motivation of their employees, the trust that they have with their supply chain. In some estimates, that's now 70% of an organization's value. So it seems odd that we spend all of this time looking at the 30% that you can actually quantify.

And I think some investors are much more attuned to this. They ask different questions about culture, about impact, about purpose, about how decisions are made, about how value is thought about inside the organization, because they understand that those things relate to long-term business success. And that's demonstrated through all of the academic research on this. But the market is not rational.

Eric Ressler [00:13:35]: It certainly seems that way these days. I would also argue that there's always going to be some tension from the investor point of view between value creation for the world and value creation for the company and for the investors themselves. And I'm a little skeptical that those things are ever going to be fully aligned.

For example, I would argue that some of the biggest value that large companies can create for society at large is just jobs. And at a certain level, an investor wants as few jobs as possible to make as much money as possible, especially in this age of AI, where there seems to be a trend of smaller companies punching above their weight in terms of revenue generation. You hear stories in Silicon Valley about the first one-person billion-dollar company. That's great for shareholders, but it's horrible for society, where we need people who have the opportunity to make a living and to do good work.

I think that leads me to a devil's advocate take, which is that I'm skeptical that business should be the first solution we reach for on certain societal issues. What is the business case for solving malaria in the Global South? You can argue there's a net economic benefit, but that's where government should be measuring against those outcomes, and community-based organizations and charities. There are just certain issues where there is no marketable value for solving. So how do you think about where business is the right lever for creating social change versus government organizations versus social impact organizations?

Sarah Gillard [00:15:25]: I think this points to the fact that we are going to have to rethink the social contract. For 70 years or so, longer probably, we've operated broadly with government, business, and civil society swimming in their own separate swim lanes. Government sets the rules. Business operates within the rules to maximize profit. Civil society picks up the pieces and tries to mitigate any of the externalities.

And that worked for a long time. It created growth and innovation and prosperity and lifted billions out of poverty. It was appropriate for the conditions at the time — post-World War Two, growing population, need to feed them, productivity was a big thing. But we're in a different situation now. It's 2026. We have climate change. We have massive social inequality. We have massive health challenges as a human race. We have AI promising probably the broadest spectrum of anything ever, all the way from abundant utopia to the end of humanity.

That old model of government does this and business does that and civil society does this is just insufficient to solving these challenges. No one of those actors can solve these big challenges. So my question is: if you imagine that in 50 years' time we are thriving as a human race on a healthy planet, it's probably because we've worked out how to design the economy, including the roles of government, business, and civil society, such that flourishing humanity on a healthy planet is the desired outcome, not a hoped-for byproduct of maximizing GDP growth.

We're just struggling with a bit of a design fault with the way we've thought about the economy and society. And we have an opportunity now, with AI creating these paradigm shifts, to ask: how might we redesign this? This is a once-in-a-humanity opportunity to say, we have the ability to intentionally decide the collective outcomes that are going to help us as a species. What role do we want business to play? Is it simply economic output? Or does business have a different role? Does it create structure and purpose? Does it allow us to contribute to society and feel interconnected as citizens? These are non-quantifiable things that are probably quite fundamental to us as human beings.

Eric Ressler [00:19:50]: I love this thought experiment, and I want to tease out how we get there. Because if I look at the trend lines and the way that business at large is acting, what is the intervention? What is the theory of change around how we convince business leaders that this is the right long-term approach and to get out of the short-term, quarterly review mindset around profit maximization? Is it narrative change? Is it government regulation? Is it culture? Is it just that at a certain point the numbers don't add up when no one can afford to buy the products these companies are creating?

Sarah Gillard [00:21:05]: If a silver bullet existed, hopefully it would have been discovered by now. System change is difficult, but it's possible. If you look over just the last 500 years in Western societies, there has been a fair amount of system change — none of which was designed by a committee.

I think the first thing is to remind ourselves that change is possible, and that's just part of the human condition. We are one moment of time in a long history. And this will change again, possible if not inevitable.

I think the second thing is that it starts with mindset and what you believe is possible. One of the challenges we currently have is a lack of hope in a positive future. We may be the first generation in humanity that believes we are handing to the next generation a worse inheritance, environmentally, culturally, socially. And I don't know what that does to us psychologically, but it can't be good.

When people imagine the future as pretty dystopian, and there's a lack of hope and optimism, that's not helped often by our culture. I ask audiences to give me some films about the future, and it's Big Brother, Mad Max, Terminator, Waterworld. I asked AI for an example of a film about the future that's positive, and it gave me The Jetsons, which is from the 1950s. We had to go back to the 50s to find it.

So one of the things that's going to be critical is helping people imagine a better future that feels possible: societal trust and cohesion, communities thriving, we've got green nature around us, we feel fulfilled in our work, people feel they've got a chance to develop their own potential. These are common features across all cultures of what it takes to live a life well. But our grasp on it is loose at the moment. Trying to hold off dystopia is not particularly energizing, and it doesn't inspire innovation and creativity. A yearning for a better future is what actually is going to help move the dial.

Eric Ressler [00:24:15]: It's funny that you mention that, and I completely agree. It reframes because we actually have not only the technology but the ability to create that future today. The resources exist. The technology exists. Sure, there are big problems, and we should have solved some of these issues, especially as it relates to climate, 30-plus years ago. But it's not too late.

I personally mostly watch and read sci-fi as my form of entertainment, and I would say it's 95-5 dystopian versus utopian. I saw something the other day — I'll try to track it down and put it in the show notes, but it turns out it was actually for like a yogurt commercial. It was this utopian anime series of clips that painted this picture of a clean energy, societal utopia. And that was the first time I've seen something that was like, oh, this is what the future could be. That wasn't dystopian. And why I introduced narrative change is we need more in culture imagining what that future could and should be, instead of constantly only warning about what it's looking like it's going to be. Otherwise people don't have a north star they're working towards.

Sarah Gillard [00:25:35]: I completely agree. What lifted me out of a spiral I was beginning to go into in terms of climate was Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future, because it laid out what seemed to me an improbable but plausible path for the next 20 years of how we actually navigate toward a better future. And for the first time in a long time, I thought, well, that seems doable. Seems possible. And that was very energizing. Despair is not a good place for action. You've got to have hope, but it has to be grounded.

Eric Ressler [00:26:35]: So we touched on this a little bit, but I think we should go a little bit deeper around AI specifically, and how it's a huge lever for change, positive and negative. How are you seeing that shape and influence the work that you're doing, and the way that organizations are thinking about AI?

Sarah Gillard [00:27:05]: It is fascinating, if nothing else, because of the speed at which this is happening. There are no experts. There are AI experts, and there are people thinking deeply about what that means for economics and for work. But when you think about it at a system level, nobody has got a vision of, okay, this is how it's all going to connect and pan out. There's a lot of uncertainty. And in that uncertainty, corporates in general are focusing on what they can control: what are our competitors doing, how quickly are they moving, what's the ROI, how does this enhance our efficiency and productivity metrics, and in many cases, how much can we reduce our workforce by.

That is understandable given the paradigm that business is operating in. But our hypothesis at Blueprint for Better Business is that that is going to create fragile businesses, as well as broader societal implications for work, for youth, for societal cohesion, and inequality.

If at this point, when norms are being shaped, businesses are able to ask broader questions around what are we actually using this technology in service of, how is it supporting our purpose, how are we contributing to society, how does this technology help us do that even more effectively, how does it unleash human potential, how does it enable us to reach communities we hadn't reached before, how does it enable us to create new products and services that hadn't been imagined before, rather than this efficiency focus, which is only going to go one way and has a limited floor — once you cut, you can't cut much more. So our question is, what does this unlock for society in general? And how does business use this to amplify its force for good?

Our hypothesis is those businesses that are asking that now are likely to be more resilient, more adaptive, more trusted, more innovative. But it's not common. The race mentality and the lack of feeling of expertise and confidence means the financial focus is dominant. And we believe very strongly that it's important to change that narrative quickly, because the norms are being shaped right now. We have an opportunity to say, how do we use this technology in service of the common good, with business as a key instrument in that?

Eric Ressler [00:30:10]: The early narratives of AI were all about promise: think about what this could mean for society, we'll solve healthcare, cure disease, universal basic income because of the economic impacts. And these narratives are still playing out to a degree. But now, as we're seeing AI actually reaching adoption across a lot of industries and companies, especially in tech, it seems that the way businesses are actually using AI are far less altruistic and far more extractive, far more driven by cutting the bottom line and being more profitable with less and less overhead.

I know there are awesome use cases for AI that are being developed right now that maybe aren't getting as much spotlight. But there's a similar lack of imagination still about what we could and should be using AI for. As we start to consider how we use AI at Cosmic for our work, I'm really trying not to fall into those traps, which are very enticing. How can we punch above our weight as a small agency? That's something I'm absolutely interested in, of course. And I'm also trying to ground that in an ethical framework. Even the way AI is being developed, even the companies that are providing it, even the impacts on climate, this is not all rosy.

I'm also trying to ground our use of AI in: is this actually helping further the social impact of the organizations we're working with? Is it a tool that's being leveraged that way? And sometimes what I find is that it is and it can, and that's really exciting. And other times I find no, actually it's not, and this is not the right tool for the job.

And I think early on the discussion was we need to slow down, make sure this is safe, make sure there's regulation. And then all of a sudden it was well, we can't because China is going to anyway. So all guardrails off, which is kind of silly when you think about other technologies that have the potential for literal human extinction, such as nuclear technology, which is highly regulated and has international treaties around it. We have models for how to be responsible.

I'd like to see the social impact sector play a major role in shaping what that future looks like, so that it's not only up to business and not only up to government, because I'm not sure government is equipped to deal with the pace of this technology.

Sarah Gillard [00:34:00]: I think partly this is about broadening the lens. How AI will be deployed will be a result of human decisions of people in boardrooms right now. Those human beings have the opportunity to ask broader questions that they don't have the answers to. And that's a frightening thing when you're an executive director, to ask a question you don't know the answer to. But the acknowledgment that we're all going to have to work it out together is important.

But it would be quite useful if the guiding principle was: how do we use this to serve humanity in general? What might be some of the unintended implications? If we scoot back 20 years and social media companies were able to ask more of those broad long-term questions, it might have meant that the social media industry moved in a different direction, instead of creating this kind of outrage engagement machine, which was probably not intended at the beginning, but the forces of the market took it there.

We're at the beginning of that now. Asking different questions now really is likely to have quite a significant effect on the trajectory of where we'll end up in five, ten, 15 years. And our website, Blueprint for Better Business, has a one-page framework that helps scaffold these conversations within boardrooms, because we recognize it's very hard to make the bridge between the things that you're worried about at three in the morning as a human being, and then walking into that room and feeling able to raise some of these concerns. We've developed some questions that elevate the conversation and bring in things that we know every single one of those human beings will be thinking about, that haven't yet found a way to make it into corporate speak.

As this develops, when we get case studies and evidence of organizations that are thinking differently about this being more resilient and more trusted, I think the momentum could grow. But right now we're in the early days. And that does mean that you get to shape it, which is both a responsibility and a massive opportunity.

The more that responsible leaders, whether in business or in social impact organizations, are able to talk about how they're thinking about AI in a responsible way, the more that becomes the norm of how you run a good organization nowadays.

Eric Ressler [00:37:00]: As we move to wrap up, I have two things. One, a thread I'd like to go on with you, and then an ending question about your optimism. For our listeners who are maybe at a point where they're starting something new or thinking about a major pivot, maybe they lead a nonprofit and they're looking at how to restructure with some kind of market-based approach, or maybe a listener is at the beginning of trying to solve a wicked social problem through a market-based approach: what's the mental model? What are some of the more pragmatic takeaways for people in that position?

Sarah Gillard [00:37:55]: Well, the charity was founded with two foundational beliefs, neither of which sound very radical when you say them out loud, but they are not common in the business world.

The first not-very-radical idea is that if you see business not as a profit-maximizing machine, but instead as a group of human beings coming together to create value for society that makes profit as a result, that changes the underlying assumptions. You begin to see it as a relational thing rather than a transactional machine type thing.

Eric Ressler [00:38:30]: I hear that and it's like, yeah, I remember now, that's what business used to be and was supposed to be. And now look where we are.

Sarah Gillard [00:38:40]: Historically we will see these last 50-odd years as an odd blip. How do we take the most powerful shaper of our societies and our future and just go: just focus on the money? Just weird. We're living in the end days of it, I hope.

And one of my favorite quotes is that ideas are first ignored, then ridiculed, and then accepted as common sense. So I'm assuming we're in the end stages of the ridiculed bit, moving into the common sense.

The second not-at-all-radical idea is that people are human beings with inherent dignity and worth and value, and they should always be seen as that, not as instrumentalist resources to be deployed in service of some financial goal. Any organization ought to be able to retain that idea, whether they're thinking about employees or customers or suppliers or future generations or community members. So common good and human dignity are the two foundational things.

As you begin to build or scale a business, or bring on investment, making those explicit is critical. It will attract the investors who believe what you believe, which is fundamental, because if you can attract those investors to begin with, you're not going to have this conflict later on.

Critically, also creating the legal and governance mechanisms that allow you to sustain that purpose, even when under pressure and economic conditions are difficult, is an important part of this. Good intentions are necessary, but not sufficient. We have learned, particularly over the past couple of years, that you need reinforcing legal and governance mechanisms that keep you on track even when there is significant pressure to move. Coding that into your business right at the start is a great way of ensuring that as you scale, it's in the DNA of the organization. It's not a veneer that you as a founder were able to contribute, and that disappears as soon as you leave. If this really matters to you, design it in.

Eric Ressler [00:41:00]: My question then is, we're talking about a lot of heavy topics here. You're an internal optimist. What keeps you in that space even when things look bleak?

Sarah Gillard [00:41:15]: I think the first thing is that reminder that change is inevitable. We are constantly changing societal norms, and we have agency. We have the ability to shape the future. It's not inevitable, no matter what big organizations want to tell us.

And again, human nature is on a broad spectrum. Economic theory would have had us believe for about 50 years that we are rational, self-interested utility maximizers who only act in terms of extrinsic motivation. And every other study of human nature doesn't demonstrate that at all. We are multi-dimensional, complex beings who are of course motivated by money and status and power, but also by intrinsic motivators. We want to belong. We want to feel like we're contributing to something bigger than ourselves. We want to feel a relational connection to other people. And my hope is that that side of our humanity is crying out for expression.

You can see it in the loneliness epidemic or the mental health crisis or people's search for meaning. We want to feel like there is meaning, and that we're contributing to something positive. And that needs to show up in businesses. Otherwise they are not going to be environments where we flourish, and that is not good for business in the long term. So I'm optimistic because I do think we have the ability within ourselves to make this change happen and to bend it in a positive direction. Rediscovering our agency, I think, is the moment we're in right now.

Eric Ressler [00:43:20]: Awesome. I think that's a beautiful place to wrap up. Sarah, thank you so much for the conversation today and for joining me on Designing Tomorrow. This was a blast.

Sarah Gillard [00:43:30]: Thank you Eric.