Mission & purpose

The work that lasts from this era will be no different. The companies that endure, the technologies that serve rather than consume, the institutions that hold their shape across generations when the founders are dead and the capital is restless and the market is telling them to be something other than what they are — they will have something at... See more

The businesses that lasted understood this. Each of them had something at the core that looked, to outside eyes, like irrationality. A refusal that made no sense. A constraint held well past the point where a rational person would have abandoned it. If you asked why the constraint was there, and kept asking, you arrived at God. You always arrived... See more

The AI megacycle that will unfold over the next ten years will produce more overcapitalized businesses searching for an identity than any boom in history. The temptation will be to purchase virtue. Fund the institute. Publish the hand-wringing annual letter that might even include a Bible verse or two. The actual work will remain untouched by any... See more

The work, for Sayers, was prayer. The shoemaker makes good shoes because that is what shoemakers do, because the object leaving his hands will either participate in the work of glorifying creation or degrade it.

"The church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables."

The man who wrote the most rigorously systemic and material book on design in the 20th century spent his final years arguing that the quality he had been trying to formalize was not an aesthetic or material property at all. It was a theological one. Good making, good building, good design participates in something transcendent. It was the aliveness... See more

It's easy to call this hypocrisy, but it's not. Hypocrisy is knowing the right thing and choosing the wrong one. This is worse and more interesting. It is a culture that has eliminated the language for asking the question at all. Harvard, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey: secular confirmation rites. They signaled membership among the elect in the way that... See more

When you lose the framework that ties your daily work to a moral account of the universe, that void does not stay empty. Something else fills the house. The finance industry of the 1980s and the 1990s built a culture that was actively hostile to answering this question. Leveraged buyouts hollowed out towns, mortgage products extracted maximum value... See more

Tom Wolfe's 1984 essay, "The Worship of Art", explains what happened next. Sometime in the 20th century, when businessmen lost these moral frameworks, they replaced them with art and cultural philanthropy, which became a substitute faith. The museum board was the congregation, the gala was the liturgy, and the naming rights to the hospital were a... See more