Deborah Westphal on building human-centric businesses for an uncertain future

Executive overview

Most businesses were optimised for efficiency, with people treated as a manageable variable rather than the central concern. Three converging forces — technology, humanity, and business purpose — are reshaping what companies must be responsible for. When any one force dominates, the ecosystem breaks down.

The shift underway is from shareholder primacy to a broader stakeholder model that includes employees, communities, suppliers, and future markets. Businesses that ignore this shift are optimising for a model that is already becoming obsolete.

The core insight: if you destroy the future market your successors need to operate in, you are not leading — you are extracting.

The convergence framework

• Three currents — technology, humanity, business purpose — must stay in balance, like the ocean currents sustaining the Galápagos Islands
• If any one current dominates, it creates systemic harm: growing inequality, environmental degradation, community breakdown
• Technology has shifted power toward people — enabling connection, shared demands, and pressure on businesses to address large problems
• The debate is no longer shareholders vs. stakeholders; it is about defining the scope of responsibility across all of humanity
• Industrial-era organisations scoped human roles for speed and efficiency; the information age demands the whole person

What human-centric means in practice

• Human systems exist both inside and outside the organisation — both matter
• Opening up the definition of your business gives you a larger innovation surface
• Serving a customer broadly (who else could benefit?) is more durable than optimising around a single product
• Supplier and partner relationships held at arm's length leave strategic value uncaptured; radical transparency tends to unlock it
• Building a market in emerging economies requires starting with people's actual needs, not projecting existing products onto them

Downstream responsibility

• Businesses cannot treat waste, water use, or carbon as someone else's problem
• Only 9% of plastic is recycled; the rest enters oceans or landfills
• Every manufacturing process uses water; water scarcity is a near-horizon business risk, not an abstract concern
• Battery production, pharmaceuticals, and electronics are all water-intensive — few companies track this
• Antarctica holds roughly 90% of the world's fresh water; current international agreements protecting it will come up for renegotiation

The Uganda example: technology and real-world outcomes

• Connecting the next three billion people requires more than satellite infrastructure — it requires meeting people where they are
• In rural Uganda: no consistent water, no electricity, no access to hardware, no economics to buy it
• Building markets in frontier regions means solving for basic human needs first
• Partnerships with local governments, NGOs, and other businesses are often necessary to achieve outcomes at all
• Africa and Latin America have historically been treated as resource extraction zones; a stakeholder lens reframes them as partners and future markets

What leaders can do now

• Accept that this transformation is already underway; the question is whether you lead it or react to it
• Broaden the company dashboard beyond profit, revenue, and EBITDA — begin tracking water management, carbon trajectory, and community impact
• Identify which voices in the human system you will pay attention to; you cannot respond to all of them, but you must stand for something
• Adopt a bifocal view: manage for today and plan for the market your successors will need
• Small steps count — you do not need to maximise transformation immediately, but waiting is costly
• Be genuinely interested in the problem your business exists to solve, not just in the product you currently sell