Blog post: Can business ever be brave?
Published: 16 November 2025
By Stella Rehbein
In November 2025, the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society held its annual Global Meeting in Paris at Place Vendôme. World leaders, corporate officials and renowned journalists gathered to discuss this year's theme: courage.
During the two-day event, a live New York Times debate on 6 November, curated by DEBATABLE, took on the motion 'Business will never be brave'. If courage is needed for society to make progress, do businesses operate within systems that forever constrain brave action? The debate surfaced a range of perspectives on what real bravery requires in business.
This post looks at the arguments made by the 'For' and 'Against' teams, the questions raised by the jury, and how the debate connects to Kite Insights' research on courage published the same year.
The motion: 'Business will never be brave'
The motion was intended as a provocation, not a prediction. It was a way to test assumptions, surface tensions and explore whether businesses can be brave in the face of current global crises. At its heart was a question about incentives: can businesses be brave within an economic model that rewards short-term, risk-reducing strategies built to maximise shareholder profit?
For the debate, 'business' referred to the broad culture of how businesses operate, and 'bravery' was defined as acting on what is morally right, regardless of risk, rather than out of a desire for profit. This includes speaking up when a decision will cause harm.
Many businesses are already investing in long-term thinking, resilience and adaptation. The open question was whether individual leaders following this path can create a wider, market-level shift, or whether that responsibility ultimately sits with policymakers.
Six debaters took up these questions, each arguing a side that was not necessarily their personal view. After a close debate, the audience vote went to the 'Against' team: business, they decided, will be brave. But the more significant outcome was the discussion itself: a genuine engagement, from speakers and audience alike, with a question that matters to people, businesses and countries everywhere.
Profit over heart: why business will never, or 'hardly ever', be brave
Rebecca Henderson, the first debater for the motion, argued that business leaders will stay quiet rather than challenge the role they are expected to play. She gave two reasons. First, business leaders must prioritise profit or risk removal. Second, most leaders lack the time and expertise to take on broader social issues. If businesses prioritise profit and lack that expertise, she argued, staying quiet is the likely result. Her conclusion: "businesses will hardly ever be brave."
Alisa Sydow built on this, arguing that bravery belongs to people and communities, not businesses. In her view, businesses are machines of constraint that limit individual bravery rather than enable it. A founder can act from conviction, she argued, but once an idea becomes a business it becomes a coalition, and decisions drift away from what is right. Drawing on her research in sub-Saharan Africa, she argued that scaling companies in corrupt conditions does not reward bravery, it rewards compliance. For Sydow, true bravery lies in communities that base decisions on dignity and conviction rather than profit.
Clover Hogan used examples to illustrate where businesses have chosen growth over values, including a major fashion brand she described as both morally compromised and unsustainable, and business leaders who quickly capitulated under political pressure. Like Henderson, she argued that leaders who choose bravery are quickly pushed out. Her own definition of bravery pointed outside the corporate world entirely, to indigenous people and protesters who risk their safety to stand up for what is right. Her conclusion: it is people challenging the status quo from outside who are brave, not those upholding it from within.
Together, the 'For' team argued that the systemic culture of business suppresses individual bravery, rewards compliance, and will almost always choose profit over purpose. Henderson and Sydow acknowledged that individual leaders can be brave, but argued the system overrides them. Hogan placed bravery outside business structures altogether. Their shared conclusion: businesses are not the brave actors society needs, and in some cases actively constrain the progress made by individuals and governments. What is needed instead, as jury member Hannah Jones later raised, is a reimagining of these systems around the people already driving real change.
Smart business strategy is where purpose meets profit
Fatou Thiam, the first debater against the motion, opened by defining businesses simply as groups of people working towards a common goal. By that logic, businesses are capable of bravery because individuals are. When we treat business as separate from ourselves, she argued, we give up the power of collective action. We already have the ability to do what is morally right, whether or not it aligns with profit. Her call was for people to use business as a tool to push back against the current profit-driven system.
Marieme-Sav Sow took a different approach, arguing that businesses will be a force for good because it serves long-term business strategy. While acknowledging the system's flaws, she pointed to genuine progress in brave business action over the past fifteen years. She redefined bravery as strong strategy: the willingness to step into the unknown. If not businesses, she asked, who will step up, given that governments tend to favour short-term measures? Her conclusion: businesses will be brave because long-term success demands it, and they have both the capability and capital to drive change.
Shannon Joly, the final debater against the motion, agreed that good business strategy is rooted in long-term thinking. She redefined bravery as moral decisions rooted in patient conviction, alternative thinking and action, all of which are becoming more commercially viable. She gave the example that every dollar spent on climate risk can return twenty-one dollars, as a case for aligning profit and purpose. Long-term thinking, she argued, requires courage to redefine what success means. Her conclusion: bravery is good business strategy, built through slow, consistent action rooted in clear values.
Together, the 'Against' team argued that businesses will be brave, both because individuals are brave and because long-term thinking demands an alignment of profit and purpose. Their shared message was a call to reclaim businesses as tools individuals can use to shape the future, highlighting both the economic and moral case for aligning profit with values. Businesses, they argued, have the capability and the incentive to drive real change.
This raises a further question. If businesses commit to long-term thinking, does that automatically give them the clarity to make value-based decisions? Or is it an ongoing commitment to build that understanding? The jury's reflections, and Kite Insights' own research, offer some answers.
How can business shape our collective future?
Jury member François Taddei reflected on the courage needed to fight for something bigger than oneself, and challenged the debaters to focus on the word 'never' in the motion: can businesses be brave if the rules of the game change? His conclusion was that everyone has the capacity for bravery, in the sense of fighting for future generations rather than simply the survival of a company.
His fellow juror Agata Meysner challenged the framing of 'the system' as a separate entity, arguing that this language can become an excuse to avoid responsibility. She pushed debaters to think about bravery beyond capitalist and profit-driven logic, asking directly: what is the role of business in changing the system itself? Her question moved the debate from whether businesses can be brave to how they might become so.
Hannah Jones returned to Marieme-Sav Sow's question, "can we afford for businesses not to be brave?", and pressed the debaters further: what does courage in business need to focus on, so that anyone who steps forward is protected? She closed by asking the two teams to find a way to both be right, rather than simply opposing one another.
As the jury raised, the actions of businesses ripple outward, which makes clarity and purpose all the more important. One way to build that clarity is through evidence-based research that helps define what value-based decisions actually look like. From that understanding, businesses gain a genuine choice to act on their values rather than simply react to circumstance.
By the audience clap meter, the 'Against' team won the debate. But the more lasting outcome was the willingness of speakers and audience to sit with a difficult question and take some responsibility for the answer.
The Women's Forum Global Meeting 2025 and Kite Insights
Kite Insights has curated debates at the Women's Forum Global Meeting for several years. The 2025 Global Meeting focused on courage: the courage to defend values, resist injustice and shape a fairer future, explored across workshops, fishbowl discussions, power labs, panels and this debate. The motion, 'businesses will never be brave', was a direct nod to that theme.
Kite Insights' 2025 report, "The courage to think clearly: a manifesto for business leadership in fractured times", offers some useful context for the questions the debaters were grappling with.
Insights from The Courage to Think Clearly
Several debaters touched on a common thread: before we can ask whether businesses will be brave, we need to define what brave action actually looks like. Hannah Jones asked how we come together to determine what change is needed. In the face of ongoing global crises, what gives businesses the courage to challenge norms and act on their values rather than default to the status quo?
In the report, Kite Insights CEO Sophie Lambin writes: "In an age when conflict and chaos feel like the new normal, well-crafted insights, and the courage to act on them, may be the most purposeful noise any of us can make."
Seeking clarity in an age of disinformation is an ongoing task for businesses navigating their decisions. Shannon Joly and Marieme-Sav Sow both argued that businesses are moving towards aligning long-term strategy with purpose-driven action. If businesses can do both, but are still largely falling short, as debaters on both sides acknowledged, what's missing? We believe it may simply be access to the right information: when new possibilities are made visible through evidence, businesses are better placed to choose deliberately rather than default.
Rebecca Henderson made a related point: business leaders are often forced to choose between their responsibilities to employees and their own values, partly because they lack the expertise to weigh the wider implications of their decisions. Better information does not just inform decision-making, it relieves leaders of a false choice between their company and their convictions.
This points to a clear gap: what kind of expertise helps businesses make value-based decisions with confidence? We believe evidence-based insights, when expressed with courage and clarity, help clarify how profit and purpose can work together. They give businesses room to step back and reconsider their collective values. And they can move mindsets, markets and, ultimately, the world.
In a world geared towards short-term solutions, that space for reflection matters. It is where intentional, informed decisions take shape, and where businesses can begin to reclaim some control over the future they want to build. Crisis creates a rare aperture for reflection: a moment to pause, take stock of how we got here, and decide what voice we want to have when we step forward again.
The full 2025 report, "The courage to think clearly", is available here.
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