Five things that made our recent fireside chat feel different (and what they tell us about purpose-led leadership in 2026)
In the summer of 2022, Jessica Mullen made what many purpose-led leaders would consider the right call.
Her strategic design consultancy had experienced a period of consistent growth and they’d made some hires ahead of the curve. When the macroeconomic climate shifted following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, corporate clients started cutting budgets and delaying decisions. The business ended up carrying more costs than it could cope with long-term.
Jessica had built the business deliberately, with a B Corp culture and a clear commitment to the team. Rather than make some tough decisions on headcount, she chose to wait and prioritised the individual team members’ security.
Fast forward 12 months, an acquisition was on the cards but the business was suffering from depleted reserves. When the timeline for the deal pushed out significantly, there was no option but to ‘right-size’ the team. This went deeper than it would have if action had been taken sooner. Prioritising people over profit in the short term cost the business both in the long term.
At a fireside chat I hosted recently, Jessica shared this story as her "cautionary tale". By not making the tough commercial decision to reduce headcount earlier, it caused more damage to the team than if she’d acted sooner. "We fiercely believed in putting our people first," she told us, "But it wasn't always the right call for the business."
This is the kind of admission you rarely hear from a founder in public. It was also the kind of moment the whole fireside chat was full of.
I’ve hosted these conversations before but this one felt different, and so did the audience response. Senior business leaders stayed for the full hour and one feedback comment in particular struck me: "I appreciated her candour." This was about one speaker, but it captured the tone of all three.
I’ve been thinking about why this conversation worked the way it did. Here are five things I think made the difference, and what they tell us about where the conversation about purpose-led business needs to go next.
1. The casting
Most events in this space (including ones I’ve hosted) feature impact-first speakers. There’s nothing wrong with that but it tends to produce a particular kind of conversation: confident and inspirational but maybe a bit safe and slightly insulated from the day-to-day realities and commercial decisions.
I deliberately chose three speakers whose biographies tell a different story:
Jessica founded a strategy and innovation business, sold it to a 600-person AI and digital transformation consultancy, and led ESG inside a PE-backed firm.
Sung-Hyui Park trained and worked as a “BigLaw” banking lawyer at Clifford Chance for 10 years before joining Bates Wells, the first UK law firm to certify as a B Corp.
Will Herbertson spent 14 years at Procter & Gamble before moving through MoneySavingExpert, MoneySupermarket, and National Accident Helpline, and is now Managing Director of SimplyPhi Group, a profit-with-purpose business working in social housing.
All three speak “commercial” fluently. They’ve sat in budget meetings, owned P&Ls, worked with investors, and navigated acquisitions. They all retain that commercial acumen and bring it into their work on impact and purpose.
That casting choice changed the whole conversation. The speakers were not asking the audience to take a leap of faith; instead, they were sharing operational reality and the same kind of pressures the audience faces every day.
2. They volunteered lessons learnt, not highlight reels
Jessica's redundancy story wasn’t an exception. Will told us about a moment at National Accident Helpline when the business was so flooded with cases that staff were on calls saying "I can't help you because I'm on the phone to you, I need to put the phone down so I can process your case." His decision was to temporarily switch off calls to the law firm, take the reputation hit, and protect the existing clients they’d already promised to help. It took time to rebuild trust.
Sung-Hyui critiqued her own sector. She said purpose-led organisations can develop a kind of "toxic niceness" – people staying silent on disagreements rather than risk seeming unaligned with the values of their company, clients or sector peers. She said that one of her early impressions of the sector was "like I'm working in a really strict Sunday school."
These open and honest stories and willingness to be vulnerable gave the conversation a depth that polished case studies never reach.
3. They contradicted the comfortable narratives of the impact space
Jessica explicitly flagged a "controversial point of view." Sung-Hyui pushed back on what she called the oversimplification that "all profit is bad and capitalism is bad and we should all be doing things that are really altruistic and for free or very low cost." Will questioned the assumption that impact and commercial returns are inherently in tension.
These are people who’ve lived inside impact-led organisations and are willing to question how the sector talks about itself. That’s rare. And it’s exactly what senior commercial leaders need to hear, because they are often put off engaging more deeply with impact precisely because the conversation feels ideologically loaded.
If we want commercial leaders to take impact seriously as a strategic priority, we need conversations that take their concerns seriously. That includes being willing to push back on our own pieties.
4. They named operational mechanisms, not just values
Most impact conversations stay at the level of purpose and values, whereas this one got into how things actually work.
Sung-Hyui described Bates Wells's appraisal process. There are three sections (Clients & Markets, People & Culture, Finance & Practice Management) that are weighted equally and (for partners) assessed by a bespoke committee. Someone who hits financial targets but has terrible 360 feedback or has failed to make a wider contribution to the firm or society won’t get celebrated in a way they might do elsewhere.
Jessica described an internal Commercial Acumen Series at her PE-backed firm, fronted by the CFO, helping every employee understand how the business makes money. This created the shared literacy needed to have constructive conversations about trade-offs.
Sung-Hyui shared a deliberate portfolio approach to her own revenue mix at her firm: a blend of sector-building work and “bread-and-butter” fee-earning work (with a careful balance of smaller, grassroots organisations and larger, more institutional investors and corporates). This portfolio is balanced consciously to keep her practice, and by extension the firm, financially sustainable while pursuing cutting-edge impact work that seeks to add genuine value and thought leadership to the sector.
The value in these insights is they allow senior leaders to take specific practical ideas back to their desks and use them. It’s operational mechanisms like these that enable strategic impact advice to become genuinely transformational. Vague exhortations to "be more purposeful" does not change businesses, embedding impact into your systems and processes does.
5. The tensions were treated as ongoing, not solved
Nobody on the panel said "we’ve figured it out."
Sung-Hyui spoke about Bates Wells's "diversity of thought" work and was clear that it’s not yet complete: "we are still on that journey, but we acknowledge it's something we willingly take on and want to continue getting better at."
Will admitted his current company makes integrating impact relatively straightforward because it’s family-owned. He contrasted that with roles where he had seen investors push out CEOs for not delivering enough financial return.
Jessica's cautionary tale was an admission that she’s not yet fully resolved how to balance her instincts for kindness with tough decisions required when you’re running a business.
The honesty about not having arrived was distinctive. Whilst we might crave the certainty and simplicity of a five-step plan, we also distrust it because day-to-day we are living with complexity. Honest conversations about the ongoing journey can be far more valuable than tidy frameworks.
So what does this tell us about purpose-led leadership in 2026?
Looking at these five observations together, a pattern emerges. The most useful conversations about purpose-led business in this moment are not the inspirational set-pieces. They are operational, vulnerable, willing to contradict comfortable narratives, and honest about what has not been figured out yet.
We need to stop thinking of impact as an ideology and start delivering it as strategy. That means integrating values into the operational fabric of how a business actually runs, so that impact becomes a key ingredient of growth, loyalty, and legacy, rather than a side project that sits in tension with the day-to-day commercial work.
These are the conversations I’m trying to convene. On the evidence of this fireside chat, there are senior leaders who are ready to have them.
If you missed the fireside chat, the recording is available here.
If you want to grow commercial success and positive impact hand-in-hand, I’m running a free masterclass on 6th July called “Separate to Strategic”. Sign up here.
If you’d like to speak at a future fireside chat or would like to recommend a guest, please let me know (hannah@keartland.co)