Recovering your core: moral leadership and imagination

When people ask, ‘what are your values?’, the question often carries the same weight and urgency as, ‘what colour did you choose for your new kitchen?’. It’s a ‘nice to have’ kind of question. In reality it fits into ‘the house is on fire’ category of importance and urgency. ‘Character shapes destiny’ said Heraclitus. And every single life, organisations and nations history bears this out. Ignore it at our peril.

Today we are looking at the great disruption. It’s happening around us socially, politically, economically, geo-politically and environmentally. Things that either felt like they were moving in a good direction, or could be relied on as being reasonably predictable, are all up in the air. It felt like we were building towards greater security, a better standard of living, decreasing global poverty, a seriousness about a sustainable future, but all of these can no longer be assumed. The apologists for the break-the-eggs strategy of Trump et al are saying to me, ‘it’s great he is disrupting everything. Things needed shaking up. Organisations have become fat and complacent’.

And I agree with this statement.

But only up to a point.

And it is a very big ‘but’.

Firstly, it’s the elite, once again, telling us what is good for us, when in reality the numbers show how it is good for them. Explain to me how a HIV+ woman in Zambia, a kid who was just refused a vaccine or and a dad who can’t feed his family because of drought, feel about hearing this from the richest 0.1% of the world.  And secondly it is a disruption without a cause. It has no core, no centre, no mission, no compass point, at its centre. I’ll explain.

The lack of principles and values for justice, equality, dignity and generosity at the heart of the elite’s world view, means that the technical necessity for greater governance, auditing, reviewing, streamlining, reordering the mechanisms to deliver lifesaving interventions, is also stripped of a moral imperative. In throwing away the drugs, foods and vaccines, we also throw away justice, equality and contribution.

The need for shake ups and wake ups and reordering’s are absolutely essential. This isn’t new. The driving theory behind the New Labour project was the need for perpetual revolution[1], because as soon as you achieve your goals, inertia, inefficiency and irrelevancy quietly slip in through the back door. They are like weeds that always return unless you vigilantly tend your garden. All organisations, all governments, all brilliant start-ups, face the same challenge. We know this. The Puritans[2] said you needed revival every three generations for this very reason.  

When we lose connection with that animating life energy that started something – even an individual life – then the forms, the routines, try to take their place and they simply can’t. ‘Things fall apart’, says WB Yeats, not because the systems and bureaucracies fail but because ‘the centre cannot hold[3]’.

It is the centre we should be screaming about right now, at every level of life. To disrupt because things are falling apart without focusing on the centre is catastrophic.

If we disrupt, pull down, dismantle everything we think is wrong, in the presence of nothing, the absence of a core, a centre, then what you end up with is nihilistic destruction that punishes the very essence of humanity. In contrast, dismantling that revolves around a principled, values driven centre is what leads to beneficial revolution, reawakening, renaissance. We don’t want people who are just against things, we need leaders who are for things - values, moral imagination - and can reconstruct around those core values; people who shape every step against the true north of the compass.

Where, I’m wondering, in the market place of life right now are the people calling out for moral leadership – leadership that grasps the core foundational values like their life depended on it, because it does?

Where, I’m wondering, are the leaders with moral imagination that takes our core values and reimagines the future built around them.

This leadership imperative should be the most unmissable and mandatory module of every MBA and Exec Development programme, but my experience is that, at best, it is an optional elective for the few. This is not acceptable.  You cannot build a life, an organisation, a nation, without a founding set of values, ruthlessly woven into the fabric of every decision, held on to as if the future hung on them and reworked courageously into every new generation, without fail, always and forever.

Individuals, organisations, nations, lose their way, their life, because they didn’t stand guard at the centre.

An interesting example from history.

In 1948 the world stood in the aftermath of total chaos and destruction. The old order had collapsed. How would the world rebuild? Firstly, there was an agreement of what is wrong with extremism of any colour – it undermines and destroys humanity. Everyone’s humanity was an agreed value. Then two things happened in that one year. The first was the Marshall Plan[4], centred in the principles of generosity and Oikos. Oikos is the Greek word from which we got our word economy. But it was a word with rich meaning. It literally meant ‘household’. Everyone (country) in the household benefits from the different resources and skills each brings. Adam Smith[5] defined the mission of the economy as everyone should live ‘a life without shame’. Economy has lost its original meaning and has become about worth, not values[6], individuals, not communities. The second principle of the Marshall Plan was generosity. Our meaning is derived in our active help for the disenfranchised to find dignity going forwards by giving from our core wealth (not a few dollars off the fringe).

In that same year the UN declared that to rebuild the world we need to rebuild around an agree, core, moral centre. That centre was called The Universal Declaration Of Human Rights[7]. An agreed set of values that would be like a moral compass for the world.

It is not that we failed in 1948 with the Marshall Plan or the UNDHR, but it is true that we neglected them. Like democracy, we took them for granted. We didn’t impress up everyone why we needed these founding values. What happened when we didn’t have them and what will happen again if we don’t keep them alive and central to all decision making. Remembering has been a foundational practice in faiths for millennia because they knew it was vital.

We are now being left with disruption. Those of us who have been around long enough can see how things are falling apart because the centred didn’t hold. With hardly any leaders calling us back to the core values on which we build humanity, we have a dangerous vacuum – of moral leadership and moral imagination, that needs to be filled urgently. This won’t happen easily and will cost some people much courage, but it isn’t an option.

If we want to know how the story ends for an individual, an organisation or a nation, just look closely at their centre. As Michael Wolff highlighted about Trump, its easy, he wants to be the most famous person in the world. Everything fits round that. Musk’s centre? Vance’s centre? We saw first-hand what happened with Boris’ centre.

But what about my centre? That is where change needs to start. This is what will determine how my story works out. So, what are the four things I am committing myself to in order to strengthen my core, in order to be fit for the decisions that lay ahead in my own life?

1.     Locate my own actual centre.

Not my ideal or aspirational centre. What actual values am I living out today? What am I doing with my deepest wounds?

2.     Locate the centre I want.

I will do the hard work on defining my core values that I am prepared to live or die for.

3.     Live from the centre.

I need to consciously apply my centre into every little decision I make. The root of the word ‘character’ comes from the word ‘to engrave’. Every little decision engraves the future. If I said I wanted to be generous and kind, what does that look like in the tough decision I have to make?

4.     Leaders lead.

As a leader of organisations in the past, did I ruthlessly clarify, recover and live the core values of my organisations? Was I committed to moral leadership and moral imagination? Leaders are tasked with getting really clear about the values of their organisations, ensuring they themselves embody them and then apply them into every single decision and holding others accountable to do the same. Then I need to reach and embed these values into the lives of every new employee through words and actions – and keep on doing it every year. I will either sow the seeds of future health or destruction. This is the leaders work.

Trevor Waldock / March 2025

[1] Philip Gould The Unfinished Revolution Abacus 2011 (btw this is the best book on strategy I’ve ever read)

[2] The religious groups of the 16th and 17th centuries

[3] W B Yeats The Second Coming in Selected Poetry 1975  Pan

[4] https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/marshall-plan

[5] Adam Smith wrote his treatise in The Wealth of Nations and this was based on his previous work A Theory Of Moral Sentiments that spelt out the underlying values of the oikos.

[6] Mark Carney  Values: An economist Guide To Everything That Matters  William Collins 2022

[7] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights