The Future Board Meeting
Last night I found myself in a sunlit boardroom, twenty years from now. The table was made of living wood. Six young people – the children of today’s founders – sat across from their parents.
No pitch decks or metrics. Just one question hanging in the air.
“Why did you still believe growth had to destroy something?”
One of them, maybe twenty-three, leaned forward. Her voice was calm, not accusing: “We read the old reports. You burned through forests to train models. You burned through people to hit quarterly targets. You called it ‘necessary friction.’ We call it unnecessary.”
A searching and at the same time thoughtful silence spread through the room.
Is that a pattern we still refuse to name? We kept treating the living world – and the living people inside our companies – as resources to be optimized instead of relationships to be stewarded.
Maybe we confused speed with direction for so long that we forgot the difference.
In the future, when our kids sit in that boardroom and ask the same question, they will be curiously interested rather than angry. Because by then the companies that survived won’t be the ones that grew the fastest. They will be the ones that grew in rhythm with life itself. The ones that left the soil richer, the people whole, the future open.
How do we actually learn to grow without taking more than we give?
Maybe you already know.
