The First Business Renaissance

The First Business Renaissance

Leading with Human Brilliance in 2026

Think about the year you’re sprinting to finish and ask yourself:

What if this is the most stable year you’ll see for the rest of your career?

It likely is. This is the Never-Normal era, where disruption, shocks, and rapid change are regular occurrences and business plans, growth expectations, even our change initiatives, are constantly rewritten by forces we don’t fully control.

If you’re leading a 60–400-person tech or tech-enabled company, you’re living this more intensely than most: targets that still look aggressive on paper, but a team, market, and operating model that no longer behave like they did in the last decade.

It’s taking a toll. In PwC’s 2025 Global CEO Survey, almost 60% of leaders expect global growth to improve slightly over the next year, yet 42% believe their own company won’t be economically viable in ten years if it keeps operating the way it does today. Tech, with its envious growth rates over the last five years, has seen a softening into a new “normal” that is well off founders’ expectations.

In my 30+ years of working with leadership teams across North America and Europe, through some of the most dire financial and socio-economic crises, what I’ve noticed is the same instinctive response: 

when times get tough, we protect and normalise instead of grow and capitalise.

In my view, we’re doing ourselves, our companies, our employees, and our customers a disservice by navigating this era with the traditional models built for the last age of relatively stable markets, steady growth, and dependable returns. 

The world has moved on. Our operating system for business hasn’t.

So, what does a business model look like when it’s purpose-built for this era? A model that grows with constant disruption without burning out its people, destroying its culture, or losing its customers’ trust?

What does leadership look like when it stops treating disruption and change as obstacles to our goals and starts using them as raw material for progress?

It’s hard to shake off what has worked for so long, to put aside our classical business-school training, and to convince bosses, boards, and stakeholders that there is a better way to grow in this new era. 

But that is exactly the decision in front of leaders right now.

This article is about a different approach.  It’s about a new mindset and model that will transform and sustainably grow your business in this high-cost, high-rate, high-velocity change world.

But first, let’s take that beat on where we are now and why.

On paper, the story looks pretty good. Your top line might even be growing despite three years of decline around you. Mid-size SaaS and tech companies are still posting 20–25% growth a year—numbers that leave most sectors envious.

But if you’ve been doing this for a while, you can feel the downshift. Something is off. And has been for some time.

That’s the first part of the bind:

You’re still growing, but not the way you expected to.

The future you sold to yourself, your team, and your board is quietly slipping out of reach, even as the P&L says you’re “doing fine.” And yet, CEO sentiment is strangely optimistic.

Almost 60% of CEOs expect economic growth to improve over the next 12 months and over 40% expect to increase headcount. Most have adjusted growth strategies to tackle disruption, entered new sectors, and leaned into AI. Over a trillion dollars has been spent globally on transformation and reinvention initiatives.

But it doesn’t square with the 41% of leaders who say their firms won’t be economically viable a decade from now unless they reinvent how they create, deliver, and capture value. Or the 70% failure rate of roughly 700 billion dollars’ worth of reinvention and transformation projects that failed to meet their objectives. Or the fact that only about 7% of revenue is coming from genuinely new businesses and sectors.

If you want to understand why growth feels softer and reinvention stalls, you have to look inside the business.

Inside most companies today, people are drowning in what Microsoft calls “digital debt.” Nearly two-thirds of employees say they don’t have the time and energy to do their job. The same people are several times more likely to say they’re struggling with innovation and strategic thinking. 

That shouldn’t surprise anyone: creativity and insight are the first things to go when you’re exhausted.

Over half of managers report feeling burned out and unable to handle any discretionary work because they are stretched, disengaged, or both. 

Engagement is hovering near an all-time low of roughly one in five people. 

Four out of five are, at best, going through the motions, doing what the role requires and not much more, because that is all they have capacity for. 

You see it in the VP who used to be your boldest thinker and now is bravely trying to get through the year. Or in your engineer that is caring more about hitting metrics than solving problems. 

Add to this billions of lost working days and hundreds of billions in lost productivity every year due to poor mental health, high stress, and “always-on” expectations and we get to the second part of the bind:

You and your team are working harder than ever for smaller gains.

And then there are your customers. They’re telling you the experience isn’t matching the promise. On the dashboards, things can look okay. But when you look at how customers actually feel, a different picture emerges. 

Forrester’s 2024 US Customer Experience Index shows CX quality has declined for the third year in a row, with scores at their lowest level since 2016 and only a small minority of companies delivering truly “good” experiences. 

At the same time, tolerance is collapsing: one recent global trends report found that 96% of customers say they will stop engaging with a company after a bad experience, and around 80% are willing to switch to a competitor after multiple negative interactions. 

Customers are sending a clear message. We’ve layered in complexity and automation faster than we’ve upgraded the human experience, and they’re voting with their feet.

Yet through all this, we keep trying to fix the problem in the same way with the same limited success. 

Anemic growth, declining engagement and poor experiences are symptoms of a larger problem for business:

trying to reinvent the business without reinventing the system it runs on.

We’re attempting change on top of an operating system built for stability and certainty, not for a Never-Normal world.

For the last decade, most leadership models have treated disruption as an obstacle to our goals and a threat to be managed and mitigated. 

We’ve optimised for certainty in an uncertain world.

The paradox is that in trying to protect ourselves from disruption, we’ve made it harder, not easier, to grow through it. That’s the bind you’re in:

You’re being asked to deliver new levels of growth and innovation from a system that was never designed to thrive in the conditions you’re facing now.

And 2026 isn’t lining up to rescue us. Global growth is expected to hover around the same slow pace, weighed down by trade tensions and geopolitical noise, not a return to the easy tailwinds of the last decade. 

In other words, the world ahead looks a lot like more of the same; grinding growth, high expectations, and expensive reinvention. If the world continues to move further away from a traditional stable environment the real question is:

Why keep running the same operating system?

II. The Hinge Moment — From the Modern Middle Ages to a Business Renaissance

Analysts call this environment a polycrisis: multiple, interacting shocks—economic, environmental, geopolitical, social, technological—that collide and amplify one another. Cost-of-living pressure. Climate shocks. AI anxiety. War headlines. Political instability. Culture wars. Loneliness is rising; trust in institutions is falling; many people quietly believe their children will be worse off than they are.

I’ve been analysing disruption and rapid socio-economic change since the financial crisis of 2008–09. I spent those years side by side with clients, navigating the carnage, rebuilding, and repositioning them for what we thought was a short, sharp financial crisis. By mid-2009 it was clear to me that something more fundamental had shifted. Employees had changed. Customers had changed. The business world had changed.

I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d seen this pattern before, somewhere in history. That sixth sense is what took me, in the summer of 2009, to a small village outside Florence, the epicentre of the Italian Renaissance.

My purpose was to rethink and write about this “new era” of business and how we might navigate it. As I dug into the history of Florence and the Renaissance, it became clear that this era of disruption, distrust, and disengagement is not so new.

We have been here before.

Historians describe the European Middle Ages as a period of overlapping crises and deep control. It was an era defined by survival, not possibility. Systems were designed to maintain order, not unlock potential; to protect doctrine and current practices, not explore new realities; to manage and mitigate change to preserve control and stability.

The rational human response was simple: keep your head down, obey authority, protect your place in the order, and hope the next shock passes you by. Resentment built as power and privilege accumulated at the top, and ordinary people learned that the system was not built for them.

When I lined up that picture against what I was seeing in modern organisations, the parallels were eerie and hard to ignore:

We are working in the Modern Middle Ages of Business.

In this Modern Middle Ages of Business, survival thinking dominates. Leaders discount the future to survive the quarter. They minimise, manage, and mitigate change instead of imagining and building with it. Employees live paycheque to paycheque. Many feel lonelier, more suspicious, and less able to trust the institutions that claim to serve them.

Edelman calls it a “crisis of grievance”: a widespread sense that the system benefits the few at the expense of the many, and that business and government leaders deliberately mislead people.

Inside companies, the same survival mindset shows up in quieter ways. People aren’t storming castles; they’re quietly checking out. The safest move, for many, is to do exactly what the role requires and not much more. You may have noticed that your team has stopped asking hard questions and stopped taking creative risks. We are all complicit when we quietly tolerate systems that grind down the very people we expect to carry us through disruption.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re running a 21st-century company on a medieval operating system, you’re not far off.

That’s what I mean by the Modern Middle Ages of Business:

Systems optimised for control, compliance, and extraction in a world that desperately needs creativity, courage, and connection.

If the historical Middle Ages were a stuck age, one too fragile to move, too fearful to imagine, our Modern Middle Ages of Business are stuck in a different way. 

We have more tools, more data, more technology than any generation before us but we are exhausted, dulled down, burned out and not, in any meaningful sense, moving forward.

And here’s the uncomfortable part if you’re a leader: most of us didn’t sign up for this.

The leaders I meet did not start their careers wanting to manage business model obsolescence. They want to build products and services that genuinely solve problems. They want to have impact. They want to create cultures where their people and their customers could do the best work of their lives.

That feeling is not new either.

The Renaissance was our response to centuries of this kind of stuckness. It didn’t magically appear out of nowhere; it emerged from an age that felt just as survival-driven and grievance-filled as ours. 

If we could ignite a Renaissance once, we can do it again. This time, it starts in business.

While you may feel you are in a bind you do have a choice:

You can keep optimising the Modern Middle Ages of Business or you can author the next era.

No amount of tinkering with feudal institutions would have produced the Renaissance. At some point, people decided to stop trying to repair the Middle Ages and decided to step into a different era altogether. 

The same is true now. It will not be enough to “fix” the current environment, or to squeeze a few more percentage points of efficiency out of systems that are already draining your people and your customers.

Historically, the Renaissance wasn’t created by policy decrees or stimulus packages. It was catalysed when people began to think differently about themselves and their world: a renewed focus on human potential and market possibility, on critical thinking and imagination, on the inner life and shared civic purpose. 

Art and science didn’t cause the Renaissance; they flourished because the conditions for curiosity and courage were deliberately created. Da Vinci and Galileo are what it looks like when those conditions are in place.

In business, we’re at a similar inflection point. We can’t policy our way out of the Modern Middle Ages of Business. We can’t transform our way out of it with one more program layered on top of a tired system.

We need a different kind of operating mindset:

One that is both human-capability-maximising and opportunity-capturing at the same time.

We need a Business Renaissance.

 And this brings me back to two questions that woke me in the middle of the night in that village outside Florence, questions that have guided my work with leadership teams ever since:

The Reframe is my answer.

IV. The Reframe — What a Business Renaissance Really Means

It is human nature to struggle.
But we need to know we’re struggling forward: becoming better, building something better, leaving something better behind.

Right now, that’s not happening.

We’re relying on survival habits; staying comfortable, managing risk, keeping it shiny side up. You can feel it in return-to-office battles, in work that feels more mechanical than meaningful, in legacy systems that are dulling human performance. 

We are struggling for all the wrong reasons and that’s creating a tension in business right now between where we are and where we want to be because:

We are being held in a present we’re trying to get out of.

That tension is what sparked the first Renaissance: a civilisation refusing to stay trapped in its own “dark age” and choosing to struggle forward into a new one.

A Business Renaissance is the same kind of move in our world.

It’s what happens when we stop trying to optimise the Modern Middle Ages of Business and start designing companies as places where environments and cultures are deliberately built to be both human-capability-maximising and opportunity-capturing at the same time.

If there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to keep optimising the Modern Middle Ages of Business, this is the moment to ask:

What would it look like to build something else?

That shift begins with how you see your role as a leader.

From Crisis Management to Era Design

For most of the last decade, the unspoken job description for leaders has been simple:

Shiny side up. Survive disruption. Hit the number.

In that model, disruption is an obstacle and effective leadership looks like ever-faster crisis management of more meetings and personal heroics to hold a tired system together. 

A Business Renaissance starts from a different premise.

You see your leadership as an opportunity to use disruption to build something better for your people and your customers. Disruption becomes the raw material for growth and advancement. Effective leadership becomes the craft of designing the conditions where people can do their best work under change.

Renaissance city-states like Florence and Urbino worked this way. Their leaders deliberately shaped their cities as “palaces” for human potential that made it easier for great work to happen. They understood that culture and internal conditions were the real, durable advantage.

The same is true now. You may not rule a city-state, but you do shape the small “state” you lead every day, your company.

Better Growth — How Growth Behaves in a Business Renaissance

In the Modern Middle Ages of Business, growth often feels like a frantic scramble: heroic effort, fragile wins, and a constant sense that you’re one shock away from sliding backwards.

In a Business Renaissance, growth stops behaving like that.

Better Growth is sustainable growth that enriches people, customers, and the company at the same time.

In a Better Growth company:

Growth feels like momentum. It’s above-market performance driven by a clear focus, a healthy culture, and a reputation that attracts more than your fair share of great talent and devoted customers.

Florence and Urbino were like this in their time. They were Ascendent city-states that outgrew their peers, drew in outsized talent, and became magnets for trade and ideas because they built the conditions for excellence.

Think of your company in the same way, a modern city-state for human potential and market possibility. The more deliberately you design it, the more growth becomes about releasing what your people are capable of, not squeezing more out of them.

In the same way the historical Renaissance emerged when human potential, belief, and courage came into alignment, Better Growth is what happens when human brilliance, clarity of purpose, and courage to act line up inside your company.

The Movement Manifesto — Principles of a Business Renaissance

The first Renaissance endured because it did more than celebrate a handful of geniuses. It re-anchored a whole society in enduring human principles: the worth of the individual, the pursuit of excellence, the responsibilities of civic life, and the belief that we could learn from the best of the past and still create something new.

Humanists like Petrarch spoke of imitatio, not blind copying of antiquity, but creative imitation of its virtues for a new age.

A Business Renaissance works the same way.

We don’t need to copy 15th-century guilds or Medici patronage. We need our own version of imitatio: carrying forward the best of what we’ve learned in business and updating it for this era of disruption, technology, and global interdependence.

In my work with leadership teams, that has taken shape as a sturdy set of principles I call a Movement Manifesto for the Business Renaissance. These principles have guided growth, built new categories of business, strengthened cultures and attracted some of the best talent and customers to my clients over the years. These are the choices they made and the principles that distinguish Business Renaissance companies from Modern Middle Ages of Business companies:

Human Brilliance — The Force That Moves Us Forward

Human brilliance is the fusion of potential and possibility. A renewable resource at the heart of every great company. When organisations create the conditions for brilliance to emerge, performance compounds, purpose deepens, and growth enriches everyone it touches.

Strategic Integrity — Excellence with Integrity

The Renaissance didn’t separate profit from principle; it fused them. Today, Strategic Integrity is our version of that wisdom. It means leading with excellence and integrity by designing products that serve, systems that elevate people, and companies that can be trusted. It’s not virtue as marketing; it’s strategy through substance. When you build with integrity, your value compounds: in the trust of your people, the loyalty of your customers, and the reputation you build.

Performance Ecosystem — The Environment Where Brilliance Breathes

Every company has a performance ecosystem, a living system of people, purpose, and practice that determines how far it can go. When that ecosystem is cluttered by misalignment and complexity, potential suffocates. But when you see performance as an ecosystem of talent, culture, and customer, brilliance returns and momentum compounds. 

Leadership as Craft — Designing the Guild for Brilliance

Leadership is the highest creative act in business. Not because it paints or writes, but because it designs the conditions where others can do their best work. Renaissance leaders didn’t control genius; they cultivated it. That’s our task again today: to make the collective human brilliance of our companies not a rare moment of inspiration, but a system we design, nurture, and renew every day.

Adopting these principles are how you move from an organisation optimised for control, compliance, and extraction to one built for Better Growth and Human Brilliance.

Why This is Sustainable — From Imitatio to a New Iteration

The first Renaissance lasted because it took enduring the human truths of the power of human potential, the call to excellence, the responsibility to the communities we’re part of and found new forms for them in its own age.

That’s what a Business Renaissance does in our time.

We’ve already proved we’re willing to invest in change. We’ve poured staggering sums into transformation and reinvention. We know, in our bones and in the data, that what we’re doing now isn’t working like it should. 

What we need is not more pressure on the same system, but a new iteration of principles that have already proved themselves over centuries: trusting human potential, designing for excellence, tying our work to something larger than our own survival.

You may feel you haven’t yet exhausted every “best practice” in the current playbook. But in a Modern Middle Ages of Business environment, the greater risk is keeping everything as it is. Managing and normalizing your business conditions. Asking your people to absorb more pressure so you can squeeze out one more point of growth, instead of choosing a new path through this era.

The Renaissance was that new path once.
The Business Renaissance can be again.

That’s why this isn’t just another change initiative. It’s a movement:

from system fatigue to human advantage. Transforming disruption and change into growth that enriches people, performance, and the world.

The question for you now is: 

What kind of era do you want your leadership to help create?

V. The Invitation — Starting Your Business Renaissance

You’ve just stepped through the never-normal environment that keeps rewriting your plans, the Modern Middle Ages of Business where survival thinking quietly rules, all the way to the idea of a Business Renaissance world where human brilliance and commercial ambition grow together.

If any part of you has been feeling that tension of “this can’t be all there is, but I’m not sure what the alternative looks like” I want you to know: you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone.

You’re not the problem.
Your people aren’t the problem.

You’ve been leading inside an operating system that was built for stability and predictability, not for the kind of disruption and complexity you’re facing now. 

A Business Renaissance is the decision to stop optimising that world and start building another.

It’s the choice to:

None of that happens by accident. It happens because one leader, in one company, decides that “how we’ve always done it” is no longer an acceptable ceiling.

There is no single template for a Business Renaissance. Each company will express it in its own way. But the through-line is a shared one: 

a belief in human potential, a commitment to excellence, and the courage to build something better on purpose.

Other generations have lived through long stretches where systems and human potential were badly out of sync. They carried forward the best of what came before them, reimagined it for their own time, and built something better on purpose.

That’s the invitation in front of you now:

Do you want to keep optimising the Modern Middle Ages of Business or start building your own Business Renaissance, inside your company?

If you choose the latter, you don’t need permission.
You need conviction, companions, and a design that makes “better” possible.

This article is my way of offering all three and an invitation to step into the era your leadership was actually made for. In 2026, everything I write and speak about will build on this invitation.