Passion Is the Wrong Word for the Next Decade

"Passion" is the wrong word for what the next decade is going to ask of us. Passion is a feeling, and feelings get shaky when the ground under your profession moves more than once a year.

What separates leaders who thrive from institutions that stall is two things working together: purpose and curiosity. Purpose tells you where you're going; curiosity is what gets you there fast. On their own, each is a liability. Combined, they're how you take agency over a future accelerating faster than any institution can prepare you for.

Here's the part most of us haven't reckoned with. The purpose statements we wrote five years ago were built for slide decks and office walls, never meant to function as a real-time check run by a person under deadline, let alone an AI agent making twenty decisions a minute. As Salim Ismail puts it, organizations are shifting from human-centered operating models to AI-native intelligence systems. In that world, purpose has to earn its keep. It has to sit behind every decision, human or agent, as a test you can apply: is this aligned with what we're here to do?

That reframes the work. Adapting purpose for the AI age isn't a values workshop. It's rewriting purpose until it's clear enough to test against and specific enough to constrain, while still leaving room for the curiosity that keeps an organization learning. Purpose first, then your operating systems, then the agents and workflows.

If you're leading a BC organization and feel the gap between where the technology is going and what your team can absorb, focus on that gap. It's where the real work starts.