When Business Escapes the Firm

The biggest changes reshaping business today don't start inside companies. When business escapes the firm, leaders have to meet it on new ground.

We tend to believe that change in business begins with the firm. That strategy drives direction, that leadership sets the pace. In stable periods, dominant firms lead the growth of markets. In disruptive periods, challengers expand the boundaries of business. And often, that logic holds—firms respond to market opportunities, or redefine them entirely. 

But in transitional periods—when the foundations are shifting—change often comes from elsewhere: from new technologies, shifting values, and a reshaping of the economic order. When we view these forces through a firm-centric lens, we constrain our ability to make sense of them—and to lead.

Firms tend to interpret change through familiar questions: What markets should we enter? What customers should we target? What products should we build? How should we price? The shifts underway now are different. They don’t just affect what firms offer—they reshape what firms can do, and what they are for.

Today, firms sense that the terrain is shifting, but not how or where it will settle. AI is poised to reshape business—but how, and on what timeline, remains unclear. People’s attitudes toward work—and their expectations of business—are changing, beyond the reach of firm policy. And state intervention in the economy—from industrial policy to great power rivalry—is reordering global markets. 

These forces don’t always move together, but their cumulative effect is to challenge how business is done and what firms are for.

In moments like this, business escapes the firm. It no longer unfolds solely within organizations or markets, but across a wider terrain—shaped by dynamics that firms respond to, but do not control. 

We don’t yet know what will replace the old foundations. But the urge to name something too quickly—whether a model, a playbook, or a purpose—often obscures more than it reveals. The challenge, and the opportunity, is to see business through a lens wide enough to make sense of the transition as it unfolds.

Beyond the Roadmap

In transitional periods, technologies don’t just change what firms do. They change what business is.

Much of today’s business conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on productivity: how firms can automate tasks, reduce costs, or accelerate workflows. This framing casts AI as an enterprise tool—something to be evaluated, adopted, and implemented. Inside many firms, the dominant questions are operational: Can we trust the output? Will it replace jobs? Where do we find use cases?

But this frame risks missing the bigger picture. AI is not just a tool for firm-level efficiency. It’s a general-purpose technology that reshapes the conditions under which business takes place—redefining how knowledge is created, how decisions are made, and how institutions coordinate action. It alters who gets to participate in value creation, what skills matter, and where the boundaries of the firm should be drawn.

Many of AI’s most significant effects are surfacing outside the firm—not because firms are slow, but because individuals face fewer constraints. People are using AI to learn, create, and connect in real time, reshaping how knowledge is gained, how authorship is defined, what interaction means. Through open source models, agent tools, and viral culture—like the recent Studio Ghibli image wave—the public is actively shaping how AI is used and what it means.

At the same time, early decisions about what AI is—what it can do, what it should do—are being made by labs and builders who are often at a distance from how work functions or how institutions create value. That leaves a growing gap: between how AI is defined, how it’s adopted, and what it will ultimately mean for society. Firms that focus only on enterprise use cases may miss this broader reshaping—and lose the ability to engage with it.

At times like this, firms can’t afford to be passive consumers of emerging technology. But in the race not to be left behind, too many have defaulted to implementing AI capabilities developed elsewhere—rather than engaging with the deeper questions AI raises. That means not just experimenting with tools, but asking what knowledge counts, how trust is earned, and which futures we choose to make real. 

If the challenge for firms in disruptive periods is digital transformation, in transitional times it’s technological participation—moving beyond adoption to help shape the assumptions these technologies carry.

Leaders guiding firms through this shift need to engage with the broader transformation AI is enabling: looking past tools and workflows to the assumptions they build in, and tracking how AI is reshaping the environment around the firm—how people learn, how work is coordinated, how trust is built, and how decisions get made.

Firms don’t need to have all the answers. But they do need to pay attention. The most important impacts of AI won’t be found in product roadmaps, but in the world beyond the firm’s walls. 

Cultural Drift

The split between firm culture and broader societal shifts is widening.

Recently, we’ve swung from a high-water mark of corporate purpose—symbolized by the Business Roundtable’s 2019 statement—to a wave of retrenchment: from flexible work to inclusion to sustainability—initiatives once framed as core to corporate purpose. What seemed like a turning point now feels more like a brief pause—an attempt to redefine the purpose of business from within, without changing the conditions around it.

But shareholder primacy didn’t originate inside firms. It took hold through economic theory, gained momentum in capital markets, spread through business schools, and was locked in by decades of policy and practice. It was a system-wide shift. The idea that stakeholder capitalism could take hold through firm-led declarations ignored how real change moves: not by consensus within companies, but through changes in the wider landscape they inhabit. 

Today, that landscape is shifting again. Generational expectations around work, meaning, and equity are taking shape outside formal institutions. Remote work, still in its early forms, is changing how we experience time, use space, and understand control. Norms are forming in places firms don’t oversee: on social networks, in side hustles, and in the slow, steady exit from traditional career arcs—toward more flexible, independent, or project-based work. These are early cultural signals of how work and value will be redefined.

And beneath these shifts lies a deeper divergence. Across many countries—including the U.S., U.K., Germany, and South Korea—young men and women are no longer moving through the world in sync. They are splitting in values and in outcomes, forming distinct worldviews, economic trajectories, and expectations. 

We tend to think of demographic change as slow, but this realignment has been sharp and fast—accelerated by digital environments that fragment social experience and reinforce separate spheres. This drift is global and still unfolding. Most firms, still built around generational archetypes and one-size-fits-all policies, are unprepared to absorb how this generation of workers is taking shape. 

The result is a growing dissonance—one dramatized by Severance, but visible in boardrooms and Slack threads alike. Inside firms, one language and logic. Outside, another. And in that space between them, the relevance and authority of the firm begins to slip. 

We talk about the future of work as if it will arrive through corporate policy. But much of it is already unfolding elsewhere—in the drift between generations, in norms shaped online, in quiet exits that look like apathy but may be something else entirely. For leaders navigating this shift, it may be less about offering answers and more about listening for what’s emerging—before the disconnect becomes a divide.

Shifting Grounds

How economic ideas outside the firm are redrawing its terrain.

Business doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It moves within an economic order—shaped by ideas, institutions, and now, more visibly again, by political will.

Globalization was one such order: it opened domestic firms to foreign markets, restructured supply chains, and redefined where and how companies could organize, build, and compete. It was a multi-decade transition that changed how business saw its purpose and played its role.

We’re entering another such shift today, shaped by forces beyond the firm.

Industrial policy has re-entered the mainstream, reframing how nations pursue growth, allocate capital, and compete globally. Once dismissed as outdated or inefficient, it’s now central to economic strategy in the U.S., the EU, and parts of Asia..

Meanwhile, great power rivalry—especially between the U.S. and China—has leapt from the pages of Foreign Affairs. It’s restructuring supply chains, redirecting investment, and challenging the logic of openness that defined the last era of globalization. 

Recent tariff shocks underscore how much strategic direction now originates at the national level—not within firms. The return of state-led economic intervention—sometimes strategic, sometimes chaotic—reminds us that firms don’t define the rules of engagement. They respond to them.

The ideas behind these shifts aren’t new—debates over strategic interdependence, national competitiveness, and the risks of great power conflict have circulated for years. What’s changed is their movement: from theory into policy, and from policy into the daily decisions firms must make. 

There’s a temptation to name this as the start of a new order. But we’re still in the early stages—where old assumptions are being undone faster than new ones can cohere.

These shifts emerge from places firms don’t always track—policy papers, law journals, economic theory—but ultimately reshape what’s viable, valuable, and vulnerable. Their effects now show up everywhere—from capital allocation to product strategy, hiring, and market access.

In moments like this, leadership becomes less about directing what’s known and more about engaging with what’s unfolding. 

Leaders will need to develop the awareness—and the relationships—that allow them to move in step with the ideas shaping tomorrow’s terrain.

Moving Forward

In stable periods, business tends to move from the inside out—driven by strategy, scaled through execution, and absorbed into norms. In disruptive periods, bold firms take the lead—challenging incumbents, creating new categories, reshaping markets. 

But in transitional periods, change often begins elsewhere. What matters most to business may not emerge within firms, or even within markets. It takes shape in ideas that gain traction—in law, policy, technology, culture—and gradually redraw the boundaries of what firms can be.

The forces reshaping business are already at work: in AI, in generational behavior, in politics. But they haven’t settled into a structure we can fully name. Moving too quickly to certainty can limit our perspective—and obscure the signals that will matter most.

These signals aren’t hidden. But they’re easy to miss when we’re focused only on what fits inside of firms. Ideas that seem marginal or impractical at first often prove foundational in hindsight. 

The challenge isn’t prediction. It’s perception: developing the range to notice what’s changing and the patience to follow it before the path is clear.

This requires leadership that looks beyond the firm, tracks the edges of change, and engages with emerging ideas—even if they take years to develop. Leaders who do this well are often the most curious—those willing to embrace ambiguity and hold competing perspectives.

Often, the shape of what’s next is already there—just not where we’re used to seeing it.

When business escapes the firm, leaders have to meet it on new ground.