Endurance Is the New Alpha: Why Investors and Funders Must Evolve from Extraction to Stewardship
Private equity knows how to make a business profitable. So do venture-backed founders. So do public sector funders chasing scalable impact. But what all of them must learn now is how to make organizations endure.
We are already profitable. We already know how to grow fast, show traction, hit KPIs, deploy capital. But we’ve confused performance with pressure. We’ve prioritized stretch goals over sustainable ones. And whether you’re a board member, fund manager, or government grant officer—the metrics you choose shape the soul of the system or extract one from the people making it happen.
Behind every balance sheet are people: the muscle of the organization. And the way we treat that muscle—how we condition it, stretch it, recover it—determines whether we’re building something that can sprint… or something that can go the distance. Muscles are vital part of a functioning systems, muscles need recovery time, they need cold plunges and clean air and care.
In today’s volatile world, endurance is the new alpha.
We Always Wore Dresses—and Many Masks
Business culture has long been obsessed with appearances: the polished pitch decks, the confident forecasts, the curated leadership image. But beneath the surface, we wore masks. Especially in private equity.
We masked uncertainty with aggressive confidence. We masked misalignment with incentive structures. We masked burnout with phrases like “high-performance culture.”
We forget that people are not just capital—they’re kinetic. They carry emotional load. They hold memory in their bodies. They remember how they were treated long after their exit package is forgotten.
“Technology needs creativity to give it empathy and humanity… and creativity needs technology to give it scale, accountability and pace.” —David Droga, CEO, Accenture Song
“Being digital means being human-centric at scale.” —Mary Kate Loftus, Digital Executive
These insights, shared during Human|Tech Week, remind us: tools only matter when they serve people—with transparency, intention, and care.
What a Leader Endures
I’ve sat with leaders many of which are dear friends reviewing layoff lists—names of people they hired, mentored, believed in. Each name, a life woven into the fabric of the company. A story interrupted. I had been pressured to push outcomes and KPI's to the max when my own mental wealth and capacity started to shatter.
What a leader endures in those moments doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet:
The ache of responsibility
The grief of lost potential
The internal war between care and compliance
This is the invisible tax of leadership under the current model. And that is why endurance must be redefined—not as brute persistence, but as the capacity to stay present when the easy thing is to distance.
“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before.” —Elizabeth Edwards
The Narrative That Leads to Withdrawal
People need jobs. They need dignity. They need to know their mental wealth is as important as their worth—not less—when the company grows.
But too often, the message they receive is: Do more with less.
Less time. Less support. Less compensation. Less acknowledgment.
It’s a story dressed up as innovation, but it leads to one predictable outcome: withdrawal. Not just from the job—but from trust, creativity, and belief in leadership. From our innate gift of play and wonder.
“The most damaged people are the wisest… because they do not wish to see anyone else suffer the way they do.” —Junaid Sarwar
And now, a new generation of talent is already confused, withdrawn, and lost. They’ve been handed systems optimized for output, not meaning. They’ve inherited hustle, instability, and burnout—all wrapped in the language of agility and innovation.
We’re asking them to lead without first showing them how to belong.
When we push people beyond their limits without replenishing them, we’re not optimizing—we’re eroding. And no margin gain is worth that.
The Limits of EBITDA—and the Illusion of Health
In many investment circles, EBITDA remains the golden metric. It’s clean. Comparable. Familiar. But it can also paint an overly rosy picture of a company’s health—ignoring the human and operational costs required to maintain it.
For example:
A company might post strong EBITDA while struggling to pay off debt, delaying vendor payments, or deferring critical maintenance.
EBITDA doesn’t reflect actual cash flow, which means it says little about day-to-day solvency or long-term sustainability.
It doesn’t account for the cost of people leaving, the cost of burned-out teams, or the cost of poor culture—none of which show up in clean financial models until it's too late.
Focusing solely on EBITDA is like looking at a runner’s split time without checking their heartbeat. The numbers might look fast—but how long can they really go?
If endurance is the new alpha, we need new metrics. Ones that tell the truth—not just about profit, but about resilience, liquidity, retention, adaptability, and trust.
And we need more than projections and risk mitigation.
We must identify the communities of interest—the people, places, and sectors directly affected by investment decisions—and ensure they are educated, resourced, and included in shaping the outcomes.
We’re building products and services for people as end users— but how often do we truly manage their experience, beyond nudging them to subscribe, consume, or buy the next “green” gadget destined for a landfill?
We forgot that community is where we first learned to crawl, to walk, to run.
Endurance is not just internal. It’s social. Cultural. Relational. If we’re not designing for shared resilience, we’re designing for collapse.
Infusing Energy Into the Organizational Body
Endurance, like athletic performance, is not about being unbreakable. It’s about being regenerative.
Elite athletes don’t just train harder—they train smarter. They listen to their bodies. They honor recovery. They know when to surge and when to slow.
What if organizations did the same?
“Today's most effective leaders lead through uncertainty… with emotional resilience—and an openness to doing what's never been done before.” —Heather E. McGowan
That looks like:
Incentives that balance profit and rest
Cultures that bounce back from failure
Systems that treat people like muscle fibers—stretched, strengthened, but not torn
Work places that feel like playground
Teams that lose to win. Together in trust falls.
Human beings thrive in safety. They thrive in belonging. In communities that value their efforts, their time, and their humanity.
When companies grow, the people inside them should feel it—not just in performance reviews, but in energy, opportunity, and shared success.
No spreadsheet can measure the cost of a disengaged soul—or the potential of one that’s fully alive.
The Invitation to Capital: Private and Public Alike
This is a moment of reckoning—not just for private equity, but for anyone allocating capital, setting benchmarks, or defining impact.
Whether you're issuing grants from a public innovation fund or structuring Series B rounds for climate tech, the same questions apply:
And do what do those dollars afford? And for whom?
Are the stretch metrics driving real outcomes—or just theater? Are we rewarding endurance—or rewarding burnout?
It’s not enough to organize projections and risk mitigation plans. We must also identify the communities of interest—workers, customers, ecosystems—who will be shaped by our decisions. And we must ensure they are educated, resourced, and ready for what change truly brings.
Community advocates must be more than voices. They must be guardians of the heart—champions who hold their communities as their own, with integrity, gratitude, and joy.
Because if we’re not designing for shared resilience, we’re designing for collapse.
AI is learning from us. From our values. Our metrics. Our definitions of success. If we don’t rehumanize our models of growth, leadership, and belonging, AI will soon become not our wholehearted friend—but our worst nightmare: a mirror of our most extractive instincts, scaled at the speed of code.
We cannot afford to keep building systems that treat people like machines. Because people don’t thrive under relentless pressure. They don’t just scale—they breathe, they rest, they create, they belong, they love.
And for those who find my words too idealistic, I have a question for you: I’m curious—how do you protect it when reality pushes back? What helps you stay idealistic and effective? Do you look for the next role when misalignment becomes inevitable? Do you abandon your teams to find peace elsewhere? Do you pivot, resign, stay silent, or start over?
If we don’t make room for ideals to coexist with impact, we will keep losing our best people—not to failure, but to fatigue.
In a world desperate for new models of leadership, the real flex isn’t maximizing profit at all costs. It’s building organizations—public, private, and in-between—that outlive trends, outlast volatility, and out love the emptiness of optimization.
Yes, we wore dresses. Yes, we wore masks.
But now— we train for what’s real. We train for what lasts. We train for each other— to remember what it means to be human.
We are not like machines.