Bowing Before Two Gods: Navigating Competing Demands

For 25 years, my research has focused on a challenge faced by many impact leaders: balancing purpose and profit, or as I call it, “bowing before dual gods”. This journey is deeply personal. Raised by political activist parents who later joined corporate America, I grew up between two worlds: the idealism of a commune and the pragmatism of business. Even as my parents transitioned to management consulting and high-tech, they held on to their activist roots.¹

This duality has consistently guided me in my academic career. I earned a PhD in organisational behaviour from Harvard, bridging discipline-based knowledge of the sociology department and the applied knowledge of the Harvard Business School – and also physically bridging the river that separates these two parts of the university. My first faculty position was at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations School, a deeply proud advocate for labor rights but also a trusted partner to human resource executives and other corporate leaders. From there I moved to Oxford’s Saïd Business School, where I have continued to explore the intersection of business and social impact. My career has been about navigating and bridging these contrasting worlds – and this challenge is at the heart of my research.

The Blurring of Boundaries Between Business and Social Impact

In the last two decades, the boundaries between business and the social sector have blurred. Early pioneers like Grameen Bank in Bangladesh broke away from using charity to address complex social problems like inequality and instead started offering microloans and other financial services.

Over time, the field of microfinance has grown tremendously, with a range of organisations adapting commercial banking practices to help people living in deep poverty become economically self-sufficient. A similar trend is seen in organisations like Digital Divide Data (DDD), a self-described “non-profit company” which combines commercial activity with a social mission. Founded in the early 2000s, DDD uses its data services business to provide well-paying jobs to people from underserved communities across Cambodia, Laos, and Kenya.

This blending of business and social impact was reflected in the founding of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, which I now lead, just over 20 years ago, when the term “social entrepreneurship” began to gain traction. The idea of using entrepreneurial approaches to tackle social issues quickly took off, becoming more mainstream. While the meaning of the term has evolved and become somewhat diffuse over time, at its core it remains focused on using commercial activity and market-based approaches to address complex social problems. This shift is part of the broader trend of blurring boundaries between business and the social sector.

Alongside these changes in how social mission-driven organisations operate, over the last 20 years we've seen an increasing number of large corporations starting to not just engage in CSR but to try to embed a social or environmental purpose into the core of their business operations. Whole Foods Market is one example, and an organisation that I spent a lot of time studying in the early 2000s, before it was acquired by Amazon. The emphasis was on offering natural foods without additives or preservatives and supporting local, environmentally sustainable production, whilst also generating profit and revenue growth.

The convergence of business and social impact has been further reinforced by the development of legal structures like the Benefit Corporation in the US, which binds companies to a broader set of stakeholders beyond shareholders, and in the global B Corp certification, which requires that companies meet a set of environmental, social, and governance standards. Meanwhile, the emergence and growth of impact investing, in which investors aim for social and well as financial returns, has also facilitated the blending of business with social purpose.

Hybridity as a Lens for Understanding Blurring Boundaries

To understand the blurring boundary between business and the social sector, and particularly to understand how organisations can survive and thrive in this space, I have developed, together with a number of research collaborators, the concept of organisational hybridity. Hybridity involves combining organising logics from different sectors of society, such as the market and social welfare sectors. These differing logics shape organisational goals, strategies, structures, as well as employees’ values, priorities, and skills.

For example, social enterprises have a social welfare mission, addressing issues like poverty or education, but incorporate market-based approaches for generating profits. Likewise Whole Foods Market, while focused on growth and profit, integrates social objectives like sustainability and local production.

The concept of hybridity sensitises us to the competing demands these kinds of organisations face due to their dual focus. For example, DDD had to decide whether to hire employees based on social need or business capability, and whether to locate offices in rural areas, where their mission could be better served because they could reach people who were more in need of training and employment, or in urban centres with more reliable infrastructure and resources for running a data services company. Microfinance institutions face similar dilemmas around balancing financial viability with social goals, particularly when making decisions about who should receive a loan – should they consider the potential borrower’s personal circumstances and social need or use more traditional financial measures. Whole Foods also faced competing demands, like whether to promote natural and sustainable but perhaps less profitable options on the end of the aisle or more profitable but less socially aligned products.

The Benefits and Challenges of Hybridity for Social Impact

While competing demands may sound problematic, they can actually be the source of novel, creative solutions. My research has surfaced three ways this occurs in organisations that pursue both business and social impact.

First, hybridity can help organisations to reach new customer segments, particularly underserved populations: For example, microfinance organisations are providing financial services to communities that otherwise would not have access to loans or banking services. Through approaches like group lending, microfinance organisations can effectively serve people in deep poverty, especially women.

Second, hybridity can help you to tap into new employee populations: Companies like DDD generate social impact by offering jobs, training, and growth opportunities to marginalised populations.

Third, hybridity can fuel product and service innovations, driving the development of products like renewable energy or sustainable goods, as seen with organisations like Sistema Bio, which developed a prefabricated biodigester that offers an affordable source of renewable energy to farmers in underserved communities, creating value for both people and the planet.

But these benefits of hybridity are not automatic, as the mixing of purpose and profit also brings significant challenges due to tensions between social missions and business goals.

This can manifest in two ways. First, tensions can arise between employees committed to social goals and those focused on business success. For instance, some microfinance organisations experience tensions between people trained in development or social work and those coming from a commercial banking background – with each group focusing on different factors when making loan decisions. Similarly, at some Whole Foods stores, there were tensions between “idealists” who prioritise the social mission and “capitalists” who seek mainly business success, with conflicts erupting over issues such as what products to promote or how strict to be about recycling and composting.

Second, tensions between purpose and profit can lead to mission drift, where organisations unintentionally shift too far towards either social impact or business success and lose sight of the other objective. In the early years at DDD, for example, the focus on hiring based on social need became so intense that the organisation nearly suffered a cash flow crisis. Conversely, some microfinance organisations have been criticised for focusing too much on profitability and losing sight of their social mission to loan to the ultra poor.

Navigating Hybridity: Strategies for Balancing Purpose and Profit

Navigating the benefits and challenges of hybridity requires actively balancing between purpose and profit, and my research has revealed three key strategies that help leaders and organisations do this.

First, embracing a paradox mindset, which involves seeking “both/and approaches” that accommodate both sides of competing demands, rather than “either/or approaches” where you choose just one side. At Whole Foods, for example, managers that adopted a both/and-mindset balanced purpose and profit by promoting local products, which aligned with the company’s social mission and appealed to customers, helping to generate profits. And when the company decided to support local farmers by hosting famers’ markets in store parking lots, these managers balanced purpose and profit by buying products from the farmers and using it in the stores’ prepared foods dishes – a solution that helped farmers while also driving up company sales.

Second, building guardrails, which involves creating structures and relationships that balance both priorities. For example, when the socially responsible ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s was acquired by Unilever, they negotiated to establish an independent board of directors responsible for the company’s social mission, ensuring that remained a priority alongside business goals.

Third, making dynamic decisions, choices that evolve over time as the context changes. For instance, after DDD’s early focus on hiring only for social need threatened its financial viability, the leadership team adapted their hiring strategy to balance social need with skills and trainability. This shift enabled them to maintain the social mission while also growing the business.

Hybrid Organising: Beyond the Single Organisation Approach

Having spent many years studying hybrid organisations, I am now building on this work to explore “hybrid organising” – the idea of coordinating efforts across multiple organisations to address complex social challenges. Tackling today’s pressing issues requires collaboration across sectors, not just within individual organisations. No single entity can solve these problems alone.

An example of hybrid organising is EAT, a not-for-profit which tackles the challenge of feeding a future population of 10 billion while staying within planetary boundaries. Instead of working in isolation, EAT brings together a range of stakeholders – spanning academic science, culinary arts, policy, and global business. While these stakeholders may have a shared overarching goal of addressing interlinked food, health and sustainability challenges, they often bring divergent values, strategies, and forms of influence to the table. Finding ways to bridge these differences and build collaboration is a fundamental challenge for hybrid organising.

The questions I’m researching now focus on how to lead and sustain such cross-organisational collaborations. How do we manage competing demands and foster joint action across multiple, diverse stakeholders? How can paradoxical thinking, guardrails, and dynamic decision-making help these coalitions to thrive?

The Future of Leadership in Hybrid Organising

As I explore hybrid organising, I am increasingly focused on what it means for leaders in this space. This isn’t about commanding from the front but creating an environment that enables others to act, experiment, and collaborate. It requires a departure from traditional top-down approaches. One CEO I’ve worked with described their role as creating a space where things can emerge – where patterns form, productive conflict unfolds, and creativity thrives. This leadership approach requires actively managing tensions and holding the associated uncertainties and anxieties – which is essential for integrating diverse perspectives and finding innovative solutions.

This is the work of the Skoll Centre today. Founded in the early 2000s, the Centre has evolved alongside my journey as a scholar. Initially, it supported social entrepreneurs through research, education, and community building at a time when social entrepreneurship was just emerging. Over time, as the field has evolved, so has the Centre.

We still work at the intersection of research, education and community building, but now the aim of this work is to not only support individual social entrepreneurs and hybrid organisations, but to also advance “hybrid organising” – helping social entrepreneurs to collaborate with other impact leaders across sectors to drive change. The Centre aims to foster broader, systemic impact not just individual or organisational success, developing leaders who can bridge divides and bring diverse stakeholders together. Leading in this way requires significant inner work and the ability to navigate complex, often uncomfortable dynamics. It’s the future of leadership in hybrid organising, and that’s where our work is headed.

Final Provocation: Embracing the Dual Gods of Purpose and Profit

As this future unfolds, we’re faced with a central challenge: How might we embrace a hybrid approach in our own work, balancing the dual demands of purpose and profit? In hybrid organisations, leadership is not only about navigating diverse perspectives but also about integrating social impact with business success. This dynamic tension – the push and pull between creating meaningful change and sustaining a viable business – requires a leadership style that is flexible, innovative, and deeply attuned to the needs of people and the planet alongside profit. How can we manage the tensions between these competing demands? Reflect on how you might integrate these forces, creating a space for purpose and profit to coexist, fuelling innovation, driving impact, and ensuring long-term success.