Great Leaders Question Philosophical Assumptions

Business leaders are increasingly called upon to make philosophical decisions. Yet few have the skills needed to navigate this new reality.

Consider the rise of AI. Anthropic, for example, is one of the rare companies that has extensively documented its philosophical principles and behavioral guidelines, shaping how its flagship AI model, Claude, operates and makes decisions. Written by a team of academically trained philosophers working alongside Anthropic’s technical staff, Claude’s Constitution embeds philosophical premises into every interaction the model engages in.

To date, Claude has been deployed by more than 300,000 businesses, including eight of the 10 largest companies in the United States. Yet in our observation, even as a growing number of organizations are integrating the model into their operations, there has been little discussion of whether business leaders understand and agree with the assumptions encoded into Anthropic’s product—or what they should do if they don’t.

AI is not the only force that is making philosophical questions a priority in modern business operations. In the U.S. at least, social and political consensus around history and core values has fractured. Foundational questions about the boundaries of acceptable speech, what counts as expertise, what companies owe their employees, and what constitutes responsible use of technology are now openly and fiercely contested. These are, at root, philosophical questions. Philosophy has always underpinned business decisions at an implicit level, but a lack of broadly shared and stable assumptions about society means that leaders must be more explicit in their engagement with it today.

When business leaders do consider philosophy, they typically focus on how philosophical tools can be used to pursue existing business objectives. Critical thinking, a capability rooted in philosophical reasoning, has repeatedly been identified as one of the most sought-after skillsets for executives. A recent, widely read MIT Sloan Management Review article made the case that philosophical thinking is essential for extracting value from an organization’s AI investments. But the importance of philosophy for businesses goes beyond sharpening thinking and strategy. Business leaders also need to engage with foundational questions—about the nature of things, about what counts as knowledge, and about what is right. These are not business problems that happen to benefit from philosophical thinking. They are philosophical problems that have direct business consequences.

In our work as practitioners, researchers, and teachers working at the intersection of philosophy and leadership, we have seen how consistently these foundational questions go unaddressed. This is not because leaders lack the intelligence or the motivation to engage with them. It is because they have rarely been given a framework for doing so. We believe that philosophical proficiency—the capacity to surface, question, and reason about the foundational assumptions that shape decisions—is becoming as essential to effective leadership as financial literacy.

In this article, we highlight three key philosophical domains: ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Business leaders frequently base important decisions on unexamined assumptions rooted in each of them. We show why surfacing those assumptions matters and offer concrete practices for developing proficiency in each. We then provide a further set of practices for converting theoretical philosophical skills into the kind of practical wisdom leaders need on a daily basis.

Ontology

The study of being or existence. From the Greek “ta onta,” meaning “the things that are.”

Ontological questions ask what things really are. Most business leaders carry around a whole host of unexamined ontological assumptions; for example, about what a company is, what constitutes a free market, or what defines an employee. These assumptions have important consequences for practical decision-making.

Consider one such foundational question: What is a business for? Milton Friedman’s answer—that a business exists to maximize shareholder returns within a limited set of social and legal rules—steers a wide range of downstream decisions about strategy, culture, and business processes. Peter Drucker offered a very different answer to this question, arguing that the corporation is a social institution through which people organize their collective lives. A leader who accepts Drucker’s view will approach the same downstream decisions with a fundamentally different set of priorities.

These are not merely theoretical positions. They are the kind of foundational assumptions that determine how an organization operates at every level. Most leaders have never consciously chosen between views like these, and even fewer businesses are aligned around such choices at the senior leadership level. Instead, decisions are made based on unexamined defaults that are often applied inconsistently from decision to decision and from person to person. Yet these assumptions shape every practical decision an organization makes.

Apple’s approach to customer data offers an example of a company that has grappled with an important ontological question and has built its strategy around the answer. The question of what customer data is has become one of the most consequential ontological questions in contemporary business. A leader who sees customer data as a raw material generated by user activity—available to be extracted, analyzed, and monetized—will use that data in certain ways. A leader who sees customer data as a digital embodiment of a relationship with the customer—something entrusted to the company and in which the customer retains a stake—will use the same data in fundamentally different ways.

Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has built part of its corporate identity around the second view, treating privacy as “a fundamental human right” and making product decisions that restrict the extraction and commodification of user data. This underlying assumption has far-reaching consequences. It does not just inform data policy but shapes product design, business models, and how the company, its employees, and its users view themselves. And it is rooted in an ontological view about the source of that data: “You are not our product. You are our customer.”

To begin grappling with ontological questions, pick something central to your business, such as your product, your customer, or your culture. Ask each member of the senior team to write a one or two sentence definition of what that thing is. Where these answers diverge will show you where your team is not ontologically aligned. As a next step, work toward a definition that can achieve consensus.

Epistemology

The study of knowledge. From the Greek “episteme,” meaning “knowledge.”

Epistemology asks what counts as knowledge, how beliefs are justified, and how disagreements about what is true should be navigated. Leaders make epistemic judgments constantly—deciding what evidence is sufficient for action, which sources to trust, whose expertise to defer to, and what level of uncertainty is acceptable.

The Pentagon’s AI strategy, issued in January 2026, illustrates both the importance and the difficulty of achieving epistemic clarity. The document notes that AI models can be ideologically tuned and that their outputs may reflect the values and assumptions of the models’ developers. To avoid importing these views into the work of the U.S. military, the strategy calls for the establishment of benchmarks for “model objectivity” and for procuring AI systems that produce “objectively truthful” answers that are free from ideological contamination.

The strategy document clearly engages with an important epistemological issue: the question of what kind of answers count as truthful. It also clearly adopts a position of its own: a version of the “commonsense” assumption that truth is both straightforwardly objective and identifiable as such. However, this position is simply asserted rather than explained and defended, a notable problem given that commonsense accounts of truth have been subject to powerful philosophical critiques for more than two millennia. In the absence of any justification for the position in the strategy document, the policy may be vulnerable to accusations that it is simply a tool for assigning an elevated epistemic status to the political views of the party in power.

By contrast, confectionary company Tony’s Chocolonely has built its decision-making processes around an explicit set of epistemic commitments. The company, founded in 2005, grew out of Dutch journalist Teun van de Keuken’s investigations into the use of child labour and slavery in the cocoa supply chain. The company was founded with the goal of setting more demanding standards for ethical sourcing than vague claims or reliance on certification alone. It embedded that challenge in organizational processes through its five sourcing principles, which formalize how such claims should be scrutinized and acted upon. These principles establish a framework in which knowledge claims must be supported, revisited, and tested against what the company is able to know, and against the degree of accuracy it is capable of achieving in its own practices.

Toyota’s longstanding doctrine of Genchi Genbutsu—roughly, “go and see for yourself”—represents a different but equally deliberate epistemic commitment. The principle mandates that the ideal way to understand a problem is for a leader to physically go to where the problem exists and encounter it directly rather than relying on reports, abstractions, or second-hand data. This is a formal epistemic norm built into the company’s operating culture: it holds that direct empirical encounter with physical reality is a more reliable basis for judgment than information gathered and reasoned about at a distance.

The approaches taken by Toyota and Tony’s Chocolonely illustrate that epistemic proficiency is not an abstract philosophical exercise. It is a skillset that can be made explicit and operationalized in a successful business. Your leadership team can begin developing epistemological proficiency by looking back at past decisions. Identify a recent one that turned out badly. Ask what the team believed at the time that made the decision seem like the right call, and where that belief came from. If no one can trace the origins of the belief, it was never held in a defensible way—it was assumed uncritically. Next, conduct the same exercise with a decision that turned out well.

Ethics

The study of morals or principles of behavior. From the Greek “ethos,” meaning “character.”

Ethics asks what is right and how competing obligations should be weighed. Ethical proficiency in the sense meant here is not corporate social responsibility, brand positioning, or an effort to align a business with prevailing moral views. It is the capacity to examine what constitutes the good. Exercising this capacity means gaining familiarity with different ethical orientations, understanding the ethical views of the people with whom the business interacts, and being able to set out and defend the company’s own ethical stances

The gap between authentic ethical commitment and the performance of ethical values has led to some high-profile corporate failures in recent years. In 2023, Anheuser-Busch adopted what it presented as an ethical position around inclusivity, partnering with a prominent transgender influencer as part of a publicity campaign for its brand Bud Light. When the partnership provoked a backlash from some consumers, the company reversed course. In doing so, it alienated other consumers who had been sympathetic to the initial campaign. The controversy, and the backpedaling that followed, was rooted in a failure on the part of Anheuser-Busch’s leadership to clearly determine its ethical stance. This failure meant that the company was unable to distinguish—to itself or to the public—between brand positioning, genuine ethical commitment, and stakeholder management efforts.

Anthropic provides a contrasting example. In February 2026, the Pentagon gave Anthropic an ultimatum: accept contractual clauses permitting the U.S. military to use the company’s technology for “any lawful use,” or lose the contract. Anthropic insisted on two specific restrictions—no use for mass domestic surveillance and no use for fully autonomous weapons—and refused to drop them. In response, the Pentagon cut the company off and cut a deal with a competitor. (At the time of writing, Anthropic’s products are still in use in military operations and the fall-out from the disagreement is subject to ongoing litigation.)

Anthropic’s broader record on ethical consistency is not beyond reproach. But in this case, the company knew the precise contours of its ethical commitments, could articulate why those commitments existed, and held to them at significant commercial cost.

To develop your ethical proficiency, start with a simple test. Identify three positions your company currently holds that are based, implicitly or explicitly, on a view about ethical values. For each one, ask: would we maintain this position if it cost us 10% of our revenue? If the answer is no, it is not grounded in a real ethical commitment. It is either a marketing position or a security blanket for leaders and their teams that covers up important but uncomfortable truths. Knowing the difference is the beginning of ethical proficiency. Being able to articulate why you hold the commitments you do, and being able to defend that reasoning in the face of hostile questioning, is the next step.

Practical Takeaways

The three proficiencies described here provide the foundational skills for identifying and examining key philosophical assumptions that shape leadership decisions. But recognizing that a question is ontological, that an epistemic standard needs defending, or that an ethical commitment has never been tested is not the same as knowing what to do about it in a specific situation under real pressure. The classical Greek philosopher Aristotle drew a distinction between theoretical knowledge—the kind of thing that can be learned from a textbook—and practical wisdom, which he called phronesis: the judgment that can only be developed through experience with real cases. And it is the ability to deliver practical outcomes that defines the effective leader.

This kind of judgment comes from wrestling with hard problems that are often unclear, making mistakes, and learning to read situations with increasing subtlety over time. In this sense, practical wisdom is not just a proficiency to be deployed but a quality of character to be cultivated. It depends on both lived experience and judgment of what is appropriate in highly specific, and sometimes unique, contexts. And like any practiced capacity, it atrophies when it is not exercised. Here are two toolkits for ensuring that philosophical judgment remains engaged and rooted in the practical world.

Engineer productive friction. Create structured moments for members of the leadership team to pause and exercise independent philosophical judgment and to engage with each other on foundational questions. For example:

• For any major strategic decision, include a brief statement of the philosophical assumptions on which it rests—what it assumes the nature of the business to be, what it treats as true, and what ethical commitments it presupposes.

• Before launching a marketing campaign, red team it against your organization’s philosophical commitments. Ask whether the position is one the company is prepared to defend under pressure.

• When evaluating a new technology or partnership, assess the philosophical assumptions it will import into your organization and whether those assumptions are compatible with your own.

Track philosophical drift. Alignment between an organization’s philosophical commitments and its tools, processes, and environment is always provisional. Market shifts, societal evolution, and advances in technology continuously pull the assumptions embedded in systems away from what the organization believes. Three practices can help you detect drift before it becomes a problem.

• Conduct a quarterly review of the assumptions embedded in a key AI tool the company relies on and assess whether these have drifted out of alignment with the company’s own assumptions. Drift can occur either because the embedded assumptions in the tool have changed or because the company’s own foundational assumptions have evolved.

• Stress-test a longstanding policy against the organization’s current ontological or ethical views.

• Conduct an annual comparison of the company’s stated philosophical commitments against the decisions actually made in the past year, looking for patterns of divergence that no single decision would have made visible.

. . .

The three philosophical proficiencies described in this article are not abstract intellectual exercises. They are capacities that are becoming essential to effective leadership in a world in which old certainties are breaking down. Organizational identity, strategy, and values are being shaped by tools and mindsets adopted from third parties. This will only accelerate. Leaders who are unable to articulate their own philosophical views and challenge those of others now risk losing their ability to exercise meaningful leadership.

Copyright 2026 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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