What Corporate Insiders Really Think About Business — And Why They Stay Silent

Seven years ago, I was sitting at my desk inside one of the world's biggest tech companies when I heard chanting outside. Youth climate activists had mounted the revolving entrance below my window. On the other side of the building, mothers were nursing their children in protest at the company's impact on future generations. And inside, nobody said a word.

That silence, and what it means, is the subject of this solo episode of Moral Footprint. I'm Jeni Miles, a behavioural scientist and independent business consultant, and I've just returned from the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens, where I launched my first physical research installation. In this episode I share what I found, and what it means for anyone who has ever felt the gap between what they privately believe and what they feel able to say out loud inside a business. You can follow my ongoing research at moralfootprint.substack.com or connect on LinkedIn.

At the company where I worked, there were over 150,000 employees globally and not a single worker seat on the board. Shareholder motions for sustainability committees and more democratic voting structures were vetoed by two billionaire co-founders who held majority voting power. Two voices, silencing thousands. I didn't realise until I left that the silence wasn't incidental. It was built in. One friend still in Big Tech recently had to stack-rank every task she does by revenue-driving potential. Everything in the bottom half had to go. Everything in the bottom half was the work that gave her job meaning.

After leaving, I found myself with a question I couldn't shake. What do people like me, corporate insiders of for-profit institutions, genuinely believe about the role of business at this pivotal moment? So in collaboration with behavioural scientists Dr Dario Krpan and Dr Fred Basso, I designed a study to find out. We surveyed over 400 business managers at for-profit companies in the UK. More than 92% believe businesses must adhere to doughnut economy principles, meeting social needs, respecting planetary limits, ensuring fair outcomes for all. Support for specific post-growth practices, like reinvesting surplus into the mission or more democratic decision-making, sits at around 86%. And yet only 53% believe their peers feel the same way. Psychologists call this pluralistic ignorance. It is one of the most powerful forces keeping the status quo in place. Not coercion, but the assumption that no one else feels what you feel.

One of the frameworks that has most shaped my thinking is Dr Jennifer Hinton's five post-growth business dimensions: relationship to profit, incorporation structure, governance, strategy, and size and scope. Most corporate sustainability efforts operate at entirely the wrong level. We switch to renewables, reduce packaging, commit to net zero. All strategy-level interventions, without ever touching the foundational question: what is this company legally structured to do? If profit is the primary legal purpose, then a social mission will always be optional. As Jennifer puts it, if you're a well-meaning mission-led company that is for-profit, it's no surprise that your mission becomes optional.

At the Forum in Athens, inspired by Jennifer's framework, I developed my own methodology and applied it to over 90 attending companies using publicly available information. I wanted to ask a simple question: is this company structurally compatible with a regenerative future? Only around 14% made it into what I call the stewarding tier. These are companies that are genuinely mission-locked, structurally designed to ensure social or ecological purpose is paramount, not just rhetorically committed to it. Every single company in the lowest tier was publicly listed on a stock exchange. A notably high proportion of the top-tier companies were German, because German law requires companies above a certain size to have 50% employee representation on their supervisory board. This isn't utopia. It's a policy choice that exists right now, that any government could make tomorrow if it chose to.

I spoke in Athens about Dr Luke Kemp's work on societal collapse. One of his central findings is that highly hierarchical structures, where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, are structurally fragile. They stop receiving honest feedback from the broader collective, which sows the seeds of their own demise. Democratic governance of business isn't just an ethical preference. It's a resilience strategy. And there are already real precedents: multi-stakeholder cooperatives in Canada that deliberately ensure community participation, and companies like House of Hackney that have legally embedded a representative for nature and future generations on their board. The question isn't whether it's possible. It's whether we're willing to choose it.

If you're a well-meaning, mission-led company that is for-profit, then it's no surprise that your mission is going to become optional.

Two voices can essentially silence thousands of others. And I didn't realise until I left that actually one of the most fundamental perks we could have had was being empowered to participate in these decisions.

That silence preserves the status quo. And of course that silence is coming at a time when there's more at stake than ever.

The majority already exists. The 86%, the 92%, they're already there, inside organisations all over the world, privately believing that another way is possible and assuming they're alone in thinking it. The research I launched in Athens was designed to surface what that majority isn't saying out loud. I'll be sharing those findings soon. But in the meantime, I think the most radical thing any of us can do is simply say, out loud, at work, in the room, what we actually believe. Because the silence keeping the status quo in place might be far more fragile than it looks.

Ready to go deeper? Watch the full episode on YouTube below, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And I'd love to know: if you've ever stayed silent inside an institution you knew was causing harm, what would have made it feel safe to speak up?