How Purpose Travels

For years, my father struggled to understand what I actually did for a living. He was a seasoned electrical engineer, perfectly comfortable with complicated systems, yet whenever I tried to explain the world of MSP, external workforce management and enterprise talent solutions, he would eventually reduce it to something much simpler: “So, you are basically a headhunter.” I would tell him that no, that really was not what I did, then make another attempt involving clients, suppliers, procurement, technology platforms, contingent labour, compliance, programme management and financial flows. I am not convinced any of those explanations improved matters.

His confusion was understandable because the industry itself operates several layers away from the apparently simple thing happening underneath it. Somewhere there is a person who wants to work, and somewhere else there is an organisation that needs some work done. Between those two points sits a substantial amount of administrative, commercial and regulatory noise: suppliers, contracts, worker classifications, approvals, local labour laws, rate cards, purchase orders, onboarding requirements, technology platforms, time capture, invoicing, payroll, financial reconciliation and the endless exceptions that appear whenever process meets reality.

Eventually I became more comfortable explaining our role in much simpler terms. The distance between somebody looking for work and that person temporarily performing work inside a company contains a great deal of administrative and regulatory complexity, and much of what we did was about absorbing and managing that complexity so the connection could happen safely, compliantly and at scale. That description also helped me understand the work more clearly because it put the person back underneath the machinery.

During one period of my career, the company I worked for described its Noble Purpose as: “We connect people to work in ways that enrich their lives.” I encountered that language long before I had heard Simon Sinek talk about a corporate “why”, which may be why I have always experienced noble purpose as something slightly different. It was not primarily a strategic framework for me, nor was it something I thought about every morning before opening my laptop. It gave a human explanation for a business that could otherwise disappear very quickly into procurement terminology, technology platforms, supplier management and administration.

I do not think the noble purpose made me better at the mechanics of my job. It did not suddenly improve my ability to negotiate, sell, operate a programme or lead a team, and I would be suspicious of any claim that a sentence on a wall can do that. What it did was make the work feel more meaningful, and because I spent much of my career somewhere around the intersection of Operations, customers and Sales, it also gave me a much more authentic way of explaining what we were actually trying to achieve.

There was an obvious limitation, though. I was still nowhere near the individual worker, and at the enterprise level at which I operated the person could easily disappear into the abstraction of the system. A worker might reach the programme as a profile submitted by an agency against a requisition, move through a technology platform, be checked against commercial and regulatory requirements and eventually appear in reporting as spend, tenure, classification, rate or compliance status. I cannot point to a particular contractor whose life I personally watched improve because of something I did, because I was simply too far removed from that part of the machinery.

That distance has stayed with me because it seems to create a particular challenge for organisations whose work is several steps removed from the people they ultimately serve. The further the employee is from the beneficiary, the more deliberate the organisation may need to be about preserving the connection, otherwise the process gradually becomes easier to see than the purpose behind it.

When purpose has to survive the machinery

Some businesses make it almost impossible to forget who the work is ultimately for. Earlier in my career, when I was building and running restaurants and working in hotel food and beverage, the customer was physically present in the environment I was responsible for creating. You could see very quickly whether the experience was working, whether the service felt right and whether something had gone wrong, and that immediacy kept the relationship between the work and the person benefiting from it remarkably clear.

Moving later into large business-to-business environments changed that relationship completely. The customer became an organisation rather than an individual, and scale required people, money, demand and risk to be translated into structures that systems and processes could manage. That translation is necessary, but it also creates distance. The further the work moves from the person ultimately affected by it, the easier it becomes for that person to disappear behind categories, metrics and process.

MSP adds another complication because the person buying the service is usually not the person whose life is supposedly being enriched. The buyer may sit in Procurement, HR or another enterprise function and is quite reasonably interested in cost, control, visibility, compliance, process consistency, supplier performance and risk. The person performing the work may never meet the MSP at all. They may have been sourced by an agency, submitted through a technology platform and onboarded through a process designed primarily to ensure that everything required by the organisation and local regulation has been taken care of.

That means the commercial customer and the human beneficiary are not necessarily the same person. A procurement leader can be delighted because agency margins have fallen, compliance has improved and spend visibility is finally reliable, while the worker at the other end of the system experiences something entirely different: how long onboarding takes, whether the assignment starts when promised, whether the systems work, whether they are classified correctly, whether they get paid on time and whether somebody can help when their situation does not fit neatly into the standard workflow.

Both sets of outcomes matter, but they live at different levels of the system. The MSP has to serve the organisation buying the service while operating machinery that ultimately affects people who may be several contractual and organisational relationships removed from it. That is one reason the worker can disappear from view so easily. Nobody has to make a conscious decision that people do not matter for the operating model to begin directing attention towards requisitions, suppliers, spend, compliance and service levels instead.

I saw countless examples of apparently sensible decisions becoming less sensible as they travelled through that machinery. At one large client, the IT organisation was under pressure to deliver cost savings and decided that external workers would no longer automatically receive company laptops. The logic was straightforward enough: the infrastructure already offered virtual desktops that were considered fit for purpose, so why incur the additional hardware cost for temporary workers?

The problem appeared once theory met the people trying to do the work. The virtual machines took considerable time to connect and boot, performance was poor and connections were not consistently stable enough for many of the roles involved. Consulting companies then quite reasonably began arguing that if their people were expected to provide their own suitable hardware, the additional cost would have to appear somewhere in the commercial model. Exceptions began multiplying, exception approvals became convoluted, and the supposed saving was gradually being recreated elsewhere in both cost and lost productivity until the initiative was eventually dropped.

Nobody needed to be incompetent for that to happen. IT had a genuine savings target, the suppliers protected their economics, programme teams were trying to keep people productive, and governance processes did what governance processes tend to do when reality no longer fits the original rule. The person trying to perform the work sat in the middle of all of it, waiting for the machinery around them to reach the same conclusion that could probably have been reached much earlier by asking whether the proposed solution actually allowed them to work effectively.

That experience has stayed with me because it is a fairly ordinary example of how organisations lose sight of the thing they are trying to enable. Every individual decision can be rational within the boundary of the function making it, while the combined outcome becomes irrational for the person who has to live with it. Cost is reduced in one place, recreated in another, productivity is affected somewhere else, and eventually a new layer of governance is added to manage the exceptions created by the original attempt to simplify things.

This is where noble purpose can become useful. It does not tell IT what laptop policy to write, nor does it tell Procurement what rate to negotiate or Operations which exception to approve, but it gives people a reason to keep asking what all of those choices are supposed to enable. If a process becomes brilliantly efficient at achieving something that makes the underlying work harder to perform, there should at least be enough shared context to question what exactly has been optimised.

In workforce services, the requisition becomes the unit of demand, the candidate becomes a profile, the agency becomes a supplier and the worker becomes a combination of rate, classification, tenure, spend and compliance status. None of those abstractions is inherently wrong because an enterprise programme cannot manage thousands of workers across multiple countries by treating every transaction as a completely unique human event. The categories exist because they make complexity manageable, yet the same categories can gradually obscure the person whose livelihood and ability to contribute sit somewhere underneath them.

This is why I think noble purpose becomes harder rather than easier as organisations scale. It is relatively straightforward to feel connected to a beneficiary when you interact with them directly, but it requires much more deliberate effort when the outcome of your work appears several systems, suppliers and organisational layers further downstream.

I have seen culture help counter that distance, although I am naturally wary of corporate language that sounds as though it was created at an off-site with too many coloured sticky notes. At one privately owned workforce business, the culture revolved around an expression that sounded almost absurd from the outside: “Real Love.” Internally it had a much more grounded meaning. It meant having a real conversation with another person, bringing enough care and personal commitment to praise them properly when they deserved it and addressing conflict directly when something needed to change, without using directness as an excuse to behave badly.

Larger meetings would often begin with a short cultural moment in which someone recognised a colleague for having embodied one of the behaviours the company wanted to reinforce. I cannot now remember one individual story well enough to retell it, and I actually think that says something useful about how culture works. What stayed with me was not the content of one particular cultural moment but the cumulative effect of hundreds of them. Occasionally somebody was obviously reaching because the ritual required a story, but overall it drew me into the organisation and made the cultural language feel connected to something people actually did rather than something printed on a wall.

What mattered more to me than any individual example was that the phrase eventually became usable language. “Real Love” gave people permission to have conversations that might otherwise have been delayed, softened beyond usefulness or allowed to become political. It did not mean avoiding discomfort. Quite the opposite. The expectation was that if something needed to be said, it should be said directly, but with enough respect for the other person that the purpose of the conversation remained solving the problem rather than winning it.

I can think of several conversations from that period that still sit with me, both ones I initiated and ones directed at me, but the details belong to more than one person and are not particularly important to the point. What mattered was the pattern. Praise could be unusually direct and personal, criticism could be equally direct, and neither necessarily felt performative because the same underlying expectation applied to both: say what you really mean, care enough to say it properly, and deal with the issue while there is still something useful to be done about it.

The president of that company played a significant role in making the culture believable for me. He had a strong leadership presence, talked frequently about cherishing the customer, encouraged boldness of action and used the same “Real Love” language when dealing with difficult conversations. The phrases worked because I could connect them to behaviour, which is probably the difference between a strange corporate expression becoming meaningful and the same expression becoming ridiculous.

That experience also taught me that culture does not have to sound sophisticated to be effective. There may even be a disadvantage when values become so polished that nobody quite knows what behaviour they are supposed to describe. A slightly odd phrase that people understand, use and see reflected in leadership can become more powerful than a perfectly constructed purpose statement that disappears the moment the town hall ends.

When values have to do some work

The real test of values comes when they stop pointing in the same direction. “Cherish the customer” is easy to support when the customer is profitable, respectful, engaged and appreciative, but it becomes much more interesting when the customer relationship itself begins to conflict with other things the organisation claims to value.

At one point I became increasingly convinced that we should walk away from a particular account. We were losing money, the customer wanted to pay even less, and some of our operational people were being treated badly. None of those issues existed in isolation, and taken together they led me to a fairly uncomfortable conclusion: retaining the customer no longer made commercial or organisational sense.

I prepared a detailed negative business case and took it to the president. I laid out the economics, the operational reality and the behaviour our people were experiencing, expecting a difficult discussion about whether we should continue the relationship. He understood the argument completely and did not dispute the facts. His response was effectively that the owner would never accept us voluntarily walking away from a customer and that I would have to find a way to make it work.

I still find that exchange interesting because it was the point at which “cherish the customer” stopped being an uncomplicated cultural statement. Customer loyalty now had to coexist with employee wellbeing, commercial sustainability and the organisation's responsibility to itself, and none of those considerations disappeared simply because one of them happened to be written more prominently into the culture.

There is something admirable in a company having a deep reluctance to abandon customers when things become difficult. Long-term relationships are not built by disappearing the moment an account becomes inconvenient, and there are certainly businesses that would benefit from a stronger instinct to stand behind what they sell. At the same time, treating one principle as absolute creates its own problems. If cherishing the customer requires accepting structurally poor economics and tolerating behaviour that damages your own people, then at some point the interpretation of the value deserves scrutiny.

That does not make the culture false. In some ways, the tension proves that it was real because the principle genuinely influenced a decision I would otherwise have made differently. Values become far less interesting when they only confirm choices everyone would have made anyway. The harder question is whether the organisation has enough judgement around them to recognise when two legitimate values collide and whether the hierarchy gives people enough room to interpret those collisions rather than simply follow the loudest principle.

The commercial context made the story more complicated still. From where I sat, parts of the business were under pressure to meet their financial and growth expectations, while the privately owned structure meant that the wider picture was not always especially transparent. That experience made it difficult for me to accept the idea that noble purpose or strong culture can somehow compensate for weak commercial fundamentals. Meaning matters, but it does not remove the requirement for a business to be sustainable.

This is one reason I resist the more enthusiastic versions of the corporate-purpose argument. A noble purpose is not a substitute for strategy, execution or economics, and a strong culture can coexist perfectly well with a business-model problem. It may make people feel more connected to the work and to one another, but it cannot indefinitely correct bad pricing, compensate for weak execution or make commercially difficult choices disappear.

Purpose becomes more useful when it gives people some common ground from which to interpret those choices rather than pretending the choices do not exist. Culture turns some of that common ground into recognisable behaviour, while leadership has to make sense of the contradictions that appear when customers, employees, commercial reality and organisational ambition stop lining up neatly.

One of the best examples I experienced came through an executive sponsor relationship. Rather than treating the senior executive as somebody to call only when the account had a problem, I used the relationship to help stretch the customer's thinking and broaden the conversation around what we might achieve together. He brought seniority and perspective into the room without needing to take ownership of the account away from me, and over time we developed a partnership in which his influence amplified what I was trying to accomplish rather than replacing it.

That was a useful lesson in what sponsorship can be when it works well. Seniority can provide leverage that is difficult to create from lower down in the organisation, but the value does not necessarily come from the senior person taking over. Sometimes it comes from helping an idea travel further, creating permission for a more ambitious conversation or giving credibility to something that would otherwise struggle to move through the organisation.

I also experienced the opposite. On another occasion, a very senior leader joined a difficult customer meeting and initially did everything one might expect from an experienced executive. She had presence, understood the situation, engaged the customer well and made significant commitments that helped us leave the meeting with a clearer and more favourable path forward.

In the internal debrief afterwards, she took ownership of a substantial part of the work and said she would mobilise people within her remit to deliver it. The problem was that the deliverables never arrived, even after repeated follow-up and repeated assurances that they were being handled, and eventually the customer started asking me where they were. The hierarchy made that particularly awkward because throwing a senior colleague under the bus might have protected me personally for a moment, but it would have damaged both the client relationship and my ability to work with her afterwards.

That experience changed how I involved her in customer situations. I learned that managing upwards sometimes means understanding where a leader adds value, where they create risk and how much of the interface needs to be managed deliberately, but there is a limit to how far that idea can reasonably be stretched. Adapting to someone's communication style, personality or blind spots is part of working in any organisation. Repeatedly compensating for commitments that are not honoured is something different because the issue eventually stops being style and becomes trust.

Another manager during that same period created almost the reverse impression. He could be awkward in front of European customers and occasionally tried to establish credibility with experiences that had little relevance to the people in the room, which could leave me cringing at moments when I had spent years building a very different kind of relationship with those stakeholders. Yet when things became difficult internally, he had my back and could make things happen, and over time I learned how to work with the leader I actually had rather than the ideal leader I might have designed for myself.

Those experiences made me wary of judging leadership too quickly through presence, polish or whether somebody says the things we expect a senior person to say. A leader can be impressive in a meeting and unreliable afterwards, while another can frustrate you in one setting and prove immensely valuable when organisational backing is what you actually need. Sponsorship seems most useful when seniority becomes leverage for somebody else's work rather than an opportunity for the senior person to become the centre of it.

They also taught me something about managing upwards that does not get discussed as often as managing people below you. Experienced people are not passive recipients of leadership. We learn how the people above us think, how they prefer to communicate, when to bring them in, when to keep them away and sometimes how to frame an idea so that it has the best chance of moving through the organisation. There were certainly times when I allowed someone else to feel greater ownership of an idea because achieving the outcome mattered more to me than owning the credit, and that sort of organisational navigation is often part of making large companies work.

There is still a boundary. Managing upwards can mean adapting intelligently to another person's strengths and weaknesses, but it should not become a permanent requirement to compensate for unreliability, lack of judgement or failure to follow through. At that point the relationship has stopped helping the organisation work around normal human differences and has begun hiding a leadership problem.

When the organisation has to translate itself

I encountered another variation of this later, in an organisation going through significant change. My commercial leader at the time was passionate about Sales, deeply personable and someone with whom I developed one of the most open and honest professional relationships of my career. He could also frustrate me enormously. We worked across a substantial time-zone difference, he disliked email with a passion, and when he travelled he had an occasional ability to disappear just when I thought I needed him most.

With hindsight, though, I appreciate his leadership more than I did at the time. He saw value in the way I brought people together across different countries, cultures and legacy businesses, and he backed that contribution in a way that made me feel trusted. In an organisation still trying to create greater cohesion after significant change, that mattered because it reminded me that culture is not experienced only through CEOs, town halls and corporate statements. Sometimes it is created much closer to home, through the person you work for, the trust they place in you and the way they make a fragmented organisation feel coherent within the part they can actually influence.

That local experience sat alongside a broader organisational problem. The company had been through relentless change, significant acquisition activity and repeated restructuring, and people were visibly developing change fatigue. When a new CEO arrived, a group of us had an opportunity during a leadership meeting to ask some fairly pointed questions, including what she thought the culture of the organisation should become.

I did not expect a newly arrived CEO to have a finished answer, and I would have been perfectly comfortable hearing that she did not yet know enough to provide one. What bothered me was that the response, and much of what followed in subsequent town halls, felt devoid of sincerity. The problem was not the absence of a polished mission statement but the difficulty of detecting much personal conviction beneath the language.

That distinction matters because people can tolerate uncertainty far better than corporate communication sometimes assumes. “I don't know yet” can be a perfectly credible leadership answer if it is accompanied by some sense of what the person believes, what they intend to learn and what they care enough about to preserve while they figure the rest out. What becomes harder to engage with is language that sounds complete while revealing very little about the person delivering it.

The organisation was also dealing with a problem that many acquisition-led businesses know well. Different legacy companies, countries and functions had been brought together, but the legal combination of organisations does not automatically produce a shared understanding of how they should work. Each market had its own realities, each legacy business its own history, and each function its own assumptions about what mattered.

I remember sitting in a global sales meeting and hearing a deal being celebrated that had originated in the US but included delivery into a European market. As the commercial details emerged, I realised almost immediately that the price point would not come close to supporting the local delivery model because some of the statutory burdens associated with employing and deploying people there had simply not been incorporated into the calculation. From one perspective, the organisation had won a significant piece of business. From another, we had made a commercial commitment in a market whose economics had not been represented when the deal was constructed.

The problem was not that somebody in the US had done a bad job. They had worked with the information and assumptions available to them, and the customer quite reasonably expected a global provider to be capable of supporting a global requirement. The weakness was that the people who understood the local reality had not been sufficiently involved before the commercial promise became something everybody else was expected to deliver.

I had experienced a different version of the same problem years earlier, even without a US-originated deal. A programme expansion had been agreed in Switzerland with strong support from the client's headquarters and procurement leadership, with France intended as the next market. On paper, the mandate looked clear. When implementation began, the French stakeholders simply did not engage. Meetings were arranged and they did not attend, follow-ups went nowhere, and the support of their own headquarters was nowhere near enough to create local ownership of a programme they had not meaningfully helped shape.

Those experiences reinforced something I have seen repeatedly in global organisations. A global mandate may give a programme authority, but it does not automatically give it local legitimacy. The commercial model can be approved centrally, the executive sponsor can be enthusiastic and the strategy can make perfect sense at headquarters, yet implementation still happens somewhere specific, with local laws, local economics, local relationships and local people who may have had no meaningful seat at the table when the decision was made.

Without enough common cultural ground, those differences become harder to navigate because every conversation starts further back. Market realities have to be explained repeatedly, local requirements need to be justified from first principles, and people can find themselves discussing the same opportunity while operating from very different assumptions about what the organisation is capable of doing. The company begins to spend a surprising amount of energy translating itself to itself.

That translation burden rarely appears neatly in a financial report. It shows up in additional meetings, slower decisions, duplicated explanation, frustrated relationships between functions and the constant feeling that everyone is working for the same organisation while somehow still needing to establish the basics of context each time they interact.

A noble purpose would not have made those differences disappear, nor would a more sincere CEO answer have solved the integration challenges created by acquisition. Switzerland would still not behave like the United States, France would still have its own stakeholders, Sales would still see the world differently from Operations, and legacy businesses would still carry different experiences. What a credible common purpose might have provided is a shared starting point, some underlying agreement about what the organisation was ultimately trying to create and why it was worth working through all those differences to get there.

That may be one of the less glamorous functions of purpose in a large organisation. It can reduce the amount of translation required before people can begin solving the actual problem, not because everyone suddenly agrees but because there is at least some common understanding of what the disagreement is in service of.

This is also why I no longer think culture is best understood as one thing belonging to an entire company. There can be an enterprise culture, a regional culture, a team culture and the culture created by one individual leader, and those can coexist quite differently. A senior leader can create trust and coherence locally even when the wider organisation feels fragmented, just as a strong corporate purpose can be undermined by a manager whose behaviour contradicts it every day.

That makes leadership both more modest and more important. Very few leaders can single-handedly define the culture of a multinational organisation, but almost every leader can influence what the organisation feels like within the part they touch. They can make the distance between words and behaviour shorter, or they can make it considerably longer.

None of this convinces me that noble purpose is primarily a performance tool. In my own experience it did not make me better at my job, and I have worked in environments with strong cultural language that still faced difficult commercial realities, as well as organisations where people continued to work hard despite a weak sense of common purpose. What it changed was the meaning attached to the work and the sense that different parts of the organisation were connected to something beyond their immediate targets, processes and functional responsibilities.

What should the machinery still be doing?

All of these experiences involved organisations adding structure in order to manage complexity. Programmes, systems, governance, supplier models, global processes and organisational layers exist because large businesses cannot operate on personal relationships alone, and much of my career has therefore been spent somewhere inside the machinery between a person who can do some work and an organisation that needs it done.

What makes the question more interesting now is that some of that machinery may no longer require people to operate it. AI and automation are beginning to absorb administrative work that previously justified significant parts of the operating model, and that creates an opportunity to remove friction we have tolerated for years. It also forces a distinction that I am not sure the industry has always made clearly enough: not everything between the worker and the work is friction.

Some of it is simply administration. Documents need to be checked, data needs to be entered, approvals need to be routed, transactions need to be reconciled and exceptions need to be identified. Much of that work is necessary, often regulated and sometimes surprisingly complicated, but there is no intrinsic virtue in a human being performing it if technology can do it faster, more accurately and with fewer handoffs.

The laptop example already showed what can happen when technology is judged primarily against the efficiency of the process rather than the effectiveness of the work it is supposed to enable. The virtual desktop was theoretically cheaper and technically available, yet the wider outcome became more expensive and less productive once suppliers, workers and exception processes reacted to it. AI raises the same question on a much larger scale because it can influence not one infrastructure decision but significant parts of the operating model itself.

Requirements can increasingly be interpreted automatically, profiles matched, documents processed, classification risks identified, onboarding triggered, transactions reconciled and exceptions surfaced without the same number of human interventions. In an industry where administrative complexity has historically created plenty of delay and plenty of opportunity for human error, much of that should be welcomed rather than treated defensively.

At first glance, it is easy to assume that removing people from those processes will make the connection between the worker and the organisation less human. Fewer people inside the service provider may ever see the individual behind the transaction, while a process that already reduced a person to a profile, rate and classification could become more automated still. That is certainly possible if efficiency becomes synonymous with pushing more volume through the system with fewer people.

There is another possibility, though, and I find it much more interesting. The human administrative layers between a worker and a piece of work are themselves part of the abstraction. Every spreadsheet, approval queue, reinterpretation, manual handoff and repeated data entry adds distance between the relatively simple human need and the outcome the process is supposed to produce.

If automation removes unnecessary layers and allows the necessary regulatory and commercial machinery to operate more quietly in the background, the connection between the person and the work could actually become less abstract. The worker may not care whether five people or one machine checked the required documentation. They care that the process is accurate, understandable, timely and does not prevent them from doing the work they have been engaged to do.

The distinction becomes important because some of what sits between the worker and the work is not administrative friction at all. Some of it is human relationship, judgement and trust, and those things can determine the quality of the outcome far more than the elegance of the transaction surrounding them.

One of the clearest examples is the relationship between an MSP programme and its suppliers. A VMS can distribute a requisition perfectly, AI can improve matching and the submission process can become almost frictionless, but none of that gives a supplier a reason to put its best recruiters onto one programme rather than another. Suppliers have finite capacity, multiple clients competing for attention and their own commercial priorities, which means they inevitably make choices about where their strongest people spend their time and which requirements receive the greatest urgency.

In my experience, the quality of that response is driven heavily by the relationship between the programme and the supplier. A programme leader or programme team that knows its suppliers, communicates openly, gives them useful context and treats them as genuine delivery partners creates a very different response from one that simply pushes requisitions through a system. The supplier understands what really matters, knows when a requirement is genuinely urgent and is much more likely to invest additional effort when the relationship warrants it.

Feedback is a particularly important part of that relationship. Suppliers cannot improve the quality of what they submit if the only signal they receive is that a candidate disappeared somewhere inside the process or was rejected without explanation. Pointed, relevant and, most importantly, timely feedback teaches the supplier what good looks like for that particular customer and allows them to adjust while the requirement is still live. A beautifully automated process that produces poor feedback may be operationally efficient while doing very little to improve the quality of the next candidate.

That distinction matters because technology can optimise the transaction without necessarily improving the relationship. A system may become very good at identifying which supplier has historically produced the strongest candidates, but the supplier still consists of people deciding where to focus their energy, whom to call first and which customer deserves the additional effort required to find somebody exceptional rather than merely adequate.

The same is true on the demand side. A hiring manager can submit a perfectly completed requisition and still describe the wrong person, ask for a combination of skills the market does not realistically offer or default to a familiar profile when the underlying problem requires something different. Technology can help interpret the requirement, but there remains value in somebody understanding what the manager is actually trying to accomplish and having enough credibility to challenge the request when the specification and the real need have drifted apart.

That is where I think the opportunity created by automation becomes much more interesting than simply reducing headcount. If the machinery becomes quieter, the human work should move towards the places where context, judgement, trust and influence actually improve the outcome. The programme team should have more time to understand demand, the supplier relationship should become more substantive, feedback should become faster and more useful, and exceptions that genuinely require human judgement should receive more attention rather than being buried underneath the routine administration surrounding them.

This also raises the question of who actually receives the benefit from automation. If administrative layers disappear, does the worker get a faster and less frustrating journey into work? Does the hiring manager get better access to capability? Do suppliers receive better information and more useful feedback? Do programme teams gain time to solve genuinely difficult problems? Does the organisation reduce unnecessary regulatory risk, or does most of the benefit simply appear as a lower operating cost and improved margin for the provider?

Those outcomes are not mutually exclusive, and a commercially healthy provider should absolutely benefit from becoming more efficient. The point is that automation does not automatically reconnect the system to its human purpose. Leadership still has to decide what the newly created capacity is for and which human relationships become more important precisely because the administrative activity around them has receded.

That question becomes strategically uncomfortable for the industry. If a very large proportion of the historic MSP value proposition has been built around managing administrative complexity, what happens when technology begins removing a meaningful part of that complexity? The answer cannot simply be to automate the existing service and declare victory, because that may produce a cheaper version of the same abstraction without changing the quality of the connection underneath it.

This may be where noble purpose becomes strategically relevant rather than merely culturally useful. If the purpose really is to connect people with work, then removing administrative noise should allow the operating model to move closer to that connection. It should create more room for understanding the work, improving the quality of supply, building relationships, challenging assumptions and dealing intelligently with the circumstances that refuse to fit comfortably into a standard workflow.

That does not mean preserving human activity for sentimental reasons. There are plenty of administrative tasks that technology will perform more accurately and efficiently than people ever did, and keeping humans inside those processes simply to preserve jobs would make little sense. The more interesting question is whether we are capable of distinguishing between the human involvement that exists because systems were historically inadequate and the human involvement that genuinely improves the relationship between people and work.

For decades, the industry has become very good at managing the complexity between those two points. It built supplier ecosystems, governance models, VMS platforms, compliance processes, commercial structures and entire operating teams because scale demanded more control than informal human relationships could provide. Much of that machinery was necessary, and much of it still is.

AI may now allow part of it to recede into the background. If that happens well, fewer human administrative layers could make the connection less abstract rather than more, while the people who remain inside the system spend more of their time on the relationships and judgement that technology cannot simply infer from a completed field.

There is a certain irony in that possibility. My father spent years reducing my complicated explanations to the belief that I was basically a headhunter, while I spent years explaining why the business was vastly more complex than that. Technology may now make parts of the business less complicated again, although not by turning MSP back into recruitment.

The underlying human need has never been particularly complicated. There is still a person who can contribute something and an organisation that needs that contribution, while everything we construct between those two points exists to make that relationship possible, safe, compliant and sustainable. The machinery matters because the world around that connection is genuinely complicated, but the machinery is easier to judge when we remain clear about what it was built to enable.

Perhaps that is ultimately why noble purpose has stayed with me long after many corporate statements have disappeared from memory. It helped me see the person underneath the process, even when my own work was several layers removed from them, and it gave the complexity some human meaning.

As technology removes some of the layers we spent decades building, that meaning may become more important rather than less. The opportunity is not to keep humans inside processes that machines can perform better, but to make sure that when the machinery becomes quieter, the relationships that actually improve the connection between people and work become louder.

Contact

Reach out for tailored support across services procurement, external workforce strategies, workflow optimisation and SaaS evaluation.

© 2026. All rights reserved.