COLUMN: Nancy Lyons on ‘The Convenience of Moral Flexibility’

Nancy Lyons gave us permission to excerpt her recent newsletter From the Nan-Cave. On the eve of this people power weekend, we wanted to share her perspective.

Nancy Lyons delivered a funny and powerful “Changing the Future” power talk at the 40th anniversary celebration of Minnesota Women’s Press (photo by Sarah Whiting)

I had a conversation recently with someone who spent the better part of a decade in senior leadership at one of the largest tech companies in the world. He’s smart. He’s thoughtful. He’s someone I don’t know well, but believe I genuinely like. And when I asked him about the culture inside that machine, about how decisions got made, about what it felt like to watch the company make choices that affected billions of people, he said something that’s been rattling around in my head ever since.

He said, “You learn to compartmentalize.”

Not because he’s a bad person. He’s not. But because the system he operated in required it. You show up. You do the work. You hit the metrics. And somewhere along the way, the questions you used to ask: Should we do this? Who does this hurt? What are we building, really? Those questions become inconvenient. They slow things down. They make you difficult. And in a system that rewards speed, scale, and shareholder value above all else, difficult is expensive.

So you stop asking.

That’s what I want to talk about today. Not him. Not any one company. But the system itself, and what it costs us when moral flexibility becomes just another competitive advantage.

The System Rewards What We Should Question

Here’s something I’ve come to believe after more than 25 years of building: capitalism doesn’t have a conscience. It has incentives. And those incentives are breathtakingly efficient at rewarding people who are willing to set their values aside, temporarily, situationally, and conveniently — in order to win.

It’s easier to grow when you don’t have to care about who gets displaced. It’s faster to ship when you skip the ethics review. It’s simpler to scale when people are ‘capital’, not humans. And the system will absolutely let you do all of those things. It will reward you for it. It will call you a visionary.

We’ve built an entire economy around the principle that winning is its own justification. That growth forgives everything. A system that suggests that if the stock price is up, the strategy must be sound.

But here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: What do we actually lose when winning becomes the only metric that matters?

Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

A few weeks ago, Palantir CEO Alex Karp said something in public that most people in his position would only say behind closed doors. He talked about AI reducing the political power of “highly educated, often female” voters while increasing the power of working-class men. He framed it like a forecast, like weather.

But it wasn’t the weather. It was a red flag.

Because AI isn’t inevitable, or neutral. It has investors, procurement officers, lobbying budgets, and government contracts. Every algorithm reflects the priorities of the people who funded it, built it, and deployed it. And when someone like Karp, whose company’s primary clients are military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies, talks about whose power goes up and whose goes down, that’s not prediction. That’s a business model.

The contempt for the humanities, for ethics, for the people most likely to ask hard questions about how these tools get used, that’s not accidental; it’s functional. Because those questions cost money. They slow down contracts and complicate the pitch. And in a system where winning is everything, the people who ask “but should we?” are treated as obstacles, not assets.

This is moral flexibility at industrial scale. And we’re watching it happen in real time.

The Convenient Retreat

You can see the same pattern playing out everywhere right now. Companies that spent years building diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — programs they celebrated publicly, that they used to recruit talent and win consumer trust — are quietly dismantling them. Not because the work stopped being valuable. But because the political winds shifted, it became more convenient to pull back than to hold the line.

That’s the thing about moral flexibility. It’s always framed as pragmatism. We’re just being realistic. We’re reading the room. We’re protecting the business.

But let’s call it what it is: it’s choosing comfort over conviction. And the cost isn’t abstract. Real people lose real things, jobs, protections, visibility, and belonging every time an institution decides that doing the right thing is too expensive or too risky.

I’ve been in rooms where leaders I respect have said, essentially, ‘I still believe in this work, but I can’t say that out loud right now.’ And I understand the pressure. I do. But silence in the face of injustice isn’t neutrality. It’s a choice. And it’s a choice that benefits the people who want you to be quiet.

What We Actually Lose

When winning at all costs becomes the operating principle of a company, an industry, or a country, here’s what disappears:

• Trust. Not the marketing version of trust. The real kind. The kind where employees believe their leaders mean what they say. Where communities believe institutions will show up for them. Where people believe the system isn’t rigged. That trust, once broken, takes a generation to rebuild. If it rebuilds at all.
• Creativity. Real innovation doesn’t come from optimization. It comes from people who are brave enough to say this doesn’t work and safe enough to try something different. When the culture punishes dissent and rewards compliance, you get incrementalism disguised as innovation. You get features instead of breakthroughs.
• People. The best ones. The ones who care. They leave or learn to compartmentalize, as my new friend described. Either way, you lose the thing that made them valuable in the first place — their ability to see clearly, to feel deeply, to push the work toward something meaningful.
• And ultimately, you lose yourself. Because moral flexibility is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. The first compromise is the hardest. The second is easier. By the tenth, you’ve forgotten what you were compromising on in the first place. You’ve built a career, maybe even a life, that requires you to be someone you’re not.

I know this because I’ve felt the pull. I’ve sat in meetings where the smart business move and the right thing were not the same thing. I’ve watched people I admire choose the money. And I’ve had to decide, again and again, who I want to be when the room is watching and when it isn’t.

The Rebellion of Doing It Differently

I have spent my whole career contributing to building something. I could have built the way the playbook said to: optimize for growth, externalize the costs, treat people like resources to be managed. And honestly? It probably would have been easier and certainly faster. Maybe even more profitable in the short term.

But I didn’t. Not because I’m better than anyone. Because my conscience wouldn’t let me. Because the best business instinct I’ve ever had is rooted in my humanity, in the belief that how we build things matters as much as what we build. That the people inside the work deserve as much consideration as the people buying the product. Our values are not a brand exercise; they are fundamental.

And you know what? It worked. Not despite the values. Because of them. The companies we built attracted extraordinary people who stayed because they felt seen and respected. We made good decisions because we asked hard questions early. We built trust with our clients because they could feel the difference between a company that meant it and one that was performing.

That’s the part the moral flexibility crowd gets wrong. They think values are a constraint. Something you tolerate until you can afford to drop them. But values are actually the strategy. They’re what make the work sustainable. They’re what make the winning worth anything.

The Future Isn’t Built by People Who Play It Safe

I think we’re at a moment of reckoning. Not just in business — in everything. We’re watching, in real time, what happens when institutions choose convenience over courage. When leaders optimize for self-preservation instead of service. When the system rewards moral flexibility so efficiently that people forget they had morals to flex in the first place.

And the counterweight, the thing that actually changes this, isn’t one leader, one policy, or one election. It’s a thousand small acts of integrity. It’s the business owner who refuses to abandon inclusion when it gets hard. It’s the employee who asks the uncomfortable question in the meeting. It’s the founder who builds slowly and sustainably, rather than strip-mining communities for growth. It’s the person who says, I’d rather win the right way or not win at all.

The future has never been built by people who stayed in line. It’s been built by people who looked at the rules and said: No. Not like this.

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