Yesterday, the corridors of London Business School resonated with something rarely heard in its iconic lecture halls: an unflinching call to face the system, not just tweak its symptoms. Halla Tomasdottir—President of Iceland, pioneer of values-driven finance and purpose leadership—brought her signature candor and provocation to an audience well-versed in “leading #transformation,” but perhaps less comfortable interrogating their own institutional dogmas.
Halla’s biography itself refutes siloed thinking: from global HR and #entrepreneurship to co-founding Auður Capital (a finance firm built on “feminine values”), then reshaping global business discourse with The B Team, she now stands as a symbol of possibility—if also of paradox—at the intersection of governance, gender, and global responsibility.
Her core message? The purpose of business is to solve problems—echoing Colin Mayer’s call for “solving the problems of people and planet, profitably.” Yet Halla swiftly moved beyond this instrumentalist framing. What’s truly needed, she insisted, is a lexical reordering of values. For Halla, the new order starts with care and kindness, which she links directly to gender parity and women’s leadership. And I will suggest this cannot remain rhetorical: it will require hard legal and structural shifts—mandatory benefit corporation status, profit caps, and personal accountability for harm.
Halla then named the elephant in the room: our crises are not external, but systemic. She labeled the global obsession with GDP growth an “intergenerational crime.” Iceland’s engagement in the Wellbeing Economy Governments, inspired by Costanza, Fioramonti, Hurth, et al., is exemplary. Yet, she still claims to remain a capitalist—a tension that demands scrutiny. Can capitalism be saved by swapping metrics (GPI for GDP) if the underlying growth imperative is untouched? More crucially, she left the power of property unexamined. When 1% own more than the bottom six billion, procedural justice is window dressing. We must reimagine property regimes, legal forms, and fiduciary duty.
Finally, Halla called for rethinking education and #leadership. We need leaders who can work on the system, not just inside it. Her own track record—across different levels, and catalyzing women’s leadership in Iceland shows inspiringly what is possible in practice. Yet her prescriptions—overcoming fear, finding courage, meditation classes—merit further debate. Love is no panacea, and yoga cannot replace moral imagination. What’s needed here is the cultivation of wisdom—both individual and organisational.
The lesson for #LBS? To “profoundly impact the way the world does business” demands more than pious rhetoric. It requires the courage to confront the systemic, institutional, and ethical realities Halla exposed. Until then, LBS remains what it is: an institution still searching for the wisdom it claims to champion.
Takk fyrir, Halla, for setting out the challenge!
#SystemsChange #LeadershipForGood #PoliticalEconomy #WellbeingEconomy #BusinessEthics