You have a mission.
A fire in your gut that goes far beyond the bottom line.
You assemble the specialists—the best you can find.
The marketer is a genius of funnels and flows.
The operations expert is a master of efficiency.
The developer architects elegant, scalable code.
Each component is polished. Each professional is world-class.
The machine, by all accounts, should be humming.
And yet, there is no harmony.
There’s a strange and frustrating dissonance. A sense of hollow victory.
You’re moving, but not advancing.
You feel it in the team meetings—that creeping dread that everyone’s just going through the motions. You feel it when you close your laptop at night, staring at metrics that should make you proud but instead leave you feeling empty.
It’s the profound exhaustion that comes from fighting a battle you can’t name. The bone-deep weariness of winning at a game you never wanted to play.
The problem is, we’ve been given the wrong diagnosis. We treat the symptoms—stagnation, team friction, inconsistent messaging—without ever understanding the cause.
The cause isn’t a flaw in your strategy.
It’s a starvation of the soul.
The Human Drive for Meaning
To understand that, I find myself returning to the work of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the horrors of the concentration camps. He observed that the single greatest human drive is not the pursuit of pleasure (Freud) or power (Nietzsche), but the will-to-meaning.
Frankl captured this truth in a single, devastating line: “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” The inverse is equally true: without that why, even the most sophisticated ‘how’ becomes unbearable.
His school of thought, logotherapy, is built on this truth: we are pulled forward by a sense of purpose. Without it, we descend into an “existential vacuum”—a state of aimlessness and despair.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. - Viktor Frankl
Now, consider this:
If this is true for a human being…
Why would it not be true for the living, breathing organism of your venture?
The dissonance you feel is the cry of an organization forced to chase power and profit when its very essence is screaming for meaning.
That battle you can’t name? It’s the will-to-meaning asserting itself against a world that tells you to focus on everything else first.
But why does the world tell you this? How did we get here?
How We Built Urizen’s Kingdom
This isn’t an accident. It’s a legacy.
An inheritance from a world that, in its rush to progress, decided to measure everything.
The Enlightenment gave us reason. The Industrial Revolution gave us scale. The Digital Age gave us data. Each wave brought powerful tools, but each also installed a new line of code into our cultural operating system:
If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count.
The poet William Blake saw this coming centuries ago. In his prophetic mythology, he gave us Urizen—the tyrannical god of measurement, law, and cold reason. Urizen’s world is one of “mind-forg’d manacles,” where everything must be weighed, categorised, and reduced to its component parts.
Blake understood that when Urizen rules unchecked—when pure rationality becomes our only lens—we lose access to what he called “the divine imagination.” We become brilliant at counting, but blind to what truly counts.
This is the world we’ve inherited: Urizen’s kingdom, where the spreadsheet has become scripture and the only prayers we know are KPIs.
And it makes me fucking furious.
Not because metrics are evil—they’re not. But because we’ve let them become the only language we speak. We’ve traded our birthright as meaning-makers for a mess of data points.
And so, we built a world that rewards what is easily quantified.
Profit. Growth. KPIs. Market share. Follower counts.
These metrics became our proxies for value.
Meaning, on the other hand, is intangible. Vocation is messy. Purpose doesn’t fit neatly onto a spreadsheet.
The result is a cultural flattening. A world overflowing with data but starved of depth. We have become brilliant technicians of the ‘how,’ while forgetting to ask the resonant ‘why.’ We reward the will-to-power because it shows up in the numbers, while the will-to-meaning is treated like a ghost in the machine.
And so, in this context, the work of a visionary entrepreneur becomes a quiet act of rebellion.
It is the choice to build something that not only counts, but that matters.
The Shadow in the Boardroom
This is where the real work begins. The work of integration.
If the illness is a lack of meaning in a world obsessed with metrics, the cure is a structured search for it. We must become, in a sense, logotherapists for the venture itself.
But here’s what makes this work so challenging—and why most of us avoid it like the plague: the dissonance you feel isn’t just about missing purpose. It’s about what Carl Jung would call the business’s “shadow”—all the unlived potential, the suppressed values, the authentic direction that’s been pushed underground in service of what’s measurable.
The shadow is what happens when only half of you is allowed in the room. When you’re expected to show up as “Professional You”—the sanitised version that talks about KPIs and never mentions that you actually give a damn about the work itself.
Because if you brought your whole self to that meeting—if you admitted you care about meaning, not just margins—you’d expose just how hollow everyone else’s performance has become. Including your own.
This terrifies us. Because acknowledging the shadow means admitting we’ve been building the wrong thing. It means facing the possibility that our beautiful, efficient machine has been running on empty all along.
Jung understood that what we refuse to acknowledge doesn’t disappear. It goes underground and creates internal friction. The same is true for ventures. When we ignore the business’s deeper calling in favour of pure metrics, that calling doesn’t vanish—it becomes the shadow that sabotages our best-laid plans.
The integration work, then, is about bringing this shadow into the light. And that process? It’s messy. It’s uncomfortable. It will make you question everything you thought you knew about your business.
It’s about recognising that meaning doesn’t live in any single department or metric. It emerges from the connections—from how your work actually serves the world, how your team shows up for each other, how your values breathe through every decision.
This is why your brilliant specialists can’t create harmony on their own. Meaning emerges from the spaces between—from how the marketing connects to the mission, how the operations serve the vision, how the code embodies the values.
But when you commit to this integration work—when you stop fragmenting yourself and your business—something shifts. The dissonance begins to resolve.
Coming Home to Your Work
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.
William Blake - Jerusalem
And when it happens—when those voices finally align—the relief is overwhelming. The sense of coming home to yourself and your work.
It is how you move from a collection of fractured parts to an integrated whole.
From a collection of fractured parts to something that actually works. Something that feels alive.
This is what integration feels like: not the absence of struggle, but the presence of meaning in the struggle.
This inquiry is the foundation.
From it, all authentic strategy, messaging, and action can finally emerge.