Equiglobal Perspectives

The Purpose Paradox: Strategy Versus Execution Most organisations know why purpose matters. Far fewer have built the governance infrastructure to make it real. According to Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose’s Giving in Numbers (2025 edition), 87% of companies reported having a corporate purpose statement in 2024, yet only 67% had embedded metrics to assess whether business practices aligned with that purpose. The result is a significant execution gap: ambitious purpose declarations collide with supply chain decisions, AI deployment choices, pricing...

Who Answers When AI Fails? The Accountability Crisis The most dangerous phrase in AI governance is “the algorithm decided.” Algorithms execute instructions — people design them, deploy them, and profit from them. Accountability requires naming those people and giving them power to intervene. Yet when AI systems cause harm, responsibility often appears to evaporate. Consider the Uber facial recognition case from Part 1: who was accountable? The vendor who built biased software? The Uber team that procured it without due diligence?...

The Black Box Problem: Why “Explainable AI” Is Usually Just More Theatre Consider an illustrative example: a high-street bank rejects thousands of loan applications using an automated credit model. When applicants exercise their GDPR Article 15 rights and request explanations, the bank provides a three-page technical document outlining the model’s architecture — neural-network layers, activation functions, training methodology. That may satisfy an engineer. It does not satisfy the law. GDPR requires meaningful, intelligible, and decision-specific information about the logic used...

The AI Governance Reckoning: Why Most Bias Audits Are Theatre When Uber’s facial recognition system repeatedly failed to recognise a Black courier and automatically suspended his account, the company discovered what many organisations still haven’t grasped: technology alone does not absolve you of legal responsibility. In Manjang v Uber Eats UK Ltd, the Employment Tribunal accepted that his claim of indirect racial discrimination was credible enough to proceed, a sign that AI‑driven decisions are not beyond legal scrutiny. Microsoft had already...

Sustainability Without Measurement Is Theatre Sustainability without measurement is theatre. Companies announce net-zero commitments and publish ESG reports, yet many cannot demonstrate actual progress. If you can’t measure impact, you can’t manage it, and you certainly can’t prove it to increasingly sceptical stakeholders. But measurement fails not from lack of metrics; it fails because companies operate fragmented systems that cannot produce reliable ESG data. The Systems Problem Sustainability measurement requires data from disconnected enterprise systems such as ERP, Supply Chain,...

The Implementation Gap That Carries Legal Consequences Human rights are no longer peripheral to business — they are fundamental to operational legitimacy and legal survival. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) establish that companies have a responsibility to respect human rights throughout their operations, yet 80% of the world’s 2,000 largest companies score zero on implementing human rights due diligence (HRDD). This implementation failure now carries severe consequences: the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD)...

Most organisations already have the right values. The problem is that values without systems don’t survive complexity. The Real Reason Responsible Business Fails Most organisations don’t fail because they lack values. They fail because their values never make it into operations. Codes of conduct get written. Sustainability statements get published. DEI commitments get announced. ESG reports get filed. And then, under the first serious pressure — a supply chain disruption, a cost-cutting cycle, a leadership transition — those commitments quietly...