When Power Forgets Who It Serves

The world outside, the world within. The dynamics operating at civilisational scale are the same dynamics we navigate in our own leadership and relationships. These pieces follow that thread - from the large to the personal.

In a phone interview with the Financial Times on 7 June 2026, US President Donald Trump said something that shows something about his relationship with Power. Speaking about Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said:

"I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn't call the shots."

Within hours, Israel struck targets in Iran. The ceasefire that had been holding since April took its most serious blow in months.

What can be seen in that exchange is not simply a disagreement between allies. It is two leaders, each holding significant power, and each treating it as something that they own. Trump declares dominion. Netanyahu acts unilaterally. Neither is asking the question, "Who is this power for?"

Across the world in the halls of Westminster, a different version of the same failure has been unfolding at a much slower pace. In the July 2024 UK General Election, Keir Starmer led the Labour Party in winning one of the largest Parliamentary majorities it had held in a generation. What they also inherited was a genuinely difficult situation: a £22 billion black hole in the public finances, an NHS in crisis after years of underinvestment, local councils close to insolvency and an economy that had grown at roughly half the rate of comparable nations for the best part of the past two decades. Circumstances called for plain speech and a determined forward direction.

What followed instead was a leader who managed for survival rather than led through difficulty. The welfare cuts. The winter fuel allowance decision taken in the middle of the cost-of-living crisis. A series of U-turns under backbench pressure, each designed to preserve his, and the government's, position rather than to honour the trust of those it was formed to serve. By May 2026, ninety-six of his own MPs were calling for him to go. His response was widely described as a "survival speech". That phrase carries its own verdict.

Power turning inward is self-defeating

Trump's assertion of dominion and Starmer's anxious self-preservation look different from the outside but they each produce the same outcome: power in service of the holder.

Not only that but the very manoeuvres designed to protect position accelerate its erosion. Trump declared that he calls all the shots — within hours, Netanyahu acted unilaterally anyway, and the credibility that assertion was meant to project was gone within the same news cycle. Starmer's welfare decisions, framed as fiscal responsibility, became the symbol of a government that had abandoned its people.

The attempt to protect the thing consumes the thing

What power looks like aimed outward

There is, however, a contrasting set of examples worth holding alongside these, not because they represent easy or perfect leadership, but because they show what power looks like when it is being handled well. These are Canadian PM Mark Carney, Yvon Chouinard (founder of outdoor apparel company Patagonia) and Pope Leo XIV.

I have written in this series before about Carney's address at the World Economic Forum in Davos - a leader who, in a moment of genuine national exposure, named the difficulty plainly and offered a way forward. Since then he has won a general election on the question of what Canada is for, and has continued building his country's economic independence through concrete acts such as a USD50 billion investment agreement with the UAE secured on his first official visit to Abu Dhabi in over forty years of Canadian diplomatic relations. The power is clearly aimed outward.

In September 2022, Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of Patagonia - the outdoor clothing company he had built over five decades, worth roughly USD3 billion - to a purpose trust and an environmental nonprofit. The press release read:

"Earth is now our only shareholder."

Every dollar of profit not reinvested in the business goes to environmental causes. He did not sell the company. He did not pass it to his family. He transferred the power itself to the purpose it was always meant to serve.

Then there is Pope Leo XIV's visit to Spain this month - worth noting because a Pope is a complicated figure leading an institution that has one of the most extensively documented records of power turned catastrophically inward. For decades, authority was used to protect the institution at the expense of the most vulnerable people toward which it had a duty of care.

Against that backdrop, Leo's choice to enter Spain through a homeless centre in Madrid and a prison in Barcelona, framing his presence as a pilgrimage from the centre toward the periphery, is a statement being made from within an institution with a well-known record of using power catastrophically poorly. If even this institution, having paid that price, can articulate what power is actually for - what does that leave the rest of us with?

When I held power for myself

I recognise that inward pull, though my version looked nothing like Trump's and not quite like Starmer's either. In 2017, North Point Academy was in a difficult period financially. I held the authority to make decisions about the company's direction, about what we built and what we prioritised. There were staff depending on the company - people with salaries, with livelihoods connected to the decisions I was making.

I came to understand that I was using that authority, in part, to manage my own anxiety - to try to secure a future that would meet my own needs. I was building the company as a vehicle for my own provision rather than as something held in trust for the staff who depended on it, the senior leaders it was meant to serve, the coaches it was meant to develop, the organisations it was meant to strengthen.

The stress of that period, which I had attributed to external circumstances, was at least partly because of a distortion I had not yet named honestly. I was using the company as a hedge against my own insecurity. A personal journal entry from that time names it plainly.

"I have been attempting to getting my needs met through my own self-effort in building North Point"

I was building for my own benefit, and "the work" I had to do instead was to stop. Not through willpower, but through finding a different account of where provision actually comes from. The question I still come back to is not a comfortable one.

For whom am I making this decision - myself or others?

That is not a one-time correction. The drift, if I am not attending to it, is always in the same direction - from others to self.

And you?

North Point Academy describes this pattern, and its alternative, as Stewardship of Power and Responsibility. It's my opinion that, on honest reflection, most leaders who hold real responsibility will find that they have been somewhere in this territory, when keeping their position was subtly more important in their decision making than the purpose of it.

These are the questions I keep returning to.

1. Where is the power or influence I hold being aimed?

• Outward, toward those in my care, or inward, toward my own security?

2. Which of my recent significant decisions were shaped primarily by what others needed, and which by what I needed to protect?
3. What am I afraid of losing?

• Is fear running more of my decisions than I have acknowledged?

These are not rhetorical questions. If you notice some discomfort then that is not the problem. It is the beginning of the work.