The Invisible Rules That Will Shape Our Future

Originally published 2019 · Updated 2026

According to Fortune's 2025 list of the World's Most Admired Companies, technology firms dominate the top positions — and the fastest-growing companies list tells the same story. This is not a revelation. Technology grows exponentially, and with it the number of companies that belong to this industry. As technology penetrates every business function, companies like Walmart or Citibank are also becoming technology companies whether they intended to or not.

But what happens when technological development starts to blur the line between human progress and what it means to be human? What happens when the decision to build a new product or service touches the edges of ethics? That is where a word as dry as corporate governance stops being a business school cliché and becomes, arguably, the most important concept of our time — and the closest thing we have to a cure for every Black Mirror episode you've ever watched.

First, a shared foundation

Corporate governance is the system by which a company is directed, regulated, and controlled — in both structure and process. Its primary objective is to ensure the long-term survival of an organization by making sure the principles that guide it are accepted, communicated, and adopted by every member, regardless of hierarchy.

A company with well-defined principles and policies benefits in many ways — not only economically, but ethically and humanly. One of the most relevant benefits is securing the social responsibility of the corporation. But beyond planting trees or saving coral reefs — respectable and necessary as those actions are — corporate governance must ensure that the development of products and services does not cross moral boundaries, and that when it does, there is a clear line of action grounded in ethical reasoning.

Defining these policies is not a bureaucratic exercise. It can be the decisive factor between a company that endures and one that destroys.

When the absence of governance becomes a crisis

We already have enough examples of emerging technology companies that clearly had no principles in place — or chose to ignore them.

Uber currently operates with over 5 million drivers providing more than 20 million daily trips worldwide. In doing so, it holds an extraordinary treasury of sensitive information: GPS location, driver's licenses, phone numbers, credit card details, car insurance records, and facial recognition data. A relatively recent feature even connects the app to emergency services in several countries, sending location updates every ten seconds to authorities — meaning this data could be used in police investigations at any moment.

The problem was never the data itself. The problem was the security around it. Uber has paid close to $150 million in settlements related to data breaches — including a case in which a driver's location history was analyzed to map every address he had visited in a single night, all of which turned out to be brothels. Beyond data, the company has lost billions of dollars for systematically violating local laws across multiple markets, treating legal compliance as an obstacle rather than a boundary.

The case of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos remains one of the most instructive failures in Silicon Valley history — not because it involved a technology that raised new ethical paradigms, but because it collapsed over something far more basic: deliberate deception. Holmes founded a company supposedly capable of running 240 types of medical analysis from a single drop of blood through a device called the Edison Machine. She raised over $700 million from high-profile investors including the Walton family, Rupert Murdoch, and Carlos Slim — none of whom received financial reports, because the company had no CFO and no practice of financial transparency.

The board that oversaw this was 80% under the control of Holmes herself, a 19-year-old who had completed only one year of university. Her co-director had a background in software — Microsoft and Lotus — but no experience in medicine or healthcare. Her advisor was a politician, again with no expertise in the company's core business.

If you're not familiar with the case, the HBO documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley is worth watching.

What Theranos illustrates is not an anomaly. It is the logical outcome of building a company without the checks that corporate governance exists to provide — and it happened in one of the most resourced startup ecosystems in the world.

The case that updated everything: OpenAI, 2023

If Theranos showed what happens when governance is absent, the events at OpenAI in November 2023 showed something more unsettling: what happens when governance exists but has no real power.

OpenAI was founded with an explicit ethical mission — to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, not for profit. To protect that mission, the company created a nonprofit board with the authority to override commercial interests. It was, on paper, a model of principled governance.

Then, on a Friday afternoon, that board fired CEO Sam Altman without explanation. Within 72 hours, a combination of investor pressure, employee revolt, and Microsoft's intervention forced his reinstatement. The board that was specifically designed to prioritize ethics over profit was dismantled in the process.

The outcome was not simply a corporate drama. It was a public demonstration that even when an organization builds governance structures with the explicit purpose of keeping ethical considerations above financial ones, economic power tends to win. The people in the room when the big decisions get made are rarely the ones asking the hardest questions.

This matters because OpenAI is not building a ride-sharing app. It is building systems that will reshape how humans work, create, communicate, and make decisions. The governance question is not internal. It belongs to all of us.

The structure of power inside these companies

Beyond individual failures, there is a structural problem worth naming.

Corporate governance must ensure that shareholder assemblies and boards of directors build democracies, not aristocracies. In several high-profile cases, founders have sold the majority of their shares while retaining absolute control of their organizations through a class of "Type C" shares, where voting ratios can run 10 to 1 compared to other shareholders. Mark Zuckerberg at Meta and Larry Page at Google have operated under structures like this.

This kind of arrangement turns the rest of the shareholders into passive actors and board meetings into ceremonies — stripping them of the function they were created to serve. When economic power is concentrated in too few hands, it becomes a significant force of disruption for society at large. A functioning corporate governance model must demand democratic participation from all shareholders, ensuring that the decisions made have at least enough pluralism to avoid reckless judgment.

The question that follows is whether these boards — even those created specifically to handle ethical complexity, like Google's AI ethics board — have the actual authority to resolve the dilemmas they are assembled to address. Or whether they are, in practice, advisory bodies with no real enforcement power.

The speed problem

There is one final challenge that makes all of the above harder: velocity.

The rate at which new technologies emerge is accelerating. Behavioral biometric authentication, neurohacking, 5G-enabled speed, and automated translation systems are already changing how we behave as a society. The governance frameworks meant to regulate them were built for a different era.

As Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institution put it: "We have a legal, regulatory framework built on the basis of mail, paper, words — versus a new world order which is digital, continuous, 24/7, and built on bits and bytes. Somehow we need to square these two worlds."

The agility to update a company's codes and principles must match the speed of the technology it governs. Otherwise, governance becomes decoration — and innovation, whether in products, services, or internal processes, proceeds without guardrails.

The question worth sitting with

The real issue is not whether corporate governance is important. It is whether the people responsible for it have the authority, the expertise, and the independence to act — not just advise — when the moment demands it.

That question has no clean answer yet. But the companies building the tools that will define the next decade are making decisions about it right now, with or without our input.

The least we can do is understand what's at stake.