Beauty: An Update

If you still think optimization is the name of the game, you’re the dinosaur

by Tim Leberecht

If I don’t write for a week, I get cranky. I feel like an intellectual impostor. But in the weeks after the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens last month, the pen just wouldn’t move. I felt intellectually constipated. There had been too much input and not enough time to digest it.

I was spent. Ten years of experience with gatherings of this sort have taught me to recognize that you pay for every peak moment with a subsequent period of depletion and deflation. The adrenaline, the energy—first it fades, then it drops off abruptly. It’s like a quiet bang. You feel it without noticing it.

But enough whining. New peak moments are waiting to be experienced. The show must go on, and so must the game—especially the beautiful one.

The Game

From the World Beautiful Business Forum I continued on to the World Cup. I first tried to resist it, for all the right reasons, but the romantic in me proved stronger—or at least more passionate—than the cynic. I guess that’s a good thing.

While my team, Germany, was playing Ivory Coast, I sat in a Mexican bar in Barcelona’s Born district with my Mexican colleague Mark, our musical director, nervously and hastily downing a Mezcalita. When German striker Deniz Undav scored the winning last-minute goal, I burst into an insanely loud celebration that instantly silenced the room before my body—and the worried expressions around me—reminded me that a similar scream had severely strained my vocal cords for a week after Germany’s last World Cup victory in 2014.

But hey, it was worth it.

The whole World Cup is.

More host countries, more nations, more games, more money than ever—yet it turns out big can be beautiful, too. I slowly grew into it, and perhaps my initial refusal to care made it all the more precious, moving my affection beyond mere reflex or habit. My co-founder Till insists that, at my age, well into my fifties, the number of World Cup tournaments I can still experience is becoming rather limited.

On that note, journalist and football connoisseur Simon Kuper, whom I once interviewed about FC Barcelona’s motto, Més que un club (”More than a Club”), offers a poignant reflection: “A World Cup is like Proust’s madeleine.” Each new tournament reminds you of the past World Cups—and of the people you watched them with. With or without the much- and rightly maligned hydration breaks, it becomes a metric of one’s life.

As Monika Jiang observes, the World Cup evokes what we’re missing so desperately in our daily lives: the feeling of being part of something greater than ourselves, of “oneliness,” of being “all” and “one” at once. These are the moments when the cliché of our “shared humanity,” which can sometimes ring hollow, becomes so tangible that we can almost touch it—or scream it out loud.

It turns out the beautiful game is more resilient than we thought, capable of defying even the most shameless attempts to commercialize and politicize it. The beauty in the beautiful game, I’d like to believe, is strong enough to withstand passing fashions and passing powers.

The same is true for beauty itself.

The Cult and the Promise

Sure, like football, beauty has become commodified—indeed, turned into a “cult,” as the exhibition Cult of Beauty at the CCCB in Barcelona argues, tracing its colonizing impulse from antiquity to TikTok, from the male gaze to the algorithmic gaze, from the beaux arts to the beauty industry, from Miss America to body shaming to looksmaxxing. Beauty is power, the curators remind us, and it is unevenly distributed.

The internet—that innocent culprit—has, by Instagramming beauty mercilessly, replaced inspiration with stimulation: a relentless excitement machine whose only goal is to make everything we hold precious less precious.

Inspiration requires attention and commitment. It is impossible if we’re constantly excited, constantly agitated. Beauty becomes scarcer the more ubiquitous it is supposed to be, while almost everything else online is, or becomes, a form of pornography.

That was the working thesis of artist Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet, an examination of the laws of extraction—of the perverted and pervasive power of digital technology as it shaped, and was shaped by, our sexual desires. Her project comprises two parts—a book and a participatory lecture—and I had the pleasure of taking part in the latter at Sónar+D in Barcelona.

In a darkened room lit only by the participants’ phones, Seu asked us to open her Instagram page and read aloud together from a shared script. Meanwhile, throughout the entire Instagram-story-as-lecture, she walked through the room, passing close to each participant as a deliberate distraction, making us struggle to stay focused on the text glowing on our screens. Stuck to our phones most of the time, we switched from one voyeurism to another, prompted into feeding Seu’s research with yet more data while adding to her Instagram views.

The performance was like the internet itself. It left a foul aftertaste.

The business model of the book is more beautiful. Each of the forty-five people cited receives a share of the profits. Seu calls this model of attribution “Citational Splits.”

What is beautiful is what we can withdraw from the laws of extraction—and those of attraction.

A week after Seu’s performance, I watched In-I In Motion, Juliette Binoche’s making-of documentary about her 2007 collaboration with the British dancer Akram Khan. The two-and-a-half-hour film requires commitment. The first part follows rehearsals and conversations between the unlikely pair and its directors; the second presents the performance itself. Each lingers longer and looks more closely than contemporary viewing habits would suggest. The camera cannot take its eyes off them.

Yet the reward is lasting: a meditation on the creative process and the power dynamics of love that takes us back to the original wound—and to the impossibility of healing it for the other.

Binoche and Khan are performing the grief of the rejected and the grief of the rejecter, as the writer Karl Ove Knausgård puts it in his essay on a kindred work of art: Joachim Trier’s magnificent Sentimental Value, where the delicate dance unfolds between two artists who are also father and daughter. “More or less damaged characters all find themselves in that recognizable here and now, depicted with care and an eye for its beauty,” Knausgård writes, describing the kind of protagonists that inhabit all of Trier’s films.

Beauty is what is of sentimental value. And to appreciate and create it, we need a sentimental education: an education of the heart.

The Education

You may call it “emotional intelligence” or, in the latest linguistic contortion, “relational intelligence” (I’ve written elsewhere about how the myopic obsession with “intelligence” is corrupting our language and culture), or “Systems Feeling“ (to use the concept developed by systems thinker Laura Francois). Or simply: love.

The only way to overcome a transactional culture is not to be reciprocal. It is to love.

A sentimental education is not one you obtain at business school, at least not on its own. Nor is it an education AI can provide by codifying and rehashing all human knowledge.

Rather, it is the knowledge you gain from reading, seeing art, and sitting with an idea. From learning “how to be read by a book,” as the leadership philosopher Steven D’Souza describes it. From listening to the singer-songwriter Ormella with your headphones set to the lowest volume so that her voice caresses you ever so slightly. From reading a poem by Forugh Farrokhzad. From asking the big “why” questions philosophers ask. From watching Lionel Messi, the GOAT, score a golazo. From trying your hand at stand-up comedy or DJing. From walking the Camino de Santiago—or simply walking your child to school (although they might not appreciate it). From spending hours trying to catch a fish in the Bosphorus or in an artificial lake in North Carolina. From watching Sculpt: Eye of the Duck, Loris Gréaud’s film starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Rampling that only one person at a time can experience. From collecting something utterly useless that only you care passionately about.

All of these experiences teach us that most of the inherently human capacities we need to thrive in the emerging more-than-human economy—curiosity, presence, imagination, creativity, play—are abundant in the arts and crafts. More importantly, they are capacities we all possessed before we turned five, before school, college, and business education gradually trained them out of us, turning us into compliant, unthinking cogs in the machine.

This machine is now literally a machine.

That makes it even harder to escape. At the same time, it might make it easier to see just how stuck—and how complicit—we have become. To realize that we’ve been playing the wrong game all along.

As Ralph Wetzel, a professional “business clown,” suggested last week during a workshop in Paris, “Boredom is a prerequisite for imagination. Maybe we will become so bored by AI that our imagination will grow in leaps and bounds.”

We do need it.

“Beauty is the name for something that does not exist,” the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa once exclaimed. So we must constantly reimagine it.

Beauty is immeasurable, unmanageable, illegible, irrational, illogical, wild. Emotional, erotic, ecstatic.

It is the opposite of management. The opposite of business. And therefore the antidote. The cure.

Beauty is a necessity, as Toni Morrison knew. And it is gaining momentum because of the moment we’re in.

The Movement

First, there is the backlash against AI. Not against the technology itself, but against the dehumanizing regime that a handful of techno-utopians seek to impose through its proliferation.

Take the pro-AI commencement speakers—including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—who were booed by students. Or comedian Ronny Chieng and his viral Harvard Class Day speech, telling graduates that the mission of their generation was to “destroy AI.” Or Pope Leo, urging us to “disarm AI.”

They all reflect a broader public sentiment.

In the United States, a national NBC News survey conducted earlier this year among 1,000 registered voters found that only 26 percent viewed AI positively, while 46 percent viewed it negatively. AI scored worse than U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris on the same poll—though still better than the Democratic Party and Iran…

Protests, and even riots, against the AI regime have become more frequent in the United States and elsewhere. Legendary activist Erin Brockovich has made data centers her new cause.

The countermovement is hardly surprising. Even many ardent technology enthusiasts now recognize that the techno-utopian vision comes at a considerable cost.

The SpaceX IPO is exemplary. It briefly valued the company at more than $2 trillion and made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. Yet what the record-breaking offering ultimately symbolizes is the extraordinary material power of belief. Investors are pricing not today’s business but tomorrow’s mythology: Mars, AI, orbital infrastructure. The company lost nearly $5 billion in 2025, and future revenues—let alone profits—remain uncertain. Yet Musk commands an avid following and has skillfully tapped into retail investors’ fear of missing out on a journey to Mars. It is a fever dream—like crypto and, to some extent, AI. A bubble that has already permeated retirement funds and become too big to fail. If it bursts, generations may end up paying the price.

As Matteo Wong writes in The Atlantic:

“The promise of AI was always a self-fulfilling prophecy: This technology is so expensive to build that it must be world-changing; and because it is world-changing, we will spend any amount to build it.”

The distance between prophecy and reality is shrinking. This is what is really happening when we speak of “acceleration.”

Two weeks ago, a group of European technology scholars published a paper (“Europe 2031”) in which they were warning that the U.S. government might one day compel an AI company to deny access to other nations. That very day, the Trump administration did exactly that: it ordered Anthropic to suspend access to its premium system, Claude Mythos, for non-American users, particularly Europeans, citing national security concerns.

It is not merely that we have entrusted our fate to a handful of tech billionaires—the majority of leading AI companies are controlled by remarkably few people. Worse, many of them display an extraordinary combination of confidence and indifference. Zuckerberg. Altman. Musk. Karp.

They are the winners by today’s standards, celebrated as the visionaries of our age. But their visions ultimately amount to something darker: a future in which humanity, as we know it, becomes expendable.

At least those protesters who are silenced can use even their silence as a form of protest. Consider the session at the Hay Festival where a court order obtained by Meta prevented former employee Sarah Wynn-Williams from speaking about her book. She participated anyway and, throughout the entire panel, sat in symbolic silence.

Protest we must.

And “the only true protest is beauty.”

The eponymous exhibition in Venice, housed in the historic Palazzo Pisani Moretta and curated by Dries Van Noten, draws on the idea, first articulated by the activist and songwriter Phil Ochs, that in ugly, turbulent times, creating and experiencing beauty is the ultimate act of defiance.

This sensibility is equally evident at this year’s Venice Art Biennale. Curated by the late Koyo Kouoh, its theme, In Minor Keys, sets the tone: a more introspective, tender, melancholic, and less spectacular exhibition—political precisely because of its intimacy.

And not afraid of beauty.

Biennale, in an essay published earlier this year, articulated this shifting zeitgeist:

“For a long time, in the serious corridors of the art world, that word, beauty, has been the forbidden moniker...”

To invoke beauty was to risk being dismissed as unserious, sentimental, insufficiently rigorous.

The encouraging news is that beauty is returning—but not beauty understood as prettiness.

“The beauty we are interested in... is the Sublime in the old, terrifying Romantic sense: the feeling of standing before a storm, or a mountain, or a truth so vast it makes you feel small. This kind of beauty does not soothe; it shakes. It is the ‘terrible beauty’ that Yeats wrote of, born of violence and transformation.”

It is precisely this terrible beauty that we need right now.

As the Biennale essay continues:

“Beauty, in the year 2026, acts as a form of friction.”

Because:

“In an age of catastrophe, only the beautiful has the power to make us stop long enough to feel.”

And further:

“The return to beauty is not an escape from reality; it is a strategy for enduring it. It is the only force strong enough to arrest our attention and hold it long enough for a seed of meaning to be planted. We have realized that we cannot scold the world into caring. We have to seduce it.”

In a world of frictionless friction, it is the human residue that grants aura.

Or, as the essay concludes:

“If we cannot find beauty in the wreckage, then the wreckage has truly won.”

So we are witnessing the renaissance of craftsmanship; the Slow Web and the Poetic Web; phone-free events, such as the rave Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter staged at Art Basel last week; the U.S. Chamber of Connection initiative; somatic retreats; the resurgence of spiritual rituals; the enormous popularity of festivals, live concerts, adventures, and adrenaline-fueled experiences; the World Cup.

Why?

Because these experiences still make us feel something. They make us feel alive. They give us texture, human connection, the “thickness” we are craving so desperately.

If you still think optimization is the name of the game, you’ve lost the plot. You’re the dinosaur.

Not only are we not done yet; we’re just getting started.

The Building

This is how we think about our own modest contribution to this global movement of beauty: beautiful business.

The ripple effects of the World Beautiful Business Forum continue to spread. Across the globe, members of our House of Beautiful Business (HoBB) community are organizing smaller gatherings of their own.

In São Paulo, Renata Barbosa hosted the Bar of Beautiful Talks. In Vitória, Brazil, Rafael Phoca built the entire program of his Efervescência summit around insights and inspirations from the World Beautiful Business Forum (I was delighted to join him virtually for a brief contribution). In New York, HoBBsters gathered to discuss their takeaways from Athens. In Berlin, our philosophy curator Eda Çaça staged a Socratic dialogue with the philosopher Agnes Callard and her colleague Berislav Marušić, extending the conversations from Athens around the question, What is a good life?

In Paris, several speakers and performers from Athens—Monika Jiang, Steven D’Souza, Laura Francois, Gianfranco Chicco, and Lori Baldwin—joined the latest Pullman xChange, produced by the House of Beautiful Business in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. The Source Code explored the essential—and often invisible—qualities that power both hospitality and, ultimately, a hospitable life.

In Paris I also reconnected with Jeroen van der Most, the artist who presented Letters from Nature, developed together with Peter van der Putten, at our 2023 festival in Sintra, Portugal. The project imagines letters written by AI on behalf of nature. One of them, he told me, will travel aboard the next NASA mission to the Moon.

Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, I was delighted to see the words “beautiful business” projected across the main stage at the opening session of the Founders Forum in Barcelona, the annual gathering of IESE’s School of Founders.

IESE is one of the world’s leading business schools, and the School of Founders was created inside it to help entrepreneurs “build significant businesses that make a positive impact in their fields.” That ambition aligns naturally with IESE’s own ethos. Founded by Jesuits, the school has long been known for emphasizing responsible leadership—not merely as the science of making better decisions, but as an inner practice requiring time, reflection, and moral purpose.

Sebastian Ross, the executive director of the School of Founders, first came across one of our LinkedIn posts, reached out, attended Athens, and invited us to contribute to the gathering.

So there we were.

Mark, our musical director, performed together with several local musicians, and I delivered the closing keynote.

What I hadn’t expected was just how prominently the idea of beautiful business would feature throughout the program. It became the Forum’s throughline.

Ross presented the school’s new manifesto, including its pledge to founders to “build businesses so beautiful you never want to sell them.”

He also reminded them: “You are worthy regardless of whether your business succeeds or not.”

The 250 participants knew exactly why they had come to Barcelona: To step back from the pressures of day-to-day growth—or survival; from the tyranny of the immediate. They had come to slow down. To take stock and exchange ideas. To console and confide in a close-knit community of fellow founders who understood the sacrifice, the imposter syndrome, the doubt, and the burnout that so often accompany entrepreneurship.

They hoped to gain clarity about the growth of their companies as it relates to their own well-being.

As the School of Founders manifesto proclaims: “Personal growth is individual work you cannot do alone.”

IESE’s dean, Franz Heukamp, joined for a refreshingly candid conversation about leadership and, more importantly, about himself: his loneliness, his fears, and his failures. He admitted that when he first took on the role, he was, in his own words, a “communications disaster.” Later came another realization: the myopic belief that only he could do the job. The terminal hubris of leadership.

IESE external faculty member James Allen, advisory partner at Bain & Company and one of the leading thinkers on corporate growth and Founder’s Mentality, appealed to the founders’ moral ambition as an expression of humility. He lamented the erosion—or outright absence—of citizenship and community among today’s technology companies: the “scale insurgents” that no longer need a meaningful social contract with their stakeholders, no longer require moral legitimacy to secure their license to operate. The current system simply no longer produces enough winners, he argued. Widening inequality is one of the root causes of today’s populism and authoritarianism.

He urged the audience to take the long view.

Cathedral thinking, as we now call it. Inspired—we were in Barcelona, after all—by Gaudí.

Allen referred to IESE professor Yih-Teen Lee, who expanded on the concept by reflecting on Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. Gaudí knew the basilica would never be completed in his lifetime. He had the time and resources to build only a fraction of it. How, then, should he use those limited resources in a way that would inspire future builders?

He chose to only fully complete the Nativity Façade, building upward so that the people of Barcelona could already see the towers reaching into the sky.

Allen writes:

“Every CEO faces problems like this all the time. Do I build out all the foundational elements for the firm of the future, or race to give my people a vision of what we could be with one product and one customer? Do I finish 20% of everything, or 100% of one fifth of what I’m doing? The efficient thing is almost always option one: build the foundations. But the beautiful thing might be to inspire—to give your people and customers a vision of what you might become.”

It reminded me of another line from Pessoa: to “put all you are into the smallest thing you do.”

Our House

And it made me reflect on the House of Beautiful Business.

Our role in the world. Our moral ambition. Our vision for the future.

Are we scaling—or merely growing? Do we have the foundations for long-term success in place? Or have we simply built one beautiful church after another? (yikes, not to compare us with Gaudí 😊).

Ten years into this journey, our momentum has grown. The community has grown. The narrative has scaled. But, by and large, we are still the same small shop we’ve been since 2016. The difference is that more and more people now believe we are something much larger.

We are punching above our weight in brand and reach. And below it in impact.

That is the challenge occupying us now: Not simply how to grow, but how to scale the beautiful business movement itself. More specifically, how to scale it without losing the intimacy that defines it.

Is it possible to scale intimacy?

We possess three extraordinary assets: a vibrant community, a brand people genuinely love, and a mission that has never been more relevant.

Over the past decade, we have succeeded in creating a narrative that resonates—a movement that more and more people want to be part of. What we have not yet built are the structures that allow members of this movement to participate fully.

When I call it a movement, I do so because movements exist first in people’s imagination. In Barcelona, one participant approached me and remarked that our movement was “going mainstream.”

I wish that were true.

But her assumption tells its own story. At this stage, it is more powerful if thousands of people believe ours is a movement of hundreds of thousands than if hundreds of thousands believe it is one of only a few thousand.

Call it the scale illusion.

Yet while momentum has always mattered more than scale, we know that this equation is beginning to change. Without stronger foundations, momentum eventually dissipates.

So we are taking this summer to pause:

To reflect honestly on what we have accomplished—and where we have fallen short.

To decide what we should not do (for example, launching a networking app for our members…).

To imagine how we can welcome more people into the House.

To dream about the individuals and organizations with whom we most want to collaborate.

To shape the next edition of the World Beautiful Business Forum: where it should take place, in what form, and why.

To explore new ways for our community to gather throughout the year.

To respond to their recurring request that we “be more present in their lives.”

To build a vehicle capable of harnessing the collective wisdom of this remarkable community.

To renew our mission.

To articulate a vision for the next decade.

To strengthen the foundations that will allow us to scale those parts of the House of Beautiful Business that can have the greatest impact.

To demonstrate that beautiful business can also be profitable business, creating the resources for new initiatives and new encounters—new moments of beauty.

Because, in the end, that’s all we want.

Our house has never been more open.

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Further Reading

Tim Leberecht: The Beautiful Asymmetry of Football

Beauty Shot: What Makes a Dream Team? Interview with Simon Kuper.

Karl Ove Knausgård: Sentimental Value: Between Trauma and the Sublime

Biennale: Who Owns Beauty?

Further Listening

Ormella: “Missing Machine”

Philip Sheppard: In-I In Motion, Original Soundtrack

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Community Updates

Sonja Kresojevic’s exhibition, Where Silence Breaks, just opened in London. Exploring form and fragility, presence and absence, it is running at Art Forward Gallery until July 11. She will also participate in an artist talk on July 2.

Joanna Kamińska’s paintings are part of the Open Art exhibition at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, June 28 - July 12.

Alexa Clay has published a memoir-inspired essay titled “Therapy for Billionaires” in Aeon.

Beowulf Sheehan has released a new book: a double portrait of the late writer Cormac McCarthy in photographs and prose, The Father of the Man: The Last Author Portrait Sitting with Cormac McCarthy.