Success is one of the most celebrated values in American culture, and leadership has become one of its most profitable industries. Each year, corporations, universities, churches, and publishers produce new books, conferences, and trainings promising to make us better leaders and more successful individuals. You’ve probably read one this year, a book promising to show you how to be a better “individual” leader and actualize the success destined for you or your organization. I’ve been reflecting on this industry — and reading recent reports from the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative and the United Nations Development Programme — I keep returning to a hard and uncomfortable truth:
Our dominant models of success are built on leaving billions of people behind.
In a previous article, I wrote about the moral crisis of inaction; this piece turns to a deeper layer beneath that crisis — the distorted models of success and leadership that shape our institutions and aspirations.
The global reports I’ve been studying document in painful detail the staggering numbers of people who live without basic necessities — clean water, education, healthcare, adequate housing, dignified work, or physical safety. They describe children who grow up chronically malnourished, families displaced by climate disasters, and communities trapped in cycles of poverty that are intensifying rather than easing. These are not small numbers or isolated situations. These are billions of human beings. And yet, they are barely a footnote in America’s leadership imagination.
The Problem With Our Models of Success
If we are honest, our cultural definition of success is disturbingly narrow. It centers personal achievement, wealth accumulation, professional advancement, and public recognition. What it rarely includes is moral responsibility or social concern. We admire leaders who build empires, not those who build communities. We celebrate affluence and influence, not integrity. We reward self-promotion, not sacrifice.
The more I look at our organizations and social systems, the more I see how consistently they reward people who benefit from unjust structures—systems designed to exploit, use, take advantage of, or simply ignore the most vulnerable people on the planet. Yet our leadership models rarely question or challenge this. Instead, they focus on teaching us how to personally thrive, no matter the toll it exacts on others. Our economy depends on this logic; so do many of our political and corporate institutions. What we call “success” often exists because someone else is bearing the weight of deprivation. We have built systems that are socially engineered to profit a select few at the expense of the many. And too often, positioning ourselves to be one of the few is precisely what we call success. We even go so far as to call such individuals “leaders.”
The truth is: Some people we call leaders are nothing more than followers — followers of comfort, privilege, and the status quo. They do not challenge the world to be better; they adjust themselves to the world as it is — unjust, unequal, and unsustainable.
Billions of People Outside Our Definitions of Success
The global poverty and human development reports make something clear: the world most Americans experience is not the world most people live in. According to these reports, millions of households across the globe lack access to clean cooking fuel, adequate housing, basic sanitation, quality education, or secure work. Entire regions face recurring climate hazards — heatwaves, floods, droughts — that disproportionately harm the poorest communities.
Meanwhile, the leadership models we promote in America rarely acknowledge these realities. They speak of entrepreneurship, competition, vision, and achievement, but they rarely speak of global responsibility, moral imagination, or the cost of ignoring human suffering.
We have created a definition of success that is detached from the needs of the world.
Where Are Our Real Leaders?
When people write books on leadership, they rarely start with Jesus, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, or Mother Teresa. Why is that? Why don’t we view their lives as blueprints for success?
These were leaders who changed the world not by climbing ladders, but by dismantling them. They refused to accept the world as it was. They challenged systems that demeaned and destroyed human life. Their leadership was defined by service, sacrifice, moral courage, and deep responsibility to human suffering.
And the wisdom they embodied points us toward a radically different vision of success. Jesus taught that real greatness expresses itself in service — that the one who leads should be the one who kneels, who washes feet, who lifts others first (John 13:13-16). He showed us that authority is not for self-advancement but for self-giving (Mark 10:41-45). Dr. King echoed this same vision when he reminded us that “everybody can be great because everybody can serve,” and urged us to measure our lives by one question: What are you doing for others?
This kind of leadership disrupts the world. It refuses to use people. It refuses to ignore suffering. It chooses humility over status, responsibility over privilege, and justice over personal gain.
Yet today, we often admire leaders who accumulate power while avoiding responsibility — leaders who maintain the world rather than challenge it. Leaders praised not for transforming society, but for profiting from its inequities. This should trouble us.
A New Definition of Success
What the world needs now is not more motivational slogans or leadership workshops. What it needs is a new definition of success — one that recognizes that personal achievement divorced from human responsibility is morally shallow and socially harmful.
Success must be measured not only by what we accomplish, but by what we repair.
Not only by how far we rise, but by how many people we lift.
Not by how well we protect our comfort, but by how deeply we allow human suffering to interrupt us.
This idea — the moral burden of interruption — has become central to my own thinking. And I believe this has implications for how we view succuss and form leaders for the organizations that serve our communities in compassionate and responsible ways. Socially and morally responsible success and leadership begin in the moment when someone else’s pain stops us, challenges us, and rearranges our priorities. The Good Samaritan understood this. So did every moral visionary who changed the course of history. Leaders who transform the world are those who refuse to walk past or exploit the wounded for our personal benefit.
Conclusion: What Kind of Leaders Will We Be?
For the past four years, I have repeatedly and clearly stated that America is at a moral crossroads. If we continue to admire leaders who accumulate wealth and influence but do nothing to address global suffering, then we will continue to produce leaders who leave billions of people behind. But if we begin to elevate leaders who serve, who sacrifice, who love, who imagine, and who disrupt injustice — leaders rooted in compassion, courage, and responsibility — then we can begin to build a world where success does not depend on someone else’s deprivation.
If the moral crisis of inaction exposed our failure to respond to suffering, this crisis of leadership exposes why that failure persists.
The world does not need more leaders who are simply successful. It needs leaders who are good. And perhaps the future of leadership depends on us rethinking who we admire — and who we aspire to become.