Three thousand years on, the Iliad remains the finest manual of power, purpose and decision a board of directors could read. Why understanding the classics is strategic intelligence — not a humanistic luxury.
By Ángel Bonet — President and founder of ImpactCo · Author of El tsunami tecnológico (The Technological Tsunami) and Empresas que crecen con alma (Companies That Grow With Soul)
78% of executives would sacrifice long-term value for the quarter · $180bn managed by ~550 activist funds (up from $51bn in 2011) · +47% more cumulative revenue at long-horizon companies · <¼ of US listed firms still issue quarterly guidance
This week, in a conversation about the Iliad, someone said something I haven’t been able to shake for days: normality works like a viscous monster. Like tar. It seeps through every crack, coats everything, and has a single objective — that no one escapes its cover.
We weren’t talking about companies. We were talking about Homer. But I’ve spent twenty-five years sitting on boards and executive committees, and I recognised that tar immediately. Because it is exactly what a leader hears when they try to do things differently.
Let me recap the story briefly, in case it’s far from mind. The Iliad doesn’t narrate the whole Trojan War: it covers barely a few weeks of the tenth and final year. Everything begins with an affront. Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and head of the Greek coalition, humiliates Achilles, his finest warrior, seizing his spoils out of sheer abuse of power. Wounded in his honour, Achilles does something unexpected: he withdraws from the fight.
Without him, the Greeks begin to lose. His soul-brother Patroclus asks to borrow his armour to hold back the Trojans, and dies in the attempt at the hands of Hector, prince of Troy. Destroyed by grief, Achilles returns, kills Hector and defiles his body for days. And the work ends with the most improbable scene of all: Priam, the aged king of Troy and Hector’s father, enters by night into the tent of his son’s killer to beg for the return of the body. And the two of them — executioner and father, Greek and Trojan — end up weeping together.
Three thousand years later, there isn’t a single conflict of power in a boardroom that isn’t already written in there. Let’s take it in parts.
1. The weapons of normality
The monster doesn’t forbid. It doesn’t need to forbid. It whispers. And its three weapons are always the same: “you’ll end up alone,” “why are you like this?,” “are you going to starve?”
Translate those three phrases into the language of a board of directors. “The market doesn’t reward that.” “No one in your sector does it.” “That isn’t profitable this year.” It’s the same tar, in a tie.
And it has numbers. 78% of executives admit they would sacrifice long-term value rather than miss the quarter’s result. This isn’t an opinion: it’s one of the most stable constants in two decades of financial research. Nearly four in five executives confess that, forced to choose between building the future and dressing up the present, they choose the present.
That isn’t greed. It’s physics. It’s the tar doing what tar does. To that pressure, some 550 activist funds have now been added, managing more than $180bn — against $51bn in 2011 — with a horizon that rarely extends beyond the next sale of their shareholding. Normality has never had so much capital to whisper in your ear.
Normality doesn’t forbid you from leading differently. It simply reminds you, every morning, that you’ll end up alone.
2. Purpose is a heroic category, not a moral ornament
Here comes what really made me think. The hero isn’t a statue. It isn’t the figure with the raised sword on the pedestal. The hero is a literary category, with a very precise function: to be the one who acts outside the norm, who takes the step no one else dares to take — and takes it for everyone else.
This ought to make a good part of the purpose industry uncomfortable. Because for years we’ve confused purpose with the statue: the pretty claim, the campaign, the sustainability report with photos of wind turbines. The ornament. And purpose is not a moral ornament. It’s a heroic category. It’s measured not in what a company declares, but in what it’s willing to do when doing it costs something.
The difference is brutal. The one who hangs the statue on the monument manages reputation. The hero takes on the risk. I wrote it in Companies That Grow With Soul and I stand by it: purpose without renunciation, without friction, without an assumed cost, is not purpose. It’s marketing with new vocabulary.
That’s why I distrust anyone who shows me their framed mission. I’m interested in something else: which client have you turned away? What margin have you left on the table? What has your purpose cost you? If the answer is nothing, you don’t have purpose. You have a statue.
3. The greatest act of power is to walk away
In the Iliad, Agamemnon humiliates Achilles. He’s the king, the most powerful, the system’s supreme representative. Achilles — who is neither the richest nor the strongest, but the best of the Achaeans — could kill him. He has the strength to do it. And he doesn’t.
He withdraws. He simply stops playing. And it turns out that this act of silent rebellion is infinitely more powerful than violence. Without Achilles, Agamemnon’s machinery falls apart.
The Greeks had a word for what Achilles was defending by leaving: doxa. The favourable opinion of your peers. Recognition. Today we call it something else — legitimacy, reputation, social licence to operate — but it’s the same thing, and it shares with Greek doxa its most dangerous trait: it’s fragile, and it must be earned every day. It isn’t inherited, it isn’t bought, it isn’t declared. It’s sustained or it’s lost.
Achilles doesn’t defeat Agamemnon by killing him. He defeats him by walking away.
That, for me, is the hardest decision a purpose-driven leader makes. It isn’t launching a campaign. It’s saying no. Withdrawing from a business that makes money but erodes who you are. Letting the toxic client go. Renouncing the shortcut. In a world that confuses strength with noise, the strongest gesture is still Achilles’s: lowering the sword and leaving the table that corrupts you.
4. A war poem that is a peace story
The Iliad ends in a way no one expects. Priam, king of Troy, kneels before Achilles — the man who has killed his son — and says one single thing: “remember your father.” And the two enemies weep together. The Greek and the Trojan. For all their dead.
It’s a war poem that, in its final gesture, reveals itself as a peace story. And there, I believe, is the exact metaphor for what I defend. The economy has always been told to us as an Iliad: a battlefield, zero-sum, the other as a rival to defeat. Extraction.
But it can be the other thing. It can be the moment when two who were competing recognise a shared humanity and build value instead of destroying it. This isn’t naivety: it’s the data. Companies that manage with a long horizon have grown cumulative revenue 47% more than the rest. And it’s no accident that the proportion of US listed companies still issuing quarterly guidance has fallen from more than a third to less than a quarter in ten years. The system is beginning, slowly, to lower the sword.
I’ve long called it dual accounting: measuring at once the economic result and the social and environmental impact we generate. Because a company can earn more while destroying trust, cohesion and future. And that, in accounting terms, looks like a profit. In human terms, it’s a defeat.
5. Why a board of directors should read Homer
By this point, someone will think this is a cultured digression. That the Iliad is all very well for after-dinner conversation, but that a board is governed with dashboards, not poems from three thousand years ago. I believe exactly the opposite. And I want to defend it seriously.
The classics aren’t cultural decoration. They’re the oldest and most tested technology we have for understanding human beings. They’ve passed through thousands of generations precisely because they work: because every time someone opens them, they recognise themselves again. In engineering, that’s called reliability.
And here’s the misunderstanding that costs a fortune. We believe that running a company is managing numbers. It isn’t. To lead is to manage people: wounded pride, loyalties, fear, ambition, grief, the desire for recognition. It’s exactly the material the Iliad is made of. An executive who reads only reports and dashboards knows the what with dazzling precision, and is blind to the why. They operate with a map amputated of the human. And almost every truly important decision — a succession, a merger, a dismissal, a betrayal in the committee — plays out in precisely the half of the map that executive cannot see.
What gets cheaper is calculation. What gets more expensive is judgement. And judgement isn’t in the data: it’s in the classics.
This becomes urgent, not nostalgic, in the age of artificial intelligence. I argue it in Companies That Grow With Soul: the more calculation is automated, the more irreplaceable the soul of the one who decides becomes — the judgement, the criterion, the long view. The machine will optimise anything we ask of it. The question of what to ask of it, and at what cost, remains ours. That question is ethical, it’s human, and it’s trained by reading those who already asked it before us: Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius. Wisdom isn’t downloaded. It’s cultivated.
That’s why, when I’m asked what a future leader should study, I increasingly give the same answer, and it makes people increasingly uncomfortable: fewer fashionable frameworks and more classics. A company, like a civilisation, is governed with intelligence or it’s governed blind. And deep intelligence — the kind that tells noise from meaning — has been waiting three thousand years for us in the same old books.
I’m not writing this for the ESG lobbyists or the statue collectors. I’m writing for the leaders who recognise the tar because they have it on their shoes every morning, and who take the step anyway. There are few of you. You’re a literary category. And the history of the next twenty years — the economic one and the other, the one that truly matters — you’re the ones who will write it.
Because the Iliad is a war poem. But the economy to come has to be a peace story. And that, like every great decision, begins with someone who dares to read the world before governing it.