Dubai, UAE | 1 May 2026
Today is Labour Day in France, my country, a day that gives voice to work, to rights, to expression. In 1889, the Second International Socialist Congress declared 1st May a day of action for workers everywhere. French socialists adopted it the following year. It took until 1948 for the government to make it a paid holiday. Nearly sixty years from demand to law.
In Japan, my motherland, it falls within Golden Week, between Showa Day and Constitution Memorial Day, less a statement than a transition, a moment held between reflection and reconstruction. It is a cluster of national holidays created by the Japanese Diet in 1948 as part of postwar democratic reconstruction. The name came from Masaichi Nagata, president of Daiei Film, who noticed that cinemas filled up during this week and borrowed a term from radio broadcasting. A legislator built the framework. A film executive gave it its name.
I am writing from the UAE, my home. We are under a ceasefire, and yet the rhythm of daily life has not paused. It is a Friday, the day of prayer, of reflection and gathering. Today is also a working day where meetings continue, and decisions are made. Today is also the day when UAE is stepping away from OPEC after five decades, "purely a policy move" in UAE Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei's words, to ensure the country is ready for the future with continuity in mind.
Each of these moments was shaped by someone who chose to act differently to better society constructively rather than defiantly: a congress, a legislature, a film executive and a sovereign state. Different actors, different scales, the same logic: this is where perennial human centred outcomes are made.
This is why I am launching The New Antigone today.
The Old Story
The king of Thebes issued a decree. Her brother Polynices had fought against the city and died a traitor. By royal order, his body was to remain unburied, denied the rites the living owe the dead. Antigone disagreed. She buried him. She was condemned. She did not appeal. Sophocles wrote her for a world where power was singular. One king. One law. One line between inside and outside. To act was to choose a side (Sophocles, ca. 441 BCE).
Drawing a parallel to modern management thinking, authority is working in a similar way. In 1970, Milton Friedman placed it at the centre: the corporation owed allegiance to shareholders alone. One interest. One line of accountability. Creon, in a suit (Friedman, 1970).
What Freeman (1984) challenged, and what Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997) refined, was that structure of singular power. Stakeholders exist. They carry weight. They must be considered but consideration is not agency.
A different world
Today, stakeholders do not wait to be considered. They act. They shape outcomes before decisions are made, during their implementation, and long after. The corporation does not manage them. It moves with them, or against them, and both choices carry consequences. Power is layered. Systems are interconnected. Decisions move across corporate, political and societal levels, often simultaneously. Walking away is no longer always possible. Nor is it always enough.
That is the world in which the New Antigone operates.
She does not stand against the system. She works with it and for it. She knows the rules, sees their limits, and chooses where to align, where to push, and where to reframe. Her authority does not come from refusal. It comes from understanding how things are built, and choosing to build differently.
The New Antigone is not a dissenter in its classic term. She is a builder. She is the stakeholder who is no longer simply to be considered. She is the one who influences, shapes, and at times redefines outcomes. She is the one who exercises agency.
The builder
The New Antigone is a space to explore that.
It is a space for perspectives, sometimes aligned, sometimes disruptive, but never disruptive for its own sake. What interests me is how businesses, corporations, and institutions make decisions when the path is unclear, when the pressure is real, and when the outcome carries weight. In those moments, decision making rarely follows a straight line. Sometimes it requires departing from what is expected; at others, it calls for creativity within the constraints of what already exists. Not out of opposition, but with purpose. Always with construction in mind.
We are also entering an era labelled 5.0: what Japan has described as Society 5.0 (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, 2016) and what Europe has called Industry 5.0, a stage of development aimed at building environments that are sustainable, resilient and human centric, in which technology is fully embedded in society and systems are increasingly interconnected (European Commission, 2021). What makes this shift significant is not only its complexity, but its orientation: decisions are no longer driven by efficiency alone, but by their human impact in real time.
A safe space
Each Tuesday’s edition at 10 am UTC will bring a different angle on the same underlying question: shedding the light on how do leaders make courageous, constructive and consequential decisions in
Some editions will be analytical, examining a trend, a policy shift, or a data point for what it actually demands of the people responsible for acting on it. Others will be conversational. I will be speaking with leaders across sectors and geographies, people who have navigated these tensions from the inside, who have had to translate a principle into a trade off, a commitment into a choice.
It will include a series leading to COP31: seventeen weeks, seventeen perspectives one SDG at a time on how materiality is addressed in real time. Not to explain the world, but to understand how it is shaped.
Their experiences are where management and business theory meets reality. This will not be a platform of perfect answers. It will be a platform of informed, sometimes divergent perspectives. Because in a world that is increasingly polarised, there is value in nuance, in realism, and in acknowledging that it is possible to approach these challenges differently, as long as the objective remains the same: to address what matters because being human-centered is material.
Antigone's story is often framed as defiance but for the New Antigone, the challenge is different, it is not about being against the establishment but for its betterment.
That is the New Antigone.
References
Cabinet Office, Government of Japan. (2016). Society 5.0. https://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/society5_0/index.html
European Commission. (2021, January 7). Industry 5.0: Towards a more sustainable, resilient and human-centric industry. https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-research-and-innovation-news/industry-50-towards-more-sustainable-resilient-and-human-centric-industry-2021-01-07_en
Freeman, R. E. (1984). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Pitman.
Friedman, M. (1970, September 13). A Friedman doctrine: The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. The New York Times Magazine.
Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853–886.
Sophocles. (ca. 441 BCE). Antigone.