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Reimagining Value Creation in Business
In today’s tech-driven world, one critical factor often goes unnoticed: our relationship with worth and money shapes the way we innovate.
Grace Clapham
January 30, 2025
Did you know:
75% of entrepreneurs feel pressure from other people’s expectations.
72% of founders report a negative impact on their mental health due to financial concerns, including anxiety, burnout, and depression—with many citing fear of failure as a major stressor.
44.1% of female entrepreneurs worry about finances, compared to 37.1% of males.
These aren't just personal struggles—they're business issues that are actively shaping the future of technology.
In today’s tech-driven world, one critical factor often goes unnoticed: our relationship with worth and money shapes the way we innovate.
As someone who works at the intersection of technology, business, social change, and human development, I’ve noticed a powerful, unspoken truth: how we think about worth and value quietly shapes the way we build, grow, and innovate.
This isn’t just about financial products or fintech. Whether we’re developing AI, tackling climate challenges, creating social platforms, or building enterprise tools, our mindset around worth impacts every choice we make. It determines the problems we solve, the people we design for, and what we define as success.
Even as organisations adopt human-centred design and ethical tech practices, we’re missing a critical piece: our collective and individual mindsets around worth and value are quietly driving the choices that shape the future of technology and society. Until we address this, we’ll continue to limit our ability to build truly transformative solutions.
A Pattern Across Ecosystems
Over the years, I’ve worked across diverse spaces:
High-growth startups,
Grassroots communities,
Corporate giants
Social impact sector.
The same story keeps showing up everywhere: our relationship with money and self-worth profoundly influences how we innovate, lead, and create impact.
Through my work founding The Change School, coaching high-performing leaders, and guiding entrepreneurs, this truth became undeniable: our personal and systemic relationships with worth dictate everything—from the way we innovate to the risks we take and the products we create.
Here’s how this toxic cycle plays out across industries:
For Entrepreneurs
The obsession with external validation—raising rounds, chasing unicorn status, and hitting vanity metrics—is driven by tying self-worth to traditional success markers. This mindset prioritises rapid scaling over meaningful impact, creating products that impress investors but fail to serve humanity. Success becomes about fundraising headlines instead of products that make a real difference.
Economic issues cause the most stress for entrepreneurs. A company’s financial situation (60%) and fundraising efforts (36%) are the top external stress factors, especially among women, people of colour, first-time entrepreneurs, and those leading smaller companies.
For Women Leaders
Generational narratives about worth stifle potential. Whether it’s undervaluing contributions, hesitating to negotiate, or shrinking in the face of opportunity, these deeply ingrained patterns limit leadership and innovation at every level.
For Community Builders & Social Impact Leaders
The belief that “doing good” means sacrificing financial stability undermines the very work that drives systemic change. This isn’t just about budgets or pricing—it’s about a pervasive mindset that questions whether impact and financial value can coexist.
For Leaders & Organisations
A narrow focus on financial returns leads to short-term, surface-level decisions and shallow solutions. Instead of creating responsible, human-centric products, we’re building technology that mirrors a limited understanding of value.
Leaders’ personal financial stress impacts team performance and how they treat others. Research from the University of New Mexico found that male leaders facing financial stress often view it as a failure to meet gender stereotypes, which affects their leadership and team dynamics.
The Turning Point: A Deeper Exploration
This pattern became so pervasive, so unavoidable, that I had to dig deeper. It wasn’t enough to call it out, I needed to confront it head-on. That’s why I became certified as a Trauma-Informed Financial Wellbeing Coach and a Certified Financial Social Work Coach.
Through my own journey—and countless conversations with leaders, founders, and change-makers—I’ve realised this: we’ve tethered our sense of self-worth to financial metrics, and it’s limiting everything we do.
When we measure our worth by our bank account, salary, or funding rounds, we create solutions that reflect that narrow mindset. This cycle influences not only our personal decisions but also professional outcomes, preventing us from thriving.
But when we value ourselves—and others—more holistically, we innovate differently. We solve problems that matter. We build technology that serves humanity.
This insight brought me to a larger revelation: how we value ourselves and others directly shapes what we build, how we innovate, and what we prioritise.
We don’t just need a shift—we need a revolution.
The Worth-Value Connection
While the world is beginning to rethink how we measure value—moving beyond GDP and traditional economic metrics—we’re standing at the edge of two seismic movements:
The Value Revolution: Reshaping how we measure success, moving beyond financial outcomes to include social, environmental, and human impact.
The Worth Revolution: A radical redefinition of how we perceive and value ourselves, our teams, and our contributions.
These revolutions are inextricably linked, forming a feedback loop that influences innovation, leadership, and social change. When we redefine worth, we redefine value. And when we shift how we create value, we unlock innovation at every level.
Here’s how worth and value intersect to drive change:
Individuals who value themselves differently create new kinds of value.
Leaders with self-worth beyond financial metrics make more balanced, innovative, and impactful decisions.
Teams that feel inherently valued take bigger, bolder risks.
Organisations that prioritise human worth build transformative products and services.
Conversely, when we cling to outdated systems of value, we reinforce the same cycles:
Traditional metrics influence how people measure their own value.
Economic systems reinforce personal narratives around worthiness.
Organisational value frameworks affect how individuals see their contributions.
Societal definitions of value shape individual and collective self-worth.
The result? Innovation is constrained, creativity is stifled, and systemic inequities persist.
To break free, we need to radically transform our relationship with worth.
Why We Need a Worth Revolution
The stakes couldn’t be higher. If we want to solve the challenges of our time—climate crises, systemic inequities, technological overreach—we need to fundamentally rethink how we define worth and value.
The call for a Worth Revolution stems from a critical observation: we’re rethinking how we measure value, but we haven’t fully examined how our ideas about worth shape these measures.
Our current systems of worth and value are overdue for transformation. Here’s why this revolution is non-negotiable:
Traditional Metrics Are Limiting
Success is often reduced to economic outputs, ignoring deeper contributions.
Innovation is constrained by outdated ideas of valuable contribution.
Financial trauma and inherited narratives about worth limit creative potential.
Systemic biases in value measurement exclude diverse perspectives.
True Innovation Requires a New Approach
Disruptive solutions emerge when people value themselves beyond traditional metrics.
Diverse perspectives thrive when worth isn’t tied solely to economic contributions.
Sustainable innovation requires teams who feel inherently valued.
Transformative products emerge when we prioritise human worth.
Systemic Change Starts With Worth
Economic systems shift when individuals value themselves differently.
Communities flourish when worth isn’t solely tied to financial metrics.
Organizations evolve when they embrace multiple forms of value.
Societies transform when we redefine what it means to be “worthy.”
Future Challenges Demand Holistic Thinking
Climate solutions require measuring impact beyond financial returns.
Social innovation depends on seeing worth beyond traditional metrics.
Technological progress should enhance human dignity, not diminish it.
Sustainable progress demands a deeper understanding of worth.
The Invisible Hand of Financial Narratives
Even in industries built on disruption, unexamined financial mindsets often hold us back:
Founders optimise for quick wins instead of sustainable growth, driven by financial anxiety or the pressure to perform.
Investors focus on scaling fast rather than scaling deep, missing opportunities for meaningful, long-term impact.
Engineering teams unconsciously encode financial biases into tech products, perpetuating the very limitations they aim to democratise.
If we don’t address these hidden influences, we’ll continue building technologies that reflect outdated narratives rather than transformative solutions.
Breaking the Chains: Practical Steps to Redefine Worth
To bring about this shift, we need actionable change. Here’s how leaders and organizations can start:
Redefine Success
Audit internal metrics to include both financial and human-centred indicators.
Evaluate success using both worth and value lenses.
Expand your definition of value to include wellbeing, sustainability, and equity.
Foster open conversations about worth and financial wellbeing.
Innovate Differently
Address financial trauma in user research.
Design for connection, not just transactions.
Incorporate diverse perspectives into the innovation process.
Invest Differently
Rethink growth: balance scale with depth and sustainability.
Value patient capital that enables transformative, long-term change.
Addressing Counterarguments
Some might argue that focusing on worth and wellbeing is a “soft” approach that distracts from growth. But here’s some interesting data:
Research by the McKinsey Health Institute in collaboration with the World Economic Forum indicates that enhanced employee health and wellbeing could generate up to $11.7 trillion in global economic value. Modern concepts of health include mental, physical, spiritual, and social function
Purpose-driven companies witness higher market share gains and grow on average three times faster than their competitors.
This isn’t about sacrificing growth—it’s about redefining what growth means.
Others might say, “We don’t have time for this—we need to focus on survival.” But the truth is, ignoring worth and value is what’s putting survival at risk. When teams feel undervalued, they disengage. When leaders tie their self-worth to external validation, they make short-sighted decisions. When organisations prioritise profit over people, they lose trust—and ultimately, their competitive edge.
A Vision of the Future
Imagine a future where:
Products are designed not just for profit, but for human flourishing.
Teams feel inherently worthy, unleashing their full creative potential.
Success is measured not just by financial returns, but by the lives transformed and the communities strengthened.
This is the future we can build—if we have the courage to redefine worth and value today.
Moving Forward
The Worth Revolution challenges us to rethink everything: how we define success, how we value ourselves, and how we build for the future. It’s not just about changing metrics—it’s about transforming the way we understand and create value.
Question traditional assumptions about worth.
Expand your definition of success.
Embrace diverse contributions and perspectives.
Build solutions that prioritise humanity, sustainability, and impact.
Your Challenge
Start Small: In your next team meeting, ask one question about worth. How do your team’s beliefs about value shape the products you’re building?
Build Momentum: Pilot new success metrics in one product area. Include wellbeing indicators alongside traditional KPIs.
Scale Impact: Advocate for systemic change in your organisation. Push for frameworks that measure success holistically—beyond the balance sheet.
The future of innovation belongs to those brave enough to redefine worth—to build technology that serves humanity, not just the bottom line.
Will you lead the Worth Revolution?
Connect with me directly on LinkedIn or via my personal website to start the conversation and engage me to innovate and grow. Together, we can create a future where technology truly serves human flourishing.
Visit The Worth Club to join my movement on building Worth-Centred Leadership. Reclaim your inherent self-worth in a world that requires you to fit into confined boxes.