This review of Hubert Joly and Caroline Lambert's The Heart of Business weighs the book's case for vulnerability-driven leadership and purpose-centered management against the practical realities of legal practice. Drawing on personal encounters with customer-service failures abroad and Korea's ongoing wave of corporate embezzlement, the author argues that kindness and trust must be paired with firmness and rigor, and that ethics education—not merely technical training—is what ultimately safeguards professional integrity.
Book: The Heart of Business
Authors: Hubert Joly,
Caroline Lambert
The perspective this book offers on business and management differs in some respects from the views I have long held, so I cannot say I agree with it entirely. Even so, I found a great deal of it genuinely useful, and this review focuses on those aspects.
On
the whole the book has much to recommend it, but there are specific reasons I
hesitate to embrace it without reservation.
Vulnerability in Leadership Has
Its Limits
In
one passage, the author reflects on having learned that inviting people into
genuine participation is a far more powerful way to lead than simply directing
them, and that sharing one's own vulnerabilities opens the door for others to
do the same, deepening connection. He puts it memorably: there can be no
authentic relationship without vulnerability, and no vulnerability without
imperfection.
The
sentiment behind this is admirable, but I believe it rests on an unstated
assumption: that the "people" being invited to participate are, at
minimum, decent people. If even one person in the group is inclined to exploit
that openness, then sharing one's vulnerabilities may do more harm than good.
In my own experience, there has almost always been at least one such person in
any group, which is why I cannot fully subscribe to the book's position on this
point.
I
would add that treating others with kindness and warmth carries its own
precondition: kindness must never become an excuse for sloppy or inaccurate
work. Careful, precise execution is not the opposite of vulnerability, and it
should never be repackaged as such. One can be kind to people while still
handling every task with the utmost rigor and precision—and it is precisely
that combination that earns real trust.
I
once worked with someone who came across, in conversation, as exceptionally
gentle and likable, yet who consistently missed deadlines and arrived late to
appointments, always with an excuse ready. On the surface he seemed mild and
easygoing, and everyone around him spoke fondly of his gentle nature. When I
pointed out, somewhat firmly, that he was not honoring his commitments on time,
I ended up being the one who looked cold-hearted. But holding that line was
unavoidable if the work was going to get done. Prioritizing harmony above all
else risks letting an entire team miss its deadlines, and in situations like
that, a measure of firmness is simply necessary.
Anyone
who has spent time in professional life will recognize how often this kind of
situation quietly recurs.
A Tale of Two Bureaucracies:
Customer Service Abroad
The
author describes a customer-service ordeal that could have come straight out of
a Kafka novel: after calling a store and asking to be transferred to the mobile
phone department, no one picked up. Calling the customer service line instead
brought little help either, and in the end he had to visit the store in person
all over again just to resolve the issue.
Situations
like this are far from rare in the United States. If a private company operates
this way, one can only imagine what dealing with a government office might be
like. I have had my own experience of being transferred repeatedly between
different case officers while trying to communicate with U.S. government
agencies. This way of doing business leaves ordinary citizens simply absorbing
the inconvenience. Having lived through frustrating administrative processes
and health-insurance headaches in the United States firsthand, I have come away
with a real appreciation for how well Korea's administrative system works by
comparison. Korea's administrative processing is fast and responsive enough
that I sometimes think the country would already rank among the world's major
powers were it not for the division of the peninsula. Even public officials
here tend to be considerably more efficient than their American counterparts.
In the U.S., calling a government office often meant being passed from one
representative to another for roughly half an hour before the call simply ended
without resolution. Experiences like these left me with a fairly negative
impression of the country, and I have decided that the next time I visit, I
will make sure to have ample financial cushion going in.
The Missing Ethics Curriculum
Behind Korea's Embezzlement Problem
The
author also recounts how, early in his career, he devoted himself entirely to
mastering techniques for maximizing profit, giving little thought to the
broader role a company plays in society. The history, philosophy, and ethics he
had studied in high school and the early years of university simply dropped out
of the curriculum, replaced immediately by double-entry bookkeeping and
financial analysis.
Embezzlement
cases—at private companies and financial institutions alike—have become a
frequent occurrence in Korea today, and I do not think this is a coincidence. I
see it as the visible result of a deeper social problem: an absence of
philosophical grounding and ethical awareness, and an absence of genuine ethics
education. Korea's education system has long been built around rote
memorization and employment outcomes. As a result, citizens often have
excellent memorization skills but a weaker instinct for distinguishing right
from wrong, or for recognizing when a given act runs counter to social ethics.
This, I believe, has helped cultivate a culture that places outsized weight on
financial gain alone.
It
appears that some individuals have taken advantage of the surge in monetary
liquidity that followed the pandemic to commit embezzlement, operating on the
assumption that they need only adjust the numbers in the books afterward to
make the transfers appear in order. This amounts to a serious erosion of the
systems a country depends on, yet public awareness of the problem remains
limited.
On
a personal level, I find myself deeply persuaded by the book's emphasis on the
importance of ethics education.
Copyright ⓒ 2026 Mecklin Kim. All rights reserved.
