What am I growing?
On Marketing, Industry Choice, and Moral Ambition
I read Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition last week, and it’s been sitting with me ever since. The book isn’t interested in soft questions or gentle self-reflection. It asks: if you have talent, access, and ambition—why wouldn’t you use it to solve the biggest problems of our time?
For marketers, that question carries weight. We are in the business of driving growth. We shape demand, visibility, and behavior. We help companies scale. And not all of them deserve to. Bregman’s argument isn’t that ambition is bad—it’s that ambition without direction is wasteful, and in the wrong direction, it’s harmful. The challenge is to pair your desire to succeed with a desire to serve. To aim higher, not just in career terms, but in moral ones.
That challenge hit me hard.
I’ve been in marketing a long time. I’ve built campaigns, brands, and teams across industries—some that aligned with my values, and some that didn’t. My early career was in pharmaceutical advertising. It was a thrilling time to be in the field—fast-paced, high-stakes, and full of breakthroughs. I worked on a drug launch that changed the course of HIV treatment. That drug has saved millions of lives. And still, I found myself questioning whether the work truly aligned with my values. Even in life-saving industries, the incentives aren’t always clean. And marketers don’t get to opt out of that reality—we help shape it.
Later, I took a job at an oilfield services behemoth. It was a title bump, a higher salary, a way to get into IT leadership. I knew from the beginning it didn’t align, but I took it anyway. It wasn’t a mistake exactly, but it was a choice I wouldn’t make again. I’ve also had roles that felt deeply aligned, especially those in clean energy, cybersecurity, and emergency communications. And in higher education, despite the politics and bureaucracy, I believed in the mission of expanding access for adult learners. But even in those “aligned” roles, I kept returning to the same question: is this helping solve the right problems—or just selling a more acceptable version of the wrong ones?
It’s always been a tension in this line of work. But that tension is sharper now, after more than a year and a half out of full-time employment. When the search has stretched this long, it would be easy to talk myself into anything. But I’ve noticed how instinctively I scroll past certain job listings—crypto, gambling, extractive tech models that sell disruption but scale harm. Even traditional CPG roles give me pause these days. I’m not judging the people who take those jobs. I’ve taken jobs for the money, the title, the opportunity. I understand the calculus. But I’ve reached a point where I can’t pretend those decisions don’t have consequences.
The truth is, I don’t need every role to be morally perfect. I’m not looking for sainthood. But I do need to feel like the work contributes to something I can stand behind. I’ve spent too many years helping companies grow to ignore the central question Bregman asks: what are you growing, and why?
That’s what Moral Ambition helped crystallize. Not that I’ve always chosen well, or that I’ve finally figured it all out. But that I want to choose differently now. And that wanting is worth listening to.
