The results from the most recent Gallup State of the Global Workplace just came in, and the results are striking. Eighty percent of the global workforce is now disengaged, the second consecutive year of decline, costing the world economy $438 billion in lost productivity.

These shockingly low numbers shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the comeback of hustle culture. The 996 schedule of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, has migrated from Chinese tech offices into Silicon Valley pitch decks. AI is being marketed not as relief but as a license to treat humans like machines. And in the founder circles I run in, founders shutting down their companies because they “simply can’t do it anymore” has become a regular occurrence. Just a few days ago Metamask co-founder Dan Finlay announced his departure due to burnout .

And yet a small group of CEOs are running the opposite playbook. They’re thriving in their jobs, creating better lives for their employees, and posting numbers like 90% retention and 34 consecutive years of 20%+ growth while the rest of the market bleeds.

I called Meghan French Dunbar , author of This Isn't Working , founder of Conscious Company Magazine, and a business anthropologist who has interviewed thousands of leaders, to ask the obvious question. If hustle culture is failing this loudly, who is winning, and what are they doing differently?

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French Dunbar's answer cuts at the financial structure underneath, not the culture on top of it. "If you're on a three-to-seven-year timeline of crazy returns to investors and you need to exit at a particular revenue marker, hustle culture is understandable," she told me in an interview. "You might make it to the exit. And then the wheels might fall off around then."

The leaders she profiles like Rose Marcario at Patagonia, Eileen Fisher, Susan Griffin-Black of EO Products, and Melanie Dulbecco of Torani, built decades-long companies, not five-year ones. The math behind a hustle-culture exit is, in French Dunbar's framing, a bet that you can extract enough from your people to clear the line before the cost shows up on your books. "If you want to cannibalize the very people on which the success of your company depends," she said, "feel free to do hustle culture."

The CEOs she studies are running different math. Three patterns repeat across them.

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The first pattern is mutualism. Old-playbook companies treat work as a one-way value transfer: people give labor, the company pays a wage. New-playbook companies treat the same exchange as a relationship that should leave employees—as well as suppliers, customers, and the community— measurably better off. "At the bare minimum they seek to not cause harm," French Dunbar told me. "In the better-case scenarios they're seeking to actually benefit their people's lives besides just a paycheck."

That shows up in concrete operating choices: development budgets that aren't gated by manager approval, vendor relationships built around mutual margin rather than vendor squeeze, customer-feedback loops that change product rather than performing customer-centricity in the marketing copy. None of it is soft. All of it compounds and drives growth.

Bay Area-based Torani Syrups intentionally invests in creating more opportunities for their team and community, and the results speak for themselves: more than 20% annual company growth for 34 years in a row; engagement rates 34% higher than the worldwide average, and a 90% retention rate in an industry that typically struggles to retain talent.

The results speak for themselves: more than 20% annual company growth for 34 years in a row; engagement rates 34% higher than the worldwide average, and a 90% employee retention rate Melanie Dulbecco, CEO of Torani on how her company’s culture has driven business results

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The second pattern is autonomy paired with transparency. The companies French Dunbar profiles let people set their own schedules, share financial information across the organization, and deliberately narrow the pay gap between the C-suite and the front line. "It's collaborative decision-making and letting people have flexible schedules and treating people like adults," she said. "There's almost this mistrust right out the gate that most companies have."

It also shows up in the incentive structure. Teams succeed and fail together rather than employees being pitted against each other for promotions. The cultural consequence is that the people French Dunbar calls "individual assholes who thrive regardless of how they treat others" stop thriving. The performance consequence is retention, which the Gallup data ties directly to the disengagement crisis the rest of the market is bleeding into.

One of the best examples is Barry-Wehmiller, the manufacturing company that pioneered what its CEO Bob Chapman calls a 'culture of care,' which grew from a struggling $18 million enterprise to more than $4 billion under that operating model.

Leaders Driving Sustainable Performance

The third pattern is the one most easily mistaken for self-help, which is exactly why French Dunbar has spent a decade trying to rescue it from the wellness aisle. "Sustainable performance," she told me, "is the ability to sustain performance over time through a holistic perspective, the individual leader, their team, the company, and the stakeholder ecosystem." It is structural, not personal: a concentric-circle model in which the leader's habits matter because they shape what gets rewarded one ring out, and the next ring out, and the next.

The leaders running thirty-plus-year companies, she said, share a recognizable set of habits: nurturing connection, protecting mental and physical health, making time for joy, holding boundaries, saying no. It’s simply about prioritization.

Yes, work is a priority. It is not the priority. Meghan French Dunbar, author of This Isn't Working

Susan Griffin-Black, co-founder and co-CEO of EO Products, has modeled the same boundary-holding practices Dunbar describes for thirty-plus years. EO's engagement numbers run 35 percent above the worldwide average, and Griffin-Black is still running the company she co-founded in 1995.

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The political climate is doing some of French Dunbar's work for her. Eighteen months into an active DEI rollback and a hard return-to-office wave, the companies that took the easy off-ramp on people-investment are losing ground to the ones that didn't. "There's about to be a lot of leapfrogging," she told me. "Emerging mission-driven companies are going to leapfrog established companies who just stopped thinking about this stuff because the data continues to show that every younger generation cares about it."

The disengagement crisis is structural, not individual, and the CEOs outrunning it are running a longer-game operating model the rest of the market hasn't priced yet. The companies French Dunbar profiles are not the soft option; they are quietly winning the talent, retention, and innovation fights the hustle-culture cohort cannot stop losing. Capital that wants enduring companies will need to start funding the operating models that build them, or settle for a portfolio of three-to-seven-year exits where the wheels fall off on someone else's balance sheet.