An Invitation to America's Leaders in 2026
By Andrew Roberts
August 19, 2026
August 19, 2026
Dear America,
You turned 250 this year, and you are still becoming. That was the promise from the start — not a finished country handed down, but one "in process," one we continue to develop. You were founded with the belief in our inalienable rights, with "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." A new country where people were free to pursue their best selves.
Two and a half centuries later, the American workplace is struggling with a crisis of spirit. This letter is about renewing that spirit — because the work we spend most of our waking hours doing can embody that pursuit of fulfillment and meaning.
The pursuit of happiness was never a promise of comfort. It was a declaration of human agency: the right to strive, to grow, to become.
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A depleted workplace: work isn’t working
Seven in ten employees are not engaged at work.* Most are checked out, doing the minimum to get by. No surprise that this costs the US economy $1.9 trillion annually in lost productivity. Doing the minimum is an act of existence, not of pursuit.
The social toll is perhaps a bigger tragedy. Work defines a part of our identity. It can feed or drain us. And it follows us home. People who struggle to engage for 8 hours come home depleted. They have little for their families, less for their communities. Depleted people create depleted workplaces and a depleted society. Apathy and a loss of spirit spread like contagions.
The real enemy: the Industrial Mindset
The enemy is not bad managers or lazy workers. It is the lingering ghost of the Industrial Mindset — the belief that people are interchangeable, compliance is enough, and drive is best managed through external rewards and punishments.
We built that operating system for assembly lines. Industrial technology fostered a sea change in how we worked, but it did not address why. It showed we could amplify labor and drive people with meager carrots and heavy sticks.
Today, AI can spark a revolution that also amplifies how we work. However, we must not miss our chance of improving the why. For business leaders, this moment offers an opportunity to create a special workplace.
Here’s the real insight: Human initiative, judgment, adaptability, and care are your true competitive advantages. You cannot mandate, outsource, or tokenize these qualities. They show up when no one is watching. If you want the full contribution of a person's talents and passion, you must stop working against human nature or treating it as a replaceable part on an assembly line. You must create the conditions where people choose, of their own volition, to pursue their best work.
The problem isn't that people don't want to work. The problem is that our corporate operating systems are starving their intrinsic motivation.
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The fire is already inside your people
Nobody wakes up wanting to do a bad job. The drive to excel lives inside — every person carries it — and it is unique. What enlivens one person may drain another. The work of a leader is not to manufacture motivation. It is to discover what already motivates each individual, and to clear away whatever suppresses it. You create the conditions for your people to shine. You clear the path for their unimpeded pursuit.
This shift changes everything. Your people transform from a line item to be managed into an advantage that cannot be easily replaced. The strongest, most resilient drive comes from within. Our Founders knew it, and modern motivational science confirms it. Intrinsic motivation is the human engine.
Win-win-win: the end of trade-offs
Honoring what makes each person different does not create a room full of loners going their own way. It does the exact opposite. When you unlock individual drivers, differences don't divide a team. They multiply its capabilities.
The individual's pursuit of happiness and the enterprise's drive for success stop being a trade-off. The effects radiate: the employee goes home with energy left for their family, the customer feels the difference in every interaction, and the business recovers the potential it was quietly bleeding. Aligned actions, three wins.
This is a bottom-up transformation. It sparks the individual first, then the team, then the entire organization. But the spark must be struck from the top. It requires leaders who decide that human potential is the core of their business.
Put people first
When corporate initiatives focus on productivity over people, they are more likely to fail. The standard “growth” playbook begins with the goals. Then we try to buy engagement with superficial perks, exhaustive annual surveys, or forced culture offsites.
The way to build a great company is to put your people first.
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You cannot bribe an unfulfilled employee into truly caring. Motivation is an intrinsic operating system. An unmotivated employee merely endures your training initiative; an intrinsically driven employee actually leverages it to grow. When the internal spark is fanned into a self-sustained fire, people learn faster, apply their training more fiercely, and stick around longer.
Intrinsically motivated employees are naturally engaged and more productive.
Most organizations are flying blind, with zero "motivation awareness." They lack a framework to see, measure, or support the underlying engine that powers everything else. Ask this about your organization: Do you know what motivates each of your employees?
If the question makes you feel like there’s a blind spot, don’t worry. That blind spot is actually your greatest opportunity. You can stop chasing surface-level metrics and start tending the root of motivation.
“You cannot mandate engagement. You can only spark it by meeting fundamental psychological needs for motivation.”
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The invitation: reclaiming the pursuit
In 1776, the signers of our Declaration of Independence chose to believe that free people endowed with “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” would rise and flourish. That belief inspired settlers to brave vast wilderness. It sent us to the moon. It built the greatest economy the world has ever known. Every time we’ve risen, it’s because we believed in our potential.
In 2026, the choice to invest in human self-determination is ours to make again. We can carry this impulse into our workplaces, spark a new revolution in how we work. And when we empower individuals to act on their unique gifts, we don't just transform our companies, we transform our communities and our society.
The inner fire is always here. It simply awaits tending.
With belief in our people,
Andrew Roberts
Founder, SparkMotiv
*Gallup. State of the Global Workplace 2026.
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SparkMotiv was founded to spark win-win-win workplaces where serving people and serving the enterprise are one and the same activity. In a twist of historical irony, we found and are bringing to the US the perfect solution from the UK. The mojoTM platform makes each employee’s unique drivers visible, giving managers a practical way to support them one conversation at a time.