Reflecting on childhood spent navigating Bavarian Catholicism leads von Schlippe to an unexpected question: what if faith, hope, and love are not just relics of religion, but the invisible forces underpinning the world’s most resilient organisations?

Every Sunday morning in Bavaria, the bell would ring and you’d put on your dirndl. There were no negotiations. My school was a Catholic Lyceum, religion was a daily subject, and the church calendar structured time the way quarterly earnings do now, with the same mixture of obligation, ritual, and occasional grace.

At 16, I was a confirmed sceptic. The pomp was too much, the prescription too tight. I attended because the alternative had not yet been invented. What saved me in the end was when ‘ethics’ appeared on the curriculum and the conversation broadened. Less Roman Catholic, more philosophical, wide enough to ask the questions that still interest me. What do we believe? Why do we act? What makes a life, or an institution, worth building?

These were not teenage abstractions. They turned out to be the frame I operate in every day.

Recently, a friend in the middle of a serious business crisis said to me, “Let’s hope and believe that everything will be all right.” It was the kind of thing people say when the spreadsheets have run out of answers. But the phrase lodged itself somewhere and refused to leave. Hope, belief, and the third one, love, which nobody says in a boardroom but everyone needs there. The trilogy from the First Letter to the Corinthians, written by the Apostle Paul, circa 54 AD. An unlikely source of business strategy.

Or perhaps, yes?

Before dismissing this as a Sunday sermon in column form, consider what neuroscience has to say about it. Manifestation, the Instagram-adjacent practice of visualising outcomes and thereby summoning them into existence, is generally a red flag for me. I do not believe in magic overnight. I believe in hard work. But strip away my scepticism and something more interesting emerges. In The Neuroscience of Manifesting (2024), psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Sabina Brennan of Trinity College Dublin argues that the practice has credible mechanisms. Not magic, but neural priming, clarity of intent, and the activation of what the brain uses to filter what is relevant. Her argument is that focused belief does not change the world. It changes what you notice, and therefore what you act on.

There is a German proverb that carries the same idea in three words. Glaube versetzt Berge. Faith moves mountains. The proverb does not say faith replaces the shovel. The hard work still follows. But the brain, rewired by conviction, performs differently. This is where Instagram stops and the neuroscience starts.

The context for this is geographically uneven, which matters enormously if your business operates across regions. In the West, belief systems are eroding fast. Over a third of Gen Z Americans identify as religiously unaffiliated, and in the UK, 53% of Gen Z claim no religion at all, according to YouGov. Yet 65% of the same generation globally describes itself as “spiritual.” The belief has not disappeared. It has decoupled from the institution and is looking for a new container.

This is no longer soft-metrics territory, purpose is showing up in the EBITDA line. And what is purpose at its operating core, if not the business translation of faith, a conviction about why you exist, held with enough discipline to guide decisions when the short-term numbers argue otherwise?

Asia tells a different story, and it is one that leaders operating in this region should sit with. In Indonesia, 98% of adults say religion is very important in their lives, according to Pew Research, and Gen Z there is not drifting from faith but deepening it. In India, the figure is 84%. Even in Singapore, one of the most secular and religiously diverse societies in Southeast Asia, 36% of adults consider religion very important, and 87% say they believe in God or unseen beings, a higher share than in Cambodia or Thailand. South Korea is the Asian outlier. Disaffiliation rates among young Koreans rival those of Western Europe, with Ipsos data showing Gen Z there among the least religious cohorts globally.

The business implication is direct. A workforce in Jakarta or Mumbai operates from a fundamentally different belief architecture than one in London or Seoul. Managing across this divide with a single leadership philosophy, secular, performance-driven, stripped of meaning, is not neutral. It is a choice, and increasingly, it is the wrong one.

Now for the part that might convince the CFO in the room. Purpose-driven companies, those that embed a clear “why” into their governance and not just their brand manifesto, reported 25% higher revenue and 22% higher pre-tax profit than peers without such integration, according to the 2025 CECP (Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose) report. Deloitte puts it more bluntly. Purpose-led companies grow three times faster than their competitors. Nearly 90% of Gen Z and Millennial employees say a sense of purpose at work is essential to their job satisfaction and well-being.

This is no longer soft-metrics territory. Purpose is showing up in the EBITDA line. And what is purpose at its operating core, if not the business translation of faith, a conviction about why you exist, held with enough discipline to guide decisions when the short-term numbers argue otherwise?

Let me try to be precise about what the three virtues actually do in a business context, because “faith, love, and hope” risks sounding like a wellness retreat rather than a strategic framework:

Faith is the operating conviction that your direction is correct before the proof arrives. Every founder knows this territory intimately. You make bets on unverified assumptions, build teams around unprovable theses, and hold the line against the quarterly pressure to abandon what has not yet had time to work. This is not irrational. It is the specific kind of reason that precedes evidence, the thing that keeps a business alive in the gap between the idea and the result.

Hope is directional energy. The neuroscience here is useful. Hope activates the brain’s planning circuitry, primes the reticular activating system to notice relevant opportunities, and reduces the cortisol load that comes from operating in pure reaction mode. A team that operates without hope is not being realistic. It is being neurologically inefficient.

Love is the most uncomfortable of the three, which is probably why it is the most consequential. It is the quality of attention you bring to your team, your product, and your customer. It is the difference between executing a strategy and caring about an outcome. The research on psychological safety, the single strongest predictor of team performance according to Google’s Project Aristotle, is essentially a study in what love looks like when it is operationalised inside an organisation.

And here is the twist I did not see coming when I started writing this. The Catholic Church has known for 2,000 years what the consulting industry is only now packaging into billable frameworks. Paul wrote his letter to the Corinthians in 54 AD. He named three things that endure when everything else fails. Faith, hope, and love. He called them the greatest of all human capacities. He was not writing a leadership manual. He was not optimising for the bottom line. And yet here we are, in 2026, watching Deloitte and McKinsey and a growing body of peer-reviewed research arrive, by a very long route, at essentially the same conclusion.

Perhaps the more interesting question is not whether faith, hope, and love belong in the boardroom. Perhaps it’s why it took us so long to notice they had been running the best ones all along. I have no definitive answers. Only the hope that the question is worth asking, the faith that it will provoke a useful conversation, and the love, frankly, for the fact that a Bavarian Sunday in a Dirndl led here.

Until then, stay off the record.

Welcome to Off the Record, your new pass into the margins of luxury leadership. Each fortnight, Bettina von Schlippe, Co-founder of Beyond the Boardroom and Publisher-at-Large at Vogue Singapore, distills what’s shaping the region’s luxury landscape, from closed-door perspectives, to unfiltered insights, and the quiet shifts that haven’t made the headlines just yet.