One of the greatest paradoxes of successful organizations is that they tend to lose clarity as they grow.
At the beginning, everything is clear. There is an idea, a mission, a real need. Everyone knows why they got up in the morning. But as the system expands — more employees, more departments, more goals, more reports, more performance metrics — something begins to blur. The means multiply, and the center disappears.
Ziv Elul Bamidbar Torah Portion
The Book of Numbers ostensibly deals with the technical arrangement of the Israelites’ camps in the desert: who camped where, who was close to the Tabernacle and who was farther away. Nachmanides viewed this primarily as a system of boundaries and hierarchy surrounding holiness. But Rabbi Isaac Arama adds a much deeper layer.
According to him, the very structure was meant to create consciousness.
Each tribe occupied a different circle, but at the center stood the Ark of the Covenant. Not only to prevent improper access, but to remind everyone what is “essential,” in his words, and what is “the purpose of all actions.”
This is not merely a religious concept. It is a sharp management principle:
An organization that cannot define what stands at its center will begin revolving around the wrong things.
And that is almost always how it happens.
Hospitals begin focusing on paperwork instead of healing. Universities focus on rankings instead of education. Startups founded to solve a human problem become machines whose sole purpose is the next funding round. Individuals, too, are sometimes pulled into the pursuit of titles, money or status and forget why they chose their path in the first place.
Martin Heidegger warned that modern people become so immersed in a world of operation and efficiency that they stop asking foundational questions. Instead of asking “What for?” they ask only “How can we do it faster?”
Arama seeks to prevent precisely that.
According to him, the physical structure of the camp was meant to shape an inner structure. The clearer a person understands what stands at the center, the more life arranges itself around proper priorities. Not every goal becomes a supreme value. Not every success becomes an identity.
Great leaders understand this well. Almost every healthy organization has its own “Ark of the Covenant” — a value that must not be sacrificed even when the numbers are under pressure. For some, it is uncompromising quality. For others, it is organizational culture, innovation or human-centered service.
The problem begins when the center becomes decoration.
When the vision remains written on the company website but no longer truly guides decisions. When employees can no longer explain why the organization exists beyond “making a profit.”
A few years ago, we brought a professor from a leading American university to a YPO retreat. He presented research showing that companies that lost touch with their center, and focused more on internal operations than on customers and markets, suffered dramatic damage to performance and growth potential.
Rabbi Isaac Arama adds another profound insight: understanding that there is a true center “cools the blaze of desires.”
In a world of endless consumption, this is a critical management insight. A person or organization without a stable internal core will try to fill the void with more money, more exposure, more power and more achievements. But without a clear center, no achievement is ever truly satisfying.
Perhaps that is why many companies collapse after major success. Not because they failed operationally, but because they lost the reason they succeeded in the first place.
The global arena also shows how a clear center creates strength. Trump’s visit to China comes at a time when China is displaying long-term consistency in its economic, technological and strategic planning. Lectures we attended last summer at Harvard University repeatedly emphasized how China’s ability to define a clear center for itself over decades — in the economy, energy, education and resource management — has become a tremendous force multiplier.
Perhaps this is also the deeper meaning of Jerusalem, whose reunification day was marked this week. Jerusalem is not only a city; it is an idea of a center. For thousands of years, even when the Jewish people were scattered around the world, they maintained one internal direction around which they moved. A society, person or organization that does not know what its own “Jerusalem” is will ultimately lose its way as well.
One verse from a song I wrote says:
“Because there is a root seeking grounding
And there is a spirit opening movement
Between the place from which I came
And the horizon I will reach tomorrow”
Perhaps that is precisely the balance of the Book of Numbers:
To know how to move forward without losing the center from which you began.
Because in the end, the most important question in management is not how fast the organization advances.
The question is what it revolves around.