Nadja Skaljic is a lawyer, corporate strategist and systems thinker working at the intersection of law, finance, technology and systems change. She is Chief Legal and Strategy Officer of a privately held Swiss company, and has previously worked across government, international institutions and the corporate world, including at the British Mission to the EU. She also serves on corporate and non-profit boards across Europe and the US, and is a member of The Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network.
 
In this My Life on Purpose conversation, she speaks to The Beautiful Truth’s Editor-in-Chief Hannah Finch and CEO Adam Penny about purpose as a discipline, systems thinking, responsible deployment of capital and frontier technology, and how surviving the siege of Sarajevo shaped the way she sees the world.

HF: What does purpose mean to you?

NS: For me, purpose is a form of action. It is a discipline, where you say, this is what matters to me, but this is how I’m actually living, working and allocating my talents in pursuit of this vision. Purpose is definitely not a slogan for me, but it’s also not a fixed destination. It’s an evolving practice of becoming.

My own work has followed this long arc: going from international law to government work, then into business and seeing the permissionless power of capital and code when directed by purpose. Today, I bring these worlds together through public-private partnerships, finance, and technology to create products for people and nature. 

HF: Systems thinking is central to your work. What drew you to it?   

NS: My primary training was in law, which gave me a rigorous framework for understanding rules, rights and responsibilities, but also revealed the limits of examining them in isolation. But as I moved between the public and private sectors, I realised that outcomes rarely flow from neat, single single rules or decision – or sit with a single actor. They emerge from interacting legal, technological, economic and political systems, often across collapsing timeframes. Systems thinking became essential because it helped me navigate deeper questions: not simply who is responsible, but what conditions make certain outcomes possible?

In fact, with the most complex legal or investment problems, sometimes the only way to get to the solution is to increase complexity: introduce more variables, more rules, more perspectives. I saw this first hand when I was working at the EU, including helping to co-draft the final text of the GDPR privacy regulation. We were helping to establish data stewardship as a matter of fundamental rights, not merely corporate compliance, so solving a large problem set. I became fascinated by feedback loops, and the power of unintended consequences. We were writing a pan-European regulation that would influence much of the rest of the world, and I kept thinking: what might the unintended consequences of this amendment paragraph here?

That curiosity led me to Donella Meadows, Jay Forrester and the wider field of complexity science. Their work gave me a language for ideas I had already begun to encounter in practice. It changed how I approached everything. The lawyer in me might begin with: Who holds power? Who is responsible? The systems thinker in me asks: What structures produced this outcome? Where are the leverage points, and how can we intervene responsibly without creating greater harm? In practice, in my current role, systems thinking in practice can mean bringing scientists, investors, policymakers and legal teams around the same table to design a product that is commercially viable, scientifically credible and beneficial within planetary boundaries. 

HF: Does systems thinking change the way you understand responsibility?   

NS: Systems thinking humbles you, and I value that. Legal education often trains us to believe that we as lawyers are in control. But in a complex system, no one controls the outcome entirely. Paradoxically, that also gives us agency: the responsibility and the burden are shared. The harder question is whether the benefits are shared too. Some economic actors generate extraordinary returns from resources owned by no one, such as nature, or funded by everyone, such as innovations made possible by government-funded research. If responsibility is collective, should the rewards be as well? That is no longer a niche or partisan debate. It is a foundational question about the future of capitalism.

I think systems thinking has travelled much further than we sometimes realise. It has influenced institutions, laws, and business models even when the people applying it would not necessarily call it “systems thinking.” At its heart, systems thinking asks us to stop seeing a company as an isolated machine for producing profit. A business is part of a much larger living system: it affects employees, communities, governments, the environment, and increasingly, through frontier technologies, the safety and future of humanity itself. Once you see those connections, it becomes difficult to argue that a company is responsible only for its financial returns.

Looking back from 2026, the evolutionary arc is striking: law and economics are no longer simply setting the limits of business – they are redefining what business is for.

One important moment came in 1999, when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan challenged business leaders to work with the UN to give globalisation a human face. challenged business leaders to give globalisation a human face, inspiring the UN Global Compact. One of its principal architects was my late Harvard professor, John Ruggie, who later translated that moral appeal into the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: governments must protect, companies must respect, and those harmed must have access to remedy. That is systems thinking in practice – distinct roles within a shared system of responsibility.

After 2010, Europe carried these ideas further by embedding them in an increasingly ambitious framework for sustainability and corporate governance. I worked on several of these legal instruments, including the Non-Financial Reporting Directive. It required certain large companies to report not only on financial performance, but also on environmental, social and employee matters, human rights, and corruption. A parallel development was taking place in the United States. In 2013, Delaware introduced the Public Benefit Corporation, a legal structure allowing a company to pursue an explicit public purpose alongside commercial success.

And now we arrive at Anthropic, a frontier AI company whose Public Benefit Corporation structure and Long-Term Benefit Trust are intended to safeguard its mission of developing advanced AI for humanity’s long-term benefit.

If Anthropic goes public at the scale anticipated, the significance will extend far beyond one company or one IPO. It will place the Public-Benefit model inside one of the world’s most valuable and strategically important businesses – and expose that model to the full force of the public markets. Can a company remain accountable to a long-term human purpose while also answering to shareholders who expect growth and financial returns?

This evolution which happened in our lifetimes is important: what began as Kofi Annan’s appeal to humanise globalisation has moved into the machinery of law and markets – standards, governance models and new corporate forms. The shift is incomplete and deeply contested. Advanced AI carries existential risks, while its infrastructure, the environmental cost of powering vast data centres. The reason for optimism is not that these tensions have been resolved, but that they are becoming harder to ignore, and increasingly difficult to treat as externalities.

HF: Your career spans business, government and the non-profit world. How do you connect those different systems? 

NS: On the non-profit side, I now primarily serve on boards. But my diverse experiences allows me to connect worlds that often operate separately – translating public priorities into business strategy, or bringing commercial discipline to social challenges.

One example I’m especially proud of is my board work with InterJust, a spin-off from the Clooney Foundation for Justice. We are helping to close a critical accountability gap through universal jurisdiction, which enables national courts to prosecute the gravest international crimes regardless of where they occurred. At a time when global institutions may be unwilling, unable or politically constrained – and international consensus is increasingly difficult to achieve – it offers a practical path to justice. One of our projects is Meridian, a global mapping tool for atrocity crimes. We have approached it with the user focus, pace and ambition of a Silicon Valley start-up adapted to the far higher stakes of international justice.

Meridian is valuable not only to international justice practitioners, but also to businesses and investors. A state’s respect for international law reveals something fundamental about the integrity of its institutions, the rule of law and, ultimately, how securely foreign investments may be treated. Accountability therefore becomes not the responsibility of courts and prosecutors alone. Lawyers, technologists, companies and investors all shape the incentives within which states operate. What appears to be a specialist justice project can become part of a much larger system of responsibility. We all participate in that system – and we all have a role in strengthening it. 

HF: You’ve spoken about family businesses as particularly interesting models for long-term thinking. Why?    

NS: At their best, family-owned businesses can absorb the cost of acting on their values. They may choose a course because they believe it is right, even when it does not maximise short-term returns. That is harder within conventional executive structures, where incentives, reporting cycles and tenure often reward immediate performance.

The strongest European family businesses I know and work with begin with the conduct of the business itself. Are people paid a living wage? Do they find dignity and meaning in their work? Does the company contribute positively to society and nature – not merely avoid causing harm? Philanthropy comes afterwards. I coined the term “sedative philanthropy” to describe charitable giving that soothes the conscience without confronting how the underlying wealth is created. What happens to the dividend matters, but it cannot compensate for an irresponsible core business model. Purpose can be embedded in the engine, not added once the profits have been made.

There is also a kind of alchemy that happens in family enterprises. Knowledge and values are often transmitted across generations almost by osmosis. One of my favourite questions, I have it framed in my office, along a few others is: How do you know that you know this? In family businesses, sometimes family members cannot fully explain this. They know because it is how a parent or grandparent understood stewardship. Their responsibility is not simply to preserve that inheritance, but to reinterpret it for their own time. At its best, a family business becomes a living ethic: continuous across generations, but never static.

HF: Where did your own instinct to work for the greater good begin?     

NS: It probably began with an early lesson in interdependence. There’s no way around my childhood. I was born in Sarajevo and I lived through the siege of the city in the 90s. Four years: no water, no electricity. During the siege of Sarajevo, the systems that make ordinary life possible – water, electricity, food and security – collapsed. Money had little meaning when there was nothing to buy. It taught me how quickly the structures of ordinary life can disappear, and how fragile individuals become when the systems around us collapse. I grew up in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious family, where identity was naturally layered. Then war flattened that complexity overnight: others decided who you were, where you belonged and whether you should be shot at.

My childhood taught me the importance of pluriversality – the idea that many worlds, identities and ways of living can coexist, provided they do not cause harm to others. Peace does not require uniformity; it requires the institutions, values and imagination to hold difference without turning it into division. The Sarajevo experience reflects a much wider truth. Whether we are confronting conflict, climate change, inequality or technological disruption, human wellbeing depends on resilient institutions, healthy ecosystems and a commitment to peaceful coexistence. Sustainability and global affairs are not separate concerns: both ask how multiple ways of living can flourish within shared social and planetary boundaries.

The lessons of that experience eventually led me to international law and working for the Prosecutor’s office at the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. There, I worked on the genocide case against Radovan Karadžić case, including the shelling and sniping of Sarajevo – the violence that had shaped my own childhood. It transformed a personal experience into a broader commitment: to investigate what really happened, understand how systems fail, uphold accountability.

HF: What was it like to work on a case so personally connected to your own experience?     

NS: It taught me that justice is not vengeance. My duty was to uphold due process, including disclosing evidence that could assist the defence. Justice depends on principles that hold precisely when emotions are at their strongest. That discipline has shaped everything I have done since, from responsible investing to sourcing technology and even my board governance. Good intentions are not a business model. The world needs good laws, accountability for crimes, incentives that direct capital and technology towards long-term value. That personal experience did not make me bitter; it deepened my love of life and people – and my conviction that doing what is right.