A lock blocks sale and extraction but cannot guarantee good stewardship

The problem

An ownership lock is a negative guarantee: it stops the company being sold for profit and stops profits being extracted. It does not supply a positive one — that the people left in control are competent, honest, or faithful to the mission's spirit. The lock answers "can the mission be bought away?" (no). It does not answer "will the mission be served well?"

Why this is a real gap

• No external discipline. With no acquirer that can take over and replace bad management, and no activist shareholder to force change, a locked company run poorly or whose mission has ossified has fewer self-correcting pressures than a normal firm.
• Interpretation drift. "The mission" is words on a deed. Stewards can satisfy the letter while hollowing out the intent, or pursue a narrow reading the founder never meant.
• Steward capture / stagnation. Control concentrated in a family trust or small steward group can entrench insiders; the lock protects them from removal just as it protects the mission.
• Impact is unverified. Even a perfectly locked mission company can make self-reported impact claims that are hard for outsiders to verify; the governance lock says nothing about the quality of the underlying impact.

What a resolution needs to address

Pairing the lock with active stewardship safeguards: an independent oversight body with real teeth (distinct from the operators), mandatory transparent reporting and third-party impact verification, a precisely drafted purpose that constrains interpretation, and explicit steward succession rules so control passes to capable mission-aligned successors rather than defaulting to whoever is already inside.