What grounds the ethical responsibility of powerful managers? Existing frameworks in management ethics have answered this question primarily through voluntary agency: leaders are responsible for what they choose to do and the foreseeable consequences of those choices. This paper argues that such frameworks rest on a philosophical presupposition — voluntarism — that is both philosophically contestable and practically inadequate for the structural realities of high-performance leadership. Drawing on René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, the paper proposes that senior leaders and high-performing executives occupy a philosophically distinctive position within what it terms the mimetic economy: they function as involuntary cultural architects, mediating desire, transmitting values, and constructing the horizons of aspiration for those who observe and imitate them, whether or not they intend to do so. This structural account of influence is then read through the philosophical traditions most relevant to its ethical implications — Aristotle’s account of civic virtue, Weber’s ethic of responsibility, Levinas’s ethics of the Other, and Jonas’s imperative of responsibility — to argue that structural position, not voluntary choice alone, is the appropriate ground of managerial obligation. The paper addresses the voluntarist objection directly, arguing that once the structural character of managerial influence is recognised, the appropriate unit of ethical analysis shifts from individual conduct to the motivational architecture from which conduct arises. Stewardship — the orientation of structural influence toward the flourishing of the systems one inhabits — is proposed not as a behavioural commitment but as a philosophical achievement: the practical realisation of a philosophical understanding of what it means to occupy a position of structural power over others’ desires. Implications for the philosophical foundations of management theory are drawn throughout.