The Year We’re Still In

We keep grieving a thing we’ve mistaken for permanent.

The middle class that the postwar decades built, the single earner who could buy a house, the factory wage that carried a family, the sense that ordinary work bought an ordinary security: we treat its passing as a wound, a theft, a system that has failed. And it may be all of those. But before it is any of them it is something simpler and harder to accept: the end of a cycle. A thing that had a beginning, ran its course, and is now spent.

The beginning was rubble. In 1945 the United States made more than half of everything manufactured on earth. With seven percent of the world’s people it held over forty percent of the world’s income, poured well over half its steel, pumped most of its oil. This was not capitalism working as it is supposed to work. It was one economy left standing in a field its rivals had burned to the ground. The high wage, the strong union, the house on one salary, these did not grow because the country had discovered the right arrangement. They grew because there was, for a while, no one else to make anything, and a worker in that position can ask for a great deal.

We called that arrangement normal. We built our sense of what is owed to a working life around it, and we have been reading its slow disappearance ever since as though a promise were being broken. But the arrangement was never the baseline, never the principal: the underlying wealth that is yours to keep and to draw on. It was the dividend: a payment thrown off by a condition that could not last, and did not.

What ended it hardly matters to the person left standing in the emptied town (in Wilkes-Barre, say, where the anthracite once came out of the ground and the reason for the place went with it), and this is the part that resists us most. There is a story about trade: the rebuilt economies of Europe and Japan, the customers we deliberately created, becoming the competitors we did not intend. There is a story about machines: the work that left not for another country but for no country, absorbed by automation that needed no wage at all. The two are difficult to tell apart and there is no need, standing where he stands, to choose between them. They point the same way. Whether the job went to Guangzhou or to a robot, it went, and it left the same person in the same place. To the one who has to live in the aftermath, the cause is a debate. The displacement is not.

The dividend even had a peak, if you want a year to hold. In 1979 the number of Americans employed in manufacturing reached its highest point and began a descent it has not reversed in the four decades since. Every recovery since has left the number lower than the recovery before. It happens that this is also, near enough, the year the country’s rising productivity and its rising wages, which had climbed together for a generation, as though tethered, came unfastened from each other, the one still climbing, the other going flat. We tend to file these as two facts. They are one fact seen from two sides. The tether that held wages to output was the same condition that held the factory in the town, and when it loosened, both let go at once.

We reconstructed the world, and the world we reconstructed no longer needed us to make its things. That is not a failure of the reconstruction. It is its success, arriving on schedule, wearing a face we would rather not recognize.

When an arrangement that has delivered for a generation begins to fail, the failure does not announce itself as structural. It arrives as grievance, as the sense that something is being taken, and grievance goes looking for a politics. So a politics arrived, one that named government the enemy, cut the taxes on capital, and loosened the hand of organized labor. And it arrived, if you watch the dates, just after the turn rather than before it. The factories had already begun to shed their workers. The peak was behind us before the new order took office. It did not start the descent; it inherited the first year of it and gave it a language: a set of reasons that pointed at government, at taxes, at the unions, at everything except the conditions that had actually changed.

And what came through, once the arrangement loosened, was not merely lower pay. It was a change in what production is. The economy that has grown up in the space the factory left runs on something other than the old circuit, the circuit in which a company made a thing, which took workers, who earned wages, who became the customers who bought the things. The largest enterprises now make very little you can hold. They make arrangements, systems, claims on attention; they grow without hiring in any proportion to their size; a handful of them now carry a third of the market’s whole value, a concentration that did not exist a decade ago. Value and work, which the old arrangement had bolted together, have quietly come apart.

This is the piece that ought to trouble us most, and it is the piece we are least equipped to see, because we are still looking with the instruments the old arrangement handed us. We expect a great company to mean many jobs. We expect a large market to mean broad prosperity. We expect that if the country is rich its working people are secure. Each of those expectations was true, once, under a condition that has expired. And we go on holding them against a reality that stopped honoring them some time ago, and we call the gap between expectation and reality a crisis, when it is closer to a mismatch of eras. We are standing in one time and reading from another.

This is where the perplexity comes from: the widespread sense that things no longer add up the way they once did, that the rules have changed without anyone announcing it. And they have, though not in the way the feeling suggests. It is not that the world has become harder to read. It is that the ground it rests on has shifted, and we are still expecting the old returns from it. Europe is no longer prostrate; the conditions that paid us are gone.

None of this is a case for despair, and I want to be careful here, because the end of a cycle is easily mistaken for the end of possibility. What has closed is not the future. What has closed is a specific arrangement, a set of conditions, historically particular, that produced an unusually broad prosperity and could not have produced it forever. You cannot restore it. You cannot legislate your way back to a world in ruins, and it is only a world in ruins that would return the leverage that arrangement rested on. The promise to bring the factories back is a promise to bring back the conditions that made them. Those conditions were the outcome of a world war. And that is a misunderstanding of what the good years actually rested on.

But not being able to go back is a different thing from not being able to go forward. Something will be built on the far side of this. What it is remains genuinely open, more open, perhaps, than at any point since the rubble. The only move that is foreclosed is the nostalgic one: the belief that what we have lost was the natural order, and that the losing was a crime we can reverse by finding the criminal.

We were not robbed. We were paid a dividend, out of a condition that has run its course, and we mistook the payment for the principal.

The work now is to see clearly where we are standing: somewhere else than where we were, and later than we think.

At the Table or on the Menu

There is something immediately arresting about the aphorism, “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” It does not argue its case or offer advice. It simply presents a scene, and once seen, it is difficult to unsee. One recognizes it before one decides whether to endorse it.

The power of the phrase lies in its economy. The table is where decisions are made. The menu is where decisions are applied. What gives the aphorism its unsettling quality is the absence of a neutral space between the two. There is no bench on which one might sit out the meal. Abstention is not safety. It is exposure.

Seen this way, the aphorism is less a warning than a description of how authority already operates: decisions will be taken, strategies set, and costs allocated. The only question is who will be present when it happens.

In this light, certain institutional arrangements begin to look like literal responses to a metaphor.

German codetermination law, for example, guarantees workers’ representatives seats and votes on supervisory boards. It does not assume harmony of interests. It does not rely on consultation alone. It proceeds from a simpler recognition: that decisions affecting labour will be made regardless, and that the difference between representation and vulnerability lies in presence at the point of decision.

The contrast with Anglo-American corporate governance becomes visible in language as much as legal structures. A distinctive lexicon accompanies it: engagement, listening exercises, corporate surveys, voice of the employee. These terms recur with remarkable consistency, and they are not without significance. They draw on the moral vocabulary of democracy while stopping short of its institutional mechanics.

The prominence of voice is especially telling. Albert O. Hirschman famously argued in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty that voice names a mode of response available when exit is costly and authority remains intact: one speaks in the hope of influence, not with the guarantee of power. In contemporary corporate usage, the term retains its democratic resonance while detached from decision-making rights.

This vocabulary does not deny the importance of workers’ perspectives. On the contrary, it foregrounds them. But it does so in a way that quietly presupposes where power resides. One may speak and one may be heard. Or even thanked. Yet the location of the table remains unchanged. Participation is invoked in democratic terms while authority remains managerial.

At moments of relative stability, this distinction can seem academic. When conditions are favorable, the difference between being consulted and being represented may not feel decisive. It is under strain that the architecture of participation becomes visible. During restructuring, automation, mergers, or layoffs, the lexicon thins out. Surveys are postponed. Engagement gives way to execution. The menu is already written and is presented.

None of this requires imputing bad faith. The language of engagement reflects a coherent managerial worldview in which legitimacy is gathered after decisions are formed rather than built into the formation of those decisions themselves. It is a system that values feedback without confusing it with authority. The aphorism simply reveals the cost of that distinction.

For managers, the phrase draws attention to an ambiguity that is usually left unspoken: whether mechanisms of voice function as supplements to shared authority or as replacements for it. For workers, it highlights a difference that can otherwise remain blurred: between being heard and being present, between influence and participation.

The aphorism endures because it refuses consolation. It does not promise fairness or cooperation. It offers only clarity. Power will be exercised. Meals will be planned. The only open question is where one is seated when that happens, and what it means to notice the answer.
==

photo by Jason Rosewell

The day belongs to her

I don’t know when this thought first occurred to me, but for as long as I can remember I’ve never been especially interested in celebrating my birthday. The day always seemed like something that should be celebrated, but not by me. The celebration belongs to the person who gave me birth.

It feels less like a conclusion I’ve reached than something I’ve always known.

The birthday is a feast day for the mother, not the child. The child is mostly passive in the event: she did the work and bore the risk. I just arrived.

Yet birthdays are relentlessly directed toward the self being honored. That vector seems backwards to me. The day points not forward toward the person who emerged, but back toward the one who made that emergence possible. Toward an origin. Toward a gift that asks only to be remembered.

Merci, maman.

What the Builders Know: on a recent Encyclical and what it doesn’t settle

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has been out for a few days. The image being received most readily as reassurance is from the presentation: an AI founder standing beside the Pope, saying that people outside need to remind those inside of the humanity they cannot see. The sentiment has been received as noble.

The founders of the major AI companies are warning publicly about the dangers of what they are building. The warnings are not vague. Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the architects of modern AI, assigns a 20 percent probability to catastrophe. Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and the field’s most cited voice on existential risk, has suggested it might be sensible to stop altogether. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wrote before founding the company that this might be the greatest threat to humanity’s continued existence. These are not hedged statements from cautious men. They are alarms pulled by the people who built the building.

And yet the proposed responses are almost entirely technical: better alignment, stronger safety protocols, governance frameworks, etc. The logic of the solution is the logic of the problem. What these companies mean by “ethics” is not the question of what this work does to the person performing it, or what it will do to the persons it reaches. It is another line of code.

A Spanish expression names what I think is actually on display in that image, though I have not found a satisfying English equivalent. The expression is dejación de deberes. It does not mean negligence, which implies a failure to notice. It does not mean error, which implies a good-faith attempt that went wrong. It names the relinquishing of one’s duty, of what one is expected to carry.

The founders know the stakes: they are the ones who published the warnings. The knowledge is not missing. Sincerity of alarm does not discharge the duty it names.

What is missing is the willingness to let that knowledge be constitutive: to make the question of the human person not a downstream ethical consideration but the premise from which the work begins.

Outsourcing that question to encyclicals and ethics boards while development accelerates is not collaboration. It is the appearance of responsibility in place of its exercise. Hiring philosophers does not resolve this. The question is not whether there are philosophers in the building. It is whether the anthropology carries the freight.

The technology being built operates by producing outputs statistically indistinguishable from understanding, without understanding. It is trained on the full recorded output of human thought while having none of its own. The output comes across as being from a person; the system is not a person.

The technology denies interiority by construction. The people building it deny it by choice.

painting: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

The invisible Bob and Martha

Humus is the thin dark layer, a few centimeters at most, that sits at the surface of the earth and sustains virtually all life on it. It takes roughly a century to form a single centimeter. It can be destroyed in an afternoon.

Most people walk over it without a second thought.

Organizations have their own humus. It doesn’t have a name on the org chart and it doesn’t appear in the annual report. It’s the accumulated living layer that makes everything else possible: trust, institutional memory, the relationships through which decisions get made and exceptions get authorized outside formal channels. Like humus, it forms slowly and invisibly, through thousands of small interactions over years. And like humus, it can be destroyed in an afternoon.

A restructuring. A betrayal. A leadership change that signals, loudly or quietly, that the old rules no longer apply. The layer doesn’t announce its departure. You notice it the way you notice soil erosion: invisibly for months, then unmistakably, when something that used to grow no longer does.

The reason organizations chronically underinvest in these things isn’t negligence. It’s visibility.

Humus doesn’t have a line item. Neither does trust. Neither does the knowledge that quietly exits when the wrong people leave. We fund what we can see and measure, which means we systematically defund the layer everything grows from.

The accounting logic is impeccable. The biological logic is catastrophic.

And the humus has a face. It’s Bob. It’s Martha. The ones who’ve been there for decades, who know where everything is and why it works the way it does, who remember what was tried before and what happened.

But here is something we don’t say: some of them chose this.

They saw, early or late, what the organization could and couldn’t see, and they settled permanently into the space between what the organization measured and what it needed. The invisible layer isn’t only where the unrecognized end up. It’s also where certain people go deliberately, because it’s the only place in the organization where the work is judged by whether it functions rather than by whether it’s visible, and the exposure to organizational politics is low enough to ignore. They knew they were invisible. Some of them preferred it that way.

Which means the organization’s failure to see them was not always unilateral. There was an arrangement. Informal and unspoken. It held. The organization got the benefit of the layer without having to account for it. Bob and Martha got to do the work they cared about without having to perform for systems that wouldn’t have known how to evaluate them anyway. It suited everyone. It cost everyone something.

We see them. We appreciate them in a vague, fond way. We call them lifers. We call them grinders. And when they retire we give them a plaque and a room full of warm applause, and six months later things start not working and nobody can explain why.

Meanwhile we celebrate the stars. The ones who rose. We built a recognition system that rewards only what our existing categories can name — ascent — rewarding the people who rise and ignoring the people who hold the ground. Then we’re surprised when the ground erodes.

The question isn’t whether your organization has this layer.

The question is whether anyone is tending it. And tending requires visibility. Which means the first problem isn’t resources or intention. It’s that some of the people who live in this layer may not want to be found. The arrangement protected them too. Making the invisible visible isn’t neutral. It changes what the layer is.

You can’t tend something you can’t see. But seeing it changes it.

photo by Matúš Kovačovský

The one belief that generates all the others

Gary Hamel closed a recent LinkedIn post with a genuine question: What elements of the managerialist mindset are ripe for a rethink?

It’s the right question. But answering it as a list misses something. The beliefs Hamel names (that KPIs can guarantee right behavior, that competence tracks with rank, that employees are “resources”) are not independent errors sitting side by side. They follow from it. They are what you get once a more fundamental belief is already in place.

That belief is this: a person is a type of thing.

Not a subject. Not an agent with an inside that no system can reach. A thing. A unit with properties. Something that can be measured, allocated, optimized, and if necessary, replaced.

Once that belief is installed (quietly, structurally, before anyone arrives at work), everything else follows with a certain logic. Of course, you measure performance. Things have measurable properties. Of course, competence correlates with rank; someone had to assess the properties and sort accordingly. Of course, you call them human resources; resources is what things are when organizations need them.

Hamel is right to reach for Kuhn. But there is a floor below the assumptions.

Scientific revolutions happen because anomalies accumulate (things the reigning paradigm cannot explain) until what the paradigm cannot explain outnumbers what it can.

The managerial paradigm has been accumulating anomalies for decades. You already know what they are. The engagement survey whose results surprised no one. The transformation initiative that consumed two years and changed nothing that mattered. The knowledge worker (perhaps yourself, in an earlier role, or a current one) who gave exactly what was measured and protected everything else.

They are what happens when you govern persons as though they were things.

This is not a case against metrics. A well-designed KPI can protect a worker from a supervisor’s prejudice; in some contexts, quantified evaluation is more humane than subjective judgment, not less.

But a system that offers that protection still cannot see the internal assessment a person makes about what the relationship on offer is worth, and what to give to it. That calculation happens below any system’s threshold.

Hamel asks which managerialist beliefs are ripe for a rethink. There is one and it is the source of most of what isn’t working.

Large organizations genuinely require systems: budgets, accountability structures, operational metrics, and role clarity. Complexity without coordination is just chaos with good intentions. The problem is subtler.

Optimize a machine component and it does what the optimization requires. Optimize a person and they notice that they are being optimized, they notice what it means to be treated that way, and they respond to that.

Not necessarily by resisting. Sometimes they calibrate. Other times they give exactly what the system measures and protect everything else. And the system registers it as compliance. In reality, it is closer to the minimum viable performance of a person who has understood the terms of the relationship on offer.

No system can reach the inside of that transaction. The belief that it can is what’s wrong.

The Signal and the Sorting

What you project is what you attract. Not what you say you are. Not what your website claims. Not the values posted in the lobby or the purpose statement ratified by the board. What you project: the signal that emanates from every decision, every tolerated behavior, every crisis handled and mishandled. That signal is always on. It is never neutral.

The institution you lead attracts people who read it correctly. Not because people conspire to find each other, but because the signal reaches them first. And the people with options read it and move on.

A university that has stopped believing it can change anything will, over time, fill itself with faculty who have also stopped believing that. No one plans it. No one sees it happening. The institution projected something. The right people for that projection showed up.

This is not a metaphor. The mechanism doesn’t require your awareness or your cooperation. It runs regardless.

Organizations emit through what they reward quietly and what they punish quietly, through who gets promoted and who stalls, through how they treat someone on the way out. All of that is signal. It reaches people who are deciding whether this is a place where someone like them belongs.

And what you actually are is, uncomfortably, a function of what you have been willing to risk (or not risk) over time. Institutions that play it safe long enough become genuinely safe: safe to enter, safe to stay in, safe to give a mediocre decade to without consequence. They attract people for whom that is enough. Which then makes them safer still.

The reverse is also true. A genuine act of institutional courage changes the projection. It tells a different story to people who had written you off, who were waiting for exactly that signal before deciding to bet on you. You don’t have to announce the change. You have to make it. The announcement follows by itself, carried by the people who noticed.

This is why culture change is so difficult and why so many attempts at it fail. They work on the surface: the messaging, the workshops, the new leadership competencies. None of it touches the underlying projection. And the underlying projection is made of decisions, not declarations. Decisions about what you will defend when it costs something. What you will refuse when refusal is inconvenient. What you will acknowledge when acknowledgment is humiliating. The surface work is a choice, which means something else is being protected.

Every institution signals. The question worth sitting with is not “what signal do we want to send?” That question is too easy. The question is: what signal are we actually sending, as evidenced by who keeps showing up?

And who keeps leaving. Over time, not case by case. The pattern, not the story any individual departure comes with.

The exit interview is almost beside the point. You are in that data. Not the institution you intend. The one you have been building, one unframed decision at a time.

photo by Markus Spiske

The Gandhi Paradox

You are not Gandhi.

Gandhi was a private citizen when he began. No title, no formal authority. People followed him because they chose to. They could walk away, and some did, and that was their right, and the movement survived anyway. The commitment of those who stayed was real precisely because it was voluntary. You could see it because leaving was an option.

Your direct reports operate inside a legal framework of employment. Their income depends on meeting your expectations. Their career depends on your assessment of them. The question this creates is one most managers never ask: how much of what I read as engagement is engagement, and how much of it is the entirely rational behavior of people who have learned that agreement is safer than dissent?

I watched this once in a team meeting. A new initiative was presented. Everyone engaged: questions, notes, apparent buy-in. Weeks later, in a casual conversation, I learned that several people in that room had serious reservations. Reservations they took home with them. They had done everything right. Their compliance had been indistinguishable from commitment.

It was not commitment. And the room never knew.

The manager who recognizes this pattern has usually decided it doesn’t apply to them. The open door is real. The invitation to candor is sincere. And none of it changes what people will risk saying to someone who controls their livelihood. The effort was genuine. The structure doesn’t register it.

This is not a culture problem. It is not a communication problem. It is not a psychological safety problem, though it will be diagnosed as all three. The power differential does not disappear because you have made yourself approachable. It shapes what people will risk saying in every conversation you have with them. It shaped what they said to you this morning.

What you are reading as engagement is real. It is also insufficient evidence. The question worth pondering is not how to fix the structure. You can’t. It is what kind of attention you owe people you cannot fully read.

photo by 愚木混株 Yumu

Leadership under any name

I drove past two high schools last week, each with a large banner stretched across the front of the building. I didn’t catch the school names. I caught the word.

LEADERSHIP

Both of them. Same word, different zip code, same promise. We are growing leaders here. Your children will emerge from these doors ready to lead. Send them to us ordinary and we will return them consequential.

I drove on. But the question followed me.

If both schools are producing leaders, and presumably every other school with a banner is doing the same, who exactly are these leaders going to lead? There are only so many positions at the front of the room. The math doesn’t work. And yet the banners multiply, the mission statements accumulate, the word appears in every graduation speech, every LinkedIn profile, every performance review, until it is everywhere and therefore, quietly, nowhere.

Something has gone wrong with this word. You probably already sense it. You’ve used it, and felt somewhere underneath the using that it wasn’t quite landing on anything solid. Not recently. Slowly, the way words go wrong. Through overuse, through flattery, through the very human tendency to take something that matters and market it until the meaning drains out and only the prestige remains.

I want to try to say what went wrong. Not because the word is beyond rescue, but because the thing it points to, when it points to something real, is worth rescuing. Here is my suspicion, stated plainly before I try to earn it: leadership is not something you become. It is something others decide you are. Everything else follows from that.

The first thing that went wrong is that leader became a synonym for person we are proud of. A high-achieving student, someone who will go out into the world and do something that reflects well on the institution that formed them. That’s a reasonable aspiration. It’s just not leadership. It’s consequence. Impact. All of which are real things, but they don’t require anyone to follow you. You can matter enormously in a room by yourself.

When we substituted leader for all of those things, we smuggled in an assumption so quietly that almost nobody noticed: that consequence requires hierarchy. That the only way to count is to be in front. The researcher who spends a decade on a problem nobody else thought worth solving, the teacher who changes the frame for a generation of students, the craftsman who does the thing at a level nobody can quite explain. These people matter. The word leader doesn’t fit them, and when we try to force it, something is lost. Not just precision. The particular dignity of their way of being in the world.

The second thing that went wrong is harder to say politely. The banner told every student they could be a leader. But leader is a word with a long memory, and its memory is aristocratic. For most of human history it described the person at the top, by birth, by force, by divine appointment. We democratized the aspiration while leaving the structure intact. Everyone can aspire. Not everyone will arrive. And the ones who don’t will be measured, forever, against a standard they didn’t choose, by a word that was never really theirs to claim.

There is a student behind one of those banners who goes home every afternoon and makes dinner for younger siblings while her parents work. She holds a family together and carries weight that would buckle most adults. The banner does not see her. Or rather, it sees her as someone who has not yet become what she could be. Which is precisely backward.

But here is the thing that stopped me most, somewhere on the drive home.

Leadership is not something you become. It is something others decide you are.

In every domain where leadership actually exists, there is a mechanism external to the wanting. An electorate. A hiring committee. A congregation that decides, for its own reasons, to trust someone with its direction. A team in crisis that turns, without quite deciding to, toward one particular person. The wanting is neither necessary nor sufficient. History is full of people who desperately wanted to lead and never did. It is equally full of people who led without ever particularly choosing to, pushed forward by circumstance, by others’ confidence, by the specific gravity of a moment that needed someone and found them available.

You cannot will yourself into being a leader any more than you can will yourself into being beloved. The relationship has to happen. The others have to manifest. And they manifest, or don’t, for reasons that have very little to do with whether you took the right courses or attended a school with the right banner.

None of this is an argument against preparation. Churchill prepared obsessively for decades: the reading, the writing, the years of political failure that sharpened rather than broke him. The preparation was real and necessary. What he could not do was manufacture 1940. That is the distinction the banners collapse. Preparation for capability is yours to do. Preparation for leadership is a category error, because whether leadership comes is not yours to decide.

And this, I think, is where the whole project goes quietly wrong. It seems to treat leadership as an internal achievement, something you become through the right formation or the right school. As if wanting hard enough, and preparing well enough, closes the gap. But leadership is a role, not a character type. It exists in a specific context, with specific people, toward a specific end. Remove those and you don’t have a leader. You have someone standing in an empty room, waiting to be followed.

Which means the schools are not, in fact, producing leaders. They cannot. What they might produce, what the good ones do produce, is people with enough judgment, enough craft, enough genuine care for others that when the right moment arrives, in the right circumstances, with the right community around them, something we might honestly call leadership becomes possible. But that is a much quieter promise. It doesn’t fit on a banner.

Here is what I think leadership actually is, when it is something real.

It is a vision for a specific group of people, in a specific set of circumstances, at a specific moment in time. Not transferable. Not a credential you carry from room to room. Churchill in 1940 is a leader. Churchill in 1945 loses the election. Same man. Different moment. The moment had needed something he had, and then the moment passed, and what it needed next was something else, and someone else.

In that frame, the people around the leader are not generic followers, waiting to be animated by someone more consequential than themselves. They are the condition of possibility. Their readiness, their willingness to move: these are what call leadership into existence. The community does not follow the leader. In some deep sense, the community produces the leader. The causality runs the other way.

Which means the competent professional is not a failed leader. The responsible citizen is not someone who didn’t quite make it. The nurse who has no interest in administration, who simply wants to be excellent at the thing she does, who shows up and carries the load and does not need to be in front. She is not the consolation prize. She may be the whole point.

I drove home thinking about what we lose when we tell young people that leadership is the aspiration. We give them a word that has been stretched until it covers everything, sorted until it flatters only some of them, and pointed in a direction that isn’t quite theirs to walk. We ask them to want something that will only come, if it comes, as a consequence of everything else, not as the goal itself. And we leave them without language for the things that might actually guide them: craft, judgment, accountability, the willingness to be responsible for something that matters without needing an audience for it.

The banners mean well. They always do.

Last week I mentioned something new was coming. Here it is.

On April 17th I am launching The-No-Need-to-Read-the-Book Workshop: five Friday mornings, every other Friday through June 12th, from 8:30 to 9:15am Eastern.

I have read the books. You bring the thinking.

Fifteen books across five sessions, none of the titles announced in advance.

One flat fee of $100.

First 12 to register. That’s it. (And no, I will not be telling you to act now while supplies last.)

If that’s you, the details and registration link are here.

The fourth book

Javier would have a pile of books waiting for me whenever I showed up at his bookshop. His selection was based on our conversations, during which he had discovered my dissertation topic, my previous studies, my professional experience, my broad interest in music, as well as the purchases I had made. Naturally, he would ask about my hockey team back home and also bitch about the local soccer team losing, again, and possibly dropping to a lower division.

Javier lived in a relatively small city. A provincial capital, for sure, but relatively small. I haven’t found a Javier in the big cities I came home to. But I try: I go to a local bookstore, find three books I want to buy, and then take them to one of the employees and ask them to pick me a fourth.

photo by Olya P