What We Preserve
On Sunday we were taught to make room for the neighbor. On Monday, the neighbor became a competitor. On what our institutions are built to preserve, and one priest who carried the Sunday teaching into the room where money is made.
The Return We Refuse to Count
An idea of mine once came back to me as someone else's presentation. On reciprocity, what our institutions count, and a library that lent seeds.
Nobody Gets Promoted for Maintenance
Institutions celebrate the people who begin things and quietly spend the people who keep them alive. This essay explores invisible work, the capability trap, who gets asked to carry low-promotability tasks, and what it would take to reward maintenance.
The Distance Between Us
As institutions grow, leadership moves farther from the work, and the people closest to it stop explaining what they see. This essay explores institutional distance, after-hours availability, algorithmic management, and what it takes to keep power close to responsibility.
When Vulnerability Becomes Self-Annihilation
Workplaces increasingly ask people to bring their whole selves. But vulnerability without trust can become a way of making people easier to manage. This essay explores the psychology of trust, institutional regression, and what a more humane future of work requires.
Integrity Is Not a Labor Strategy
After ten years of trying to build a humane workplace in mental health, I no longer believe good leadership guarantees reciprocity. This essay explores what integrity can — and cannot — do inside a culture that increasingly treats work as transaction.
Nineteen Years Underground
For nineteen years, Saturn in the eighth house became a language for descent: loss, power, erasure, endurance, and the machinery beneath apparently stable systems. What emerged was not a belief that suffering makes us better, but a harder form of sight—the ability to distinguish what was mine from what was structural.
The Trophy Has One Name
The trophy has one name, but the achievement rarely does. Behind exceptional performance is an invisible organism of family, sacrifice, resources, recovery, and support. We study elite performers while ignoring the ecology that makes their performance repeatable.
Conditions
We are taught a simple moral equation: work hard, be good, and eventually life will reward you. Reality has made no such agreement. If character cannot fully explain why people flourish or fail, we have to look elsewhere—to the conditions in which a life is asked to grow.
Leading Without Ego: How Founders Grow Into Mature Leadership
The qualities that help a founder begin a company can eventually prevent it from maturing. This Work Ecology essay explores the slow work of leading without ego: receiving disagreement, relinquishing centrality, and building an organization capable of intelligence beyond the person who began it.
The Intimate Partner of Business Is Time
Business is often described as being in relationship with money, but its most intimate partner is time. Through Hard Times, family history, industrial pottery, and a Japanese teapot, this essay examines how work learned to measure, discipline, and dominate human time — and what it might mean for business to witness time instead.
Work Is Not a Meritocracy. It Is Ecology.
The most naïve thing I ever believed about work was that it was based on meritocracy. But merit does not exist outside ecology, access, power, and recognition.