Humans have been complaining about moral decay for 6,000 years, ancient Egyptian tombs contain the same warnings as today's op-ed pages. That's not a reason to dismiss the concern; it's a reason to take it seriously. As nearly half the US workforce moves online and technology compresses the distance between people, moral leadership has quietly become one of the most important skills a founder can develop. The question isn't whether your firm has a moral system. It's who is sh

Every leader is a seasonal leader, whether they know it or not. Some seasons are for building, some for pruning, some for simply holding ground. The hardest part is refusing to wait out a downturn before you invest in yourself, the seeds you plant during uncertainty are the ones that make the next season count. Many of America's largest companies started in a recession because their founders understood what leadership really is: one part decision-making, one part sense-making

Nearly half the US workforce went home in 2020, and the digital transition was easier than anyone expected. Preserving trust turned out to be the hard part. As surveillance software ("tattleware," "nanny-ware," "spyware") flooded into remote workplaces, leaders had to decide what they actually wanted employees to believe about their organization. The technology answers whether you can monitor every keystroke. Leadership asks whether you should, and what you lose when you do.

When the ground shifts under a business leader's feet, the temptation is to look for new tactics. The best leaders look for something else first: their values. Carl Anderson's 1997 values-based leadership framework gives executives a disciplined way to identify their non-negotiable principles, translate them into values, and examine the leadership philosophy they are actually operating from, before the next hard decision lands.

You rarely turn to the children's section for business insight. But reading The Velveteen Rabbit to my daughter this week, the Skin Horse's monologue about becoming 'Real' stopped me cold — and it reframed everything I've been thinking about this summer. Not about scaling businesses. About what we owe each other. Whether to duck and cover or jump into the current. As for me and my house, we're paddling like mad.