The Ideas
This is where we explore culture, leadership, and the systems that shape how work actually happens. In this collection, you’ll find stories from the field, ideas that challenge the status quo, and reflections on building more human, values-led workplaces. We don’t promise perfect answers. Just a commitment to keep asking better questions.
Culture is Infrastructure.
Culture Isn't the Book Club. It’s the relationship infrastructure that’s running your company. Whether you’re tending to it - or not.
The Tyranny of Efficiency, or How It Dismantled Quality, Craft, and Competence
This first essay in a fictional forensic series examines how efficiency-first operating models degraded creative capacity over time. Told from the perspective of an AI Chief Efficiency Officer conducting a systems-level failure analysis, it explains why organizations optimized for speed and scale ultimately lost their most creative contributors—not through failure, but through design.
Stop Weaponizing Resilience, Start examining your culture
This article argues leaders often use “resilience” to dodge accountability, shifting blame onto individuals instead of fixing unhealthy systems. Drawing on the author’s 2022 culture review, it shows executives rejecting evidence of harm, targeting dissenters, and refusing to address toxic conditions. Resilience became framed as personal weakness rather than systemic failure. Using Jurie Rossouw’s PR6 model, the piece recasts resilience as a leadership duty. Its conclusion is blunt: build systems where resilience is possible, or keep asking employees to endure dysfunction.
Read the Room, Not the Brief. It's how I found the real culture culprits
This article argues that problems blamed on tools, scaling, or delivery often stem from leadership misalignment. Drawing on firsthand experience inside a travel technology company during early COVID, it shows how fragmented systems and confusing structures reflected deeper failures in trust, accountability, and executive cohesion. Process changes alone could not fix the culture. Real transformation required aligned leadership and shared accountability; without it, teams defaulted to self-protection.
Vision or Vice grip? When to choose clarity over certainty.
January’s Rebel 75 newsletter explores the difference between clarity and certainty in leadership and teamwork. Using a personal reflection on planning a multi-generation trip to Europe, the article argues that leaders don’t need perfect plans—they need a clear vision, shared priorities, and the flexibility to adapt. The issue also features an Art Corner reflection on bravery, a monthly Signal Check for team alignment, and a Tiny Rebellion prompt encouraging teams to clarify their most important commitments for the year.