The recent rounds of layoffs, which have hit middle managers particularly hard, have raised an important question. 1 Do we even need middle managers anymore? On one side, companies have flattened their hierarchies, and the managers they retain are asked to have more direct reports than they previously had. In some ways, this makes sense if you are not planning

I have gotten some feedback that what I have been writing has been too dense and not actionable enough. This week, I am going to try something different. Please share your thoughts by replying to this email. I don’t want to lose the depth of the thinkers I borrow from, but I also want to make sure it is helping

In past newsletters, I have reviewed several books on the transindividual, and while those were densely theoretical, I am now working on making them more practical as a basis for a new approach to change. The fundamental question I am asking is, if the individual and the collective are mutually co-created, then how would that change how we think of

In the previous newsletter, we looked at how Yves Citton defines power (as the flow of desire and belief) in his book Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds. In this newsletter, we will explore narrative as a form of power and examine how we can use it to benefit ourselves as managers. As we concluded last time, we saw how

‘I’m telling people that they’ve tried everything, and now they have to try mythocracy. They’ve got a democracy, theocracy. The mythocracy is what you never came to be that you should be.’ – Sun Ra 1 Yves Citton’s Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our World is a book about the nature of power and how storytelling shapes that power. To understand