One way I make a living is by coaching CEOs. Recently I was speaking with one of my clients, the CEO of a startup with 60-plus employees.

The CEO told me how they and one of their executives had been disagreeing about something. My client’s initial instinct was to assert their authority, close the issue, and move on. Rather than doing that, however, the CEO decided to open a document instead.

In that document the CEO first wrote down their opinion on the situation and why. Next they wrote down what the other person thought and why. When the CEO…

If you’ve ever slept outdoors or even just watched a survival reality show, you know the importance of fire. Fire is warmth, energy, safety. Fire bridges the line between comfort and discomfort. Even life and death.

Early humans’ ability to tame fire — which took hundreds of thousands of years to develop — changed the course of history. Human biology too. Taming fire led to cooked food which increased the calories in human diets, growing the size of our brains.

Fire was and is pivotal. But fire is also dangerous. It kills people. It’s difficult to tame. …

In the late 1990s, people around the world began to live in a state of rising fear of two missing numbers.

The computer bug known as Y2K threatened to wreak havoc on the global infrastructure through the tiniest of details: computers being programmed to represent years in two digits (“99”) instead of four (“1999”). Headlines warned that systems would go haywire — crashing planes, freeing prisoners, and potentially leading to “The End of the World as We Know It?” as a 1999 Time Magazine cover posed.

We laugh at Y2K today like it was just another Skidz-like ’90s fad, but…

How’s your apocalypse going? Yeah, mine too.

Sending love to everyone right now. The chaos is overwhelming. Even more disturbing, it’s already normal. I write this as my windows are blanketed in smoke from the West Coast fires.

We’re hoping that 2020 is a blip on the radar. But at the same time we’re saying things like “when things go back to normal…” less and less. There’s unmistakable evidence that we may have entered a period of significant decline for the wellbeing of life on Earth. …

Last week I took an internet vacation. I didn’t go anywhere. I just wasn’t online.

I spent a lot of my time in the woods. I recently moved to the Pacific Northwest and have fallen in love with the trees. They’re incredible creatures.

You see a lot of these fallen giants covered in new growth.

For millennia, thinkers from ancient philosophers to modern cosmologists have grappled with the question of how time functions. In a book called The Fourth Turning, the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe sort the theories of time into three categories:

1. Time is chaotic. There’s no order at all.

2. Time is cyclical. Time is marked by repetition — the sun rises and sets, seasons change, and living things go through the biological cycle of birth, life, death. Until the Renaissance, this is how people experienced time, the authors contend. There was no technological progress. The world was a loop.

…

It’s getting harder to remember life before, but we’re still in the early, “in it together” phase of this crisis. Barely. The stratification of society that was already here is becoming clear again. The gap between who has power and who doesn’t — already big — is getting bigger.

Here’s how economist Umair Haque describes the situation:

The economy has been divided into a kind of caste system. At the very top are the owners of technocapital — Bloombergs and Bezoses and whatnot: they’re a tiny class of mega-billionaires. They have more than they can ever spend — and a…

Two weeks ago I shared the Values Stack as an illustration of how values operate.

Values are expressed through three layers. At the deepest layer are a culture’s Morals. Those Morals are expressed as Rules. Those Morals are also positively expressed as Incentives.

Today I’m going to share three examples of the Values Stack in action, and propose a new value that I think will become newly important in a post-COVID world.

Values Stack IRL, Pt I

One of the most celebrated and non-controversial values in business today was nowhere on the radar just two decades ago. That value? Transparency.

Back in the 1950s, companies…