“It’s just the wind.”

You’ve probably thought that to yourself (or even said it out loud) when you were alone at home at night and heard an unexpected noise.

“It’s just the wind,” you say, as you try to convince yourself that there’s nothing to worry about.

Then, thinking that the wind couldn’t make that kind of a sound, you pivot: “Or maybe it’s a squirrel in the attic.”

You desperately want to try to outsmart the fear center in your brain. Maybe you succeed. Maybe you don’t. It depends on the kind of story you tell yourself.

Stories as Explainers

Aside from things that go bump in the night, the world can be a scary place.

Even now, amid advanced technology that connects us to each other's homes around the world, we don't know what the future will look like.

Imagine what it must have been like thousands of years ago, before calendars were in use, when weather forecasts were unheard of, and when we had no idea where we came from.

It’s human nature to want to simplify the complex, shape the world into a more orderly place, and make sense of things we don't understand.

So what do we do? We tell ourselves stories to explain away the inexplicable.

It’s been happening since we were first able to communicate. Humans developed myths, traditions, and stories that made sense out of a big and sometimes terrifying world.

One of my favorite scenes from Disney’s 1940 classic Fantasia is the mythology sequence1 (no doubt because of my background both as a classics major and a devotee of Beethoven). It’s set to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” and in it, we experience an idyllic scene of centaurs, winged horses (recall there was only one original Pegasus), and Dionysus [Bacchus],2 the god of wine, all enjoying themselves.

Then the sky darkens and the dark clouds part, revealing an amused Zeus [Jupiter], who called to Hephaestus [Vulcan] to supply him with lightning bolts. The creatures scatter in fear, desperately seeking cover. Eventually, Zeus tires of this exercise, kicking off his sandals as he tucks in for a nap on a cloud. The storm recedes.

It’s a creative and illuminating mise-en-scène that literally illustrates how the ancients created stories to explain unexpected, unexplained, or confusing things in the world around them.

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Modern Mythology

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, when surrounded by advanced technology — incomprehensible to some and awe-inspiring to others, all of whom are grappling with the tumult and uncertainty — that modern-day myths arise in the form of conspiracy theories.

From the moon landing to chemtrails, the suspicions that land on Freemasons to the desperate rantings of Flat-Earthers, the dangers of vaccinations and fluoride, and the sore-loser election-rigging claims, you can find people who are willing to believe fanciful stories that seemingly explain everything to them.

Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.

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The best leaders know how to rely on facts and data to guide their teams forward.3 It’s how I help them understand and implement the Working Together™ Leadership & Management System.

Danger arises when a leader is surrounded by sycophants.4 The best leaders include people with a variety of opinions, viewpoints, and experience, in order to arrive at a better plan.

When the guardrails are off and a person in power is never told “no,” they become isolated from reality, which in turn affects their ability to make decisions that affect the lives of others.5

Populism Rejects Facts

It’s astounding to see the degree to which people will go to contort facts and logical thinking into crazy theories to fit their worldview.

It may be rooted in a lack of understanding of scientific principles. In her book Democracy and Truth, Sophia Rosenfeld finds that conspiracy theories flourish in societies where there’s a gap between the governing and the governed classes. When populism takes hold, the public “tend to reject science and its methods as a source of directives.”6

Advances in modern science and technology call even more attention to the disparity between experts and non-experts, leading to the doubting of basic truths.

Thank Heaven We’ve Seen This Before

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, though: in 1623, Galileo wrote about the same phenomenon in The Assayer, noting that his observations of the heavenly bodies were based on math:

“…what I had set forth was supported and proved by geometrical demonstrations; and such is the strength of men's passion that they failed to notice how the contradiction of geometry is a bald denial of truth.”

Galileo’s most significant challenge wasn’t wrestling with equations and figures. His was a battle for the mind, a struggle for a different perspective. He tried to convince people that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but rather than other scientific defenses, he was met with powerful emotions and biases — powerful defenses that prevented others from seeing the truth.

When we let our emotions overpower facts, we miss the opportunity to be enlightened.

In trying to persuade others, the best efforts take into account emotions, making our audience feel a certain way, creating the desire to change. When backed by facts, it’s even more powerful.

Isn’t this what the best stories do? They’re vessels for information that create an emotional connection.7

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The world is complex. And we have experts who make it their business to try to understand it. We ought to put our trust and faith in them. There's no need to make up stories about things in order to assuage our fears.

The best antidote to fear is dealing with reality.

Anecdotes can come later.

I.

Of course you’ve seen the President storm off of a news interview because he couldn’t handle difficult questions. The blow-up made the questions become the story, rather than the answers. ()

II.

A significant portion of leadership is accountability. In fact, we have an entire section on Accountability. (Timeless & Timely)

III.

Put plainly (and with some great links in the article), “Everything Is A Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Bother to Educate Yourself.” (Techdirt)

The stories we tell ourselves about our food are some tall tales indeed.

I.

“Take a look at the 1928 painting used for early Land O’Lakes boxes. If you think the original butter maiden looks less like a Native American woman than the daughter of a Minnesota dairy farmer playing dress-up, you’d be right: that’s actually what she was.” Land O’Lakes finally changed the iconic image on their butter earlier this year. (The Baffler)

II.

Many foodies and soda lovers swear there’s a discernible difference between Coke made with sugar and Coke made with high-fructose corn syrup—a truer, less “chemical-y” taste; a realer real thing. The story behind Mexican Coke is more complex than you might think. (Smithsonian Magazine)

III.

Did you ever stop to think about how Triscuits got their name? This man did, and he was in for a big surprise. (Delish)

🎧 Myths and Legends brings you folklore that has shaped our world. Some are incredibly popular stories you think you know, but with surprising origins. Others are stories that might be new to you, but are definitely worth a listen. These are stories of magic, kings, Vikings, dragons, knights, princesses, and wizards from a time when the world beyond the map was a dangerous, wonderful, and terrifying place.

📘 Bulfinch’s Mythology offers approachable accounts of ancient legends in a compilation of the works of Thomas Bulfinch, banker and Latinist. This volume includes all three of Bulfinch’s original titles: The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, and The Legends of Charlemagne. “Our work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature...who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation.”

There’s so much to learn,

This entry is tagged:

Truth, Communication, Trust, Emotional Intelligence

Reflection

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There is a scene in The Twilight Zone that deserves to be far more famous than it is.

In “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,”2 a CEO named Wallace Whipple has decided to replace his factory workers with machines. His chief engineer, Hanley, pushes back with the kind of moral clarity that leaders rarely permit in subordinates:

“Tell me, Mr. Whipple, why are you so eager to replace men with machines? Did it ever occur to you that you might be trading efficiency for pride?”

“Pride?!?”

“Yes, pride, Mr. Whipple! Craftsmanship. What a man feels when he makes something.”

Whipple is contemptuous.

“What the devil can I do with pride? Can I can it? Bottle it? Wrap it? I’m not selling pride, I’m selling product.”

Hanley presses further, invoking Whipple’s father — the founder, a man of different instincts:

“Nobody ever accused him of inefficiency, but he had something else on his mind.”

“What else did my father have on his mind, Mr. Hanley?”

“Goodwill. And the welfare of the people who worked for him.”

Whipple dismisses him. The machines go in. Hanley is let go. Progress, it seems, has been achieved.

And then, in the episode’s quiet devastation, Whipple himself is replaced. The board, as cold as the logic he’d preached, informs him that his position has been automated. He finds Hanley at a local bar and, with remarkable lack of self-awareness, rails against the injustice of it:

“It’s not right, Hanley, it’s not right. Cold, dispassionate, impersonal… they chuck a man out right in his prime — chuck him out like he was some kind of a part! Said I was neurotic about things. Said that being alone with the machines had warped me…”

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Rod Serling wrote that episode in 1964. He was watching the first great wave of industrial automation — and he understood something that our era has yet to learn. Whipple is not a villain. He is a man who adopted a philosophy without counting the cost, who optimized himself right out of the moral imagination, and who did not notice until the logic he’d championed was turned against him.

We are all, in some measure, living in Whipple’s world now.

Lower-Value Human Capital

Last month, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters addressed investors with a phrase that would have made even Whipple pause: his company, he explained, was not cutting costs so much as

“replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”3

Lower-value human capital.

Sit with that for a moment. The de-humanization of individuals to data points on a chart, as decimal points in a financial statement.

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The words landed badly enough that by the next morning Winters had sent a memo to his employees assuring them that “where roles do fall away, it reflects changes in the work, not the value of our people.” One can only wonder what the people whose roles had already fallen away made of that particular reassurance. The memo is the modern equivalent of Whipple’s speech to Hanley — an attempt to retain the vocabulary of human dignity while executing a strategy that has already discarded it.

This is not an isolated incident. It is increasingly the lingua franca of an era.

Amazon’s mass layoff initiative was christened “Project Dawn” — a branding choice that deserves its own chapter in the history of corporate euphemism. Tens of thousands of employees learned their fates through calendar invitations and Slack speculation as the sun came up.

No conversation. No dignity. Just confusion at scale, delivered with the efficient impersonality of a system that had, somewhere along the way, stopped remembering that people were at the other end.

Thomas De Quincey wrote in 1845 that the human brain is a palimpsest — a piece of writing material that has been used, erased, and reused — that those layers of experience, memory, and feeling stacked upon one another, each apparently buried but none truly extinguished.4

The danger of delegating our thinking, our judgment, our empathy to machines is not merely that we will make worse decisions. It is that we will become worse thinkers — flatter, less attuned, less capable of the lateral understanding that makes compassion possible. We will lose the very strata that make us human.

AI doing our thinking for us doesn’t just make us lazier. It erases the layers. Or worse: creates conditions such that we never have to create or be aware of those layers in the first place.

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A Man Has Value

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued by Pope Leo XIV last week,5 is the most comprehensive moral argument against the current trajectory of AI that any major institution has produced. At over 40,000 words, it is a document that — as one observer noted — should shame many professional technology journalists who have preferred credulous access reporting to the harder questions the pope is now demanding we ask.6

In its core argument, it is Whipple’s lesson written in theological language. Or Winters’ statement “Where roles do fall away, it reflects changes in the work, not the value of our people,” rephrased.

The encyclical answers that framing with something more philosophically durable: human dignity does not depend on the work you perform. It precedes it. It exists just as the air we breathe and cannot be optimized away.

The encyclical names as “particularly insidious” the ideology that every person must earn or justify their worth through efficiency — that those who produce more matter more. This is not merely a spiritual error. It is the operating assumption of a great deal of contemporary management practice, and it is producing predictable results. summarizes Leo’s argument: “Stop treating human labor as a corporate liability.”7 The phrase lands with such force precisely because it shouldn’t need to be said.

That this argument is being made by a pope rather than a CEO is itself instructive.

Refer a friend

What’s in a Name — Revisited

A year ago, on the day of his election, this newsletter noted that Cardinal Prevost’s choice of the name Leo XIV carried specific historical weight. Leo XIII had been the Social Pope, the Pope of the Workers — the man who, in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, had insisted that the proclamation of the Gospel could not overlook the concrete lives of people. To take that name, we suggested, was to presage a mission that would be “thoughtful, inclusive, and humanitarian.”8

Magnifica Humanitas is the fulfillment of that prediction — and then some. It positions itself explicitly as a successor document to Rerum Novarum, written on that encyclical’s 135th anniversary.

Where Leo XIII addressed the new things of industrial capitalism — the displacement of workers, the concentration of power in private hands, the moral accountability of those who hold economic leverage — Leo XIV addresses the new things of our moment: AI, algorithmic management, data extraction, and a small class of transnational technology companies whose resources exceed those of many governments.

The structural parallel is exact. The moral argument is unchanged. What has changed is the scale of what’s at stake.

, reflecting on the encyclical’s language, notes that Leo XIV uses the word colonialism to describe how AI is reshaping the balance of power — noting that data about ordinary people has become “the new ‘rare earths’ of power,” extracted from entire regions by platforms that answer to no electorate and whose values are those of their shareholders.9

This is a harder charge than most secular critics have been willing to make, and it is worth contemplating.

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The Palimpsest We’re Erasing

Last month Steve Wozniak spoke to graduates in Michigan, offering his own version of this argument with characteristic directness. Reflecting on decades spent with engineers trying to recreate human cognition in software, he reminded the graduating class that they already possess what the machines do not: actual intelligence.

The most reliable method for producing a brain, he observed, still takes nine months. He urged students to think independently — to resist treating AI as a substitute for genuine understanding and intuition.10

This is De Quincey’s palimpsest argument in commencement speech form. Every layer of genuine thinking, genuine feeling, genuine encounter with difficulty and ambiguity — these are not overwritten by what comes next. They form the substrate on which wisdom is built. When we outsource that process, we don’t gain efficiency. We lose depth. We arrive at more answers and fewer insights.

The Ringer’s Brian Phillips, in a piece that manages to be both funny and genuinely alarmed, puts it simply: the problem with the tech industry isn’t a messaging problem:

“When you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”11

There is no algorithm for that kind of accountability.

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Nehemiah’s Section of the Wall

Magnifica Humanitas offers two biblical images as its organizing framework: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah.

Babel, the encyclical argues, is not merely a story of divine punishment. It is a story of what happens when a great project is built on uniformity rather than communion, on efficiency rather than dignity, on the ambition to “make a name” rather than to serve. The result is not unity but dispersion. The languages fracture. The project collapses under the weight of its own scale.

Nehemiah offers the counter-vision. Arriving at a ruined Jerusalem, he does not impose a top-down plan. He convenes the families. He assigns each of them a section of the wall. He listens to their concerns. He makes everyone accountable for their piece, and no one accountable for everything. The city is rebuilt not through one man’s efficiency but through shared, human, distributed responsibility.

This is not merely a theological model. It is the Working Together™ Leadership & Management System described in theological language. Every section of the wall belongs to someone. No one is a resource. No one is lower-value human capital. Everyone has a section, and everyone is responsible for it, and the city rises because enough people take that responsibility seriously enough to show up.

The great failure of the Whipple model — and its contemporary equivalents — is not that it replaces workers with machines. It is that it mistakes the product for the purpose.

Whipple’s father understood that the company existed for the people. The machines existed for the company. When you invert that hierarchy, you do not simply lose goodwill. You lose the organizing principle that made the whole enterprise worth building in the first place.

The Work No Machine Can Do

Alan Mulally arrived at Ford in 2006 and did something that no algorithm would have recommended: he made every leader in the room stand behind a red, yellow, or green status on their piece of the plan. No hiding behind dashboards. No automated summaries. A human being, accountable to other human beings, in real time. The discomfort was the point.

That friction was the trust.

Hire Me to Speak

About the Working Together System

The best leaders — and the encyclical is making this argument in universal terms — are not those who eliminate the difficulty of human interaction. They are those who embrace it. Those who remain present within it. Who sit with bad news. Who close the loop not because a metric flagged an engagement dip, but because a person told them something that mattered and they chose to act on it.

AI can process information faster than any human. It can identify patterns, generate options, summarize complexity. These are genuine capabilities, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of foolishness.

But it cannot be accountable. It cannot be responsible. It cannot take the call when someone’s section of the wall is falling and decide that the relationship matters more than the efficiency of the outcome. It cannot, in Whipple’s forgotten father’s phrase, hold goodwill and the welfare of people in mind.

Meaning is still the work of human hands.

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And in an age that is very rapidly convincing itself otherwise, insisting on that truth is not sentiment. It is resistance.

There is no algorithm for life.

There is no optimization function for dignity.

The question before every leader, every organization, every person building or deploying or simply using these technologies is the oldest question in management and in moral philosophy alike:

Are we treating people as ends, or as means?

Whipple learned the answer the hard way. The Standard Chartered CEO is learning it in real time. Leo XIV is asking the whole world to learn it before it’s too late.

There’s so much to learn,

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Readers (or even casual browsers) have seen the Timeless & Timely tagline: “Because character doesn’t change with the headlines.”

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Such is our shorthand for the timeless principles that bind all humans and give us pause to consider what we need in leaders and in each other in a world otherwise fraught by constant chaos, cacophony, and change.

Last year, when Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elevated to Pope Leo XIV, we pondered on the significance of his name, noting “the names that popes select for themselves carry meaning, ranging from their personal values to their strategic goals.”1

Lest there be any doubt about Leo XIV’s values and goals, last week he released his first Encyclical (more about that in the main newsletter this week — make sure you’re signed up). But over the weekend, this tweet from the pope caught my eye:

“Connecting young people to digital networks serves no purpose if they remain disconnected from themselves, others, and their own interiority. We must help young people rediscover silence, reflection, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationships, and openness to transcendence. To listen to the soul, we must lend an ear, because the soul’s voice is not a shout, but a whisper.”

There’s quite a bit to unpack here — and my preference is to avoid taking up too much of your valuable Monday analyzing these three sentences — so I’ll be brief and Ill supply you with further reading to reflect on this message.

Knowing ourselves2 is one of the most important and profound things we can do. Ancient philosophers knew this and it remains true to this day.

Being connected to ourselves means taking time to slow down, looking at things slowly and deliberately. “We seem to be always running to one thing or another—and in some cases, running from ourselves.”3

In addition to silence and reflection, one of the best ways to know yourself and to understand others is by asking questions.4 5

In 2022, I wrote: “We can learn a lot — about ourselves, about others — if we pay attention to the silence in our lives.”6 Nearly four years later, the same simple but profound truth remains.7

One last item worth calling out is the popes use of the word transcendence. The word may be unfamiliar to some, but its widely appreciated around these parts, as transcendence is a broad category of character and values we talk about.

According to the VIA Institute on Character, transcendence includes traits such as appreciation of beauty8, spirituality, gratitude9, hope10, and humor11. These are traits that go beyond the observable, residing deep within us. And they come out when we spend time getting to know ourselves.

I could go on (I already went longer than I expected to), but here’s the main takeaway:

Be sure to read the footnotes12, explore more using the search function, and our Browse page for whatever topic speaks to you.

Thank you for being part of this journey and being interested in the timeless values of humanity.

There’s so much to learn,

Last summer, we waded together into the shallow end of English’s great forgotten lexicon1 — a place where scholars once labored over words that the rest of the world had quietly decided it could live without. The response was, to use a word from that list, scripturiently enthusiastic.

Now we’re back with a second volume of beautiful, obscure, and largely pointless words. The list itself isn’t pointless — consider it like your attic, holding both treasures and puzzlements, unseen for years. If jentacular and deipnosophist became household words in your home after Vol. 1, you are more than ready for these. If not — the door remains open, and the list is linked below.

What strikes me, reviewing the full list, is how much human behavior had once earned itself a word. The person who pretends to refuse what they want, the enthusiast who opines past their knowledge, the lover who only pretends to love, the writer hiding behind anonymity while contributing little.

These are not historical curiosities. They are live conditions, updated daily, simply awaiting the right vocabulary.

Here, then, is the second installment2 of words you will probably never use — but will be genuinely glad to know.

Roorback

Definition: a defamatory falsehood published for political effect

What makes roorback special is that it is a lie built on a lie, twice removed from reality. The word comes from the invented “Baron von Roorback,” a fictional European nobleman conjured in 1844 to smear presidential candidate James K. Polk with an accusation that Polk had branded the initials of his ownership onto dozens of enslaved people.

The accusation was false. The Baron was fictional. And yet the word roorback survived — a monument to the durability of political bad faith. The irony is that the broader accusation was true: Polk did own enslaved people, a fact that somehow got lost in the outrage over the forgery.

Now, 180 years later, the phenomenon the word describes is no longer obscure. Only the word itself is.

Ultracrepidarian

Definition: giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge

This one traces to Apelles, the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece — so respected that Alexander the Great reportedly allowed only him to paint his likeness. According to Pliny the Elder, when a shoemaker once dared to critique Apelles’ rendering of a sandal strap, Apelles corrected the flaw. When the emboldened cobbler moved on to criticizing the figure’s leg, Apelles cut him off: ne sutor ultra crepidam — “let the shoemaker not go beyond the sole.”

From that exchange, we get ultracrepidarian: one who opines about things they know nothing about. The concept predates the Roman Republic. The word arrived in English only in the nineteenth century.3 The behavior has never required either a name or an era to flourish.

Anecdotage

Definition: garrulous old age

Here is a portmanteau of genuine elegance: anecdote blended with dotage (that decline of mental acuity that visits the elderly) to produce a word for the condition of being old and unstoppably full of stories.

The word captures something real about the relationship between memory and age. As the future compresses, the past expands. The long-term storage is often intact; what changes is the editorial instinct about which stories to tell and when to stop telling them.

Every family has someone in anecdotage. They are often the most interesting person at the table. They are also, occasionally, the reason the table runs two hours long.

Jackassery

Definition: a piece of stupidity or folly

There is a dignity to precision. When the St. Charles Republican Intelligencer of Iowa used this word in 1857 to describe a political maneuver it found contemptible, it was doing what good prose always does: reaching for the exact word rather than the approximate one.

The construction follows the pattern of foolery, knavery, trickery — the suffix -ery denoting a condition or collective practice. It is a word that sounds exactly like what it means, which is the highest compliment you can pay to a word.

Accismus

Definition: the pretended refusal of something one keenly desires

Ancient rhetoric had a name for every trick in the book — because ancient rhetoric wrote the book. Accismus is the technical term for the feigned rejection: the politician who “reluctantly” accepts a nomination, the actor who “resists” the standing ovation, the child who says “no thank you” to a second cookie while staring at the cookie.

The Greeks classified it as a figure of speech. The moderns call it something less flattering. Either way, it has been in continuous operation since at least the age of Pericles, which suggests either that the stratagem works or that humanity has never quite located the off switch.

🔒 This is where the paywall falls — and where things get considerably stranger.

The words above are merely neglected. The ones below are a different category entirely: words for smells that recall undercooked meat, words excited beginnings and insignificant writers, and at least one word Shakespeare himself deployed and then the rest of civilization quietly abandoned. If your curiosity is intact after five perfectly good words, you may be exactly the kind of reader who needs the next twelve.

Subscribe to Off the Clock to read on — and to receive every future installment of words the world forgot but probably shouldn’t have.

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The following is an entry for subscribers of Timeless & Timely who have elected to join the Ampersand Guild (or the & Guild) — our community of paid subscribers.

Membership gets you access to the full archives plus bonus material that helps to bring the past — our past — up to the microphone of the present.

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There is a painting in this newsletter to which I have returned more often than I realized until I went looking. John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus, from 1903 — the boy stretched along the water, the nymph receding into the trees, the small lethal geometry of the scene.

I assumed, each time I used it, that I was making a fresh point. I now see, rereading three of the essays in sequence, that they were arguing with each other about the same problem.

That problem, roughly, is that the things we look at most attentively are usually the wrong things, and that the discipline of looking better is harder than the discipline of looking more. Ovid knew this. So did Kierkegaard, who shows up in two of the three pieces below without my having planned it.

But the points raised are much more relevant and modern than indicated by the names of old poets and philosophers…

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Reflection

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) wrote accessible poetry that appreciated nature and laid out simple instructions for life. Her poem “Sometimes” is as profound as it is succinct in what makes a successful life:

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Many years ago, a nervous young intern stood at his cubicle at The Daily Show when Stephen Colbert walked past, stopped, and asked his name.

“Oh, I’m just an intern,” the young man said.

Colbert looked at him for a moment. “‘Just an intern’? Hey, look, everybody starts somewhere. I was just an understudy at one point, but that’s just a point in time. It’s not about where you are now, or even where you hope to go — it’s who you are that matters.” He put out his hand. “I’m Stephen. Who are you?”

They shook hands. “Don’t let your place in the world dictate who you are to anyone,” Colbert told him. “We all have the same merit.” And then he was gone — off to prep a new show — leaving behind a sentence that the intern, Devin Klos, would still be repeating decades later.

A simple yet powerful reminder of the importance of seeing and honoring the dignity in every person.

That is a small story. A hallway, a handshake, thirty seconds a busy man did not owe anyone. And it is precisely the kind of story now pouring out by the hundreds, because The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired its final episode on Thursday, having been cancelled by CBS under its new leadership.

I’ve watched late-night hosts leave before. I remember the maudlin farewell of Johnny Carson, the eternal cheekiness of David Letterman taking his bow. This is decidedly not that.

The cynical — and those predisposed to dislike late night hosts — may find it easy to dismiss them because of the style of humor, the targets of their jokes, or for some other reason. This essay is neither an encomium nor a critique of Colbert’s comedic hosting abilities; this is an assessment of the person and leader he is.

There are scores of stories and clips that make it clear the kind of person Stephen Colbert is, but another story and an assessment of his faith are enough demonstrate the character of the man.

The Measure of the Man

The comedian and production assistant Noel Casler was working backstage at Night of Too Many Stars in 2017 when a talented young performer on the autism spectrum sat down to play piano. A miscue sent confetti drifting down at the wrong moment; rattled, she stopped.

Producers huddled at the monitors, frozen — cut the segment, or risk the moment.

As Casler recounted it, Colbert said:

“I got this guys” and walked out onto stage, sat with her at her piano and comforted her and conveyed how much he alone wanted to see her play.

He reassured and comforted her, saying, “Do the song as if you’re just playing for a friend, never mind the distractions, I know it’s scary but I’m right here with you”

She played wonderfully and in that moment in my eyes you saw the measure of the man, a father, a friend, a fellow performer reminding us all why we were really here and what truly matters in this life: love and humility and lifting each other up.

Love and humility. That’s it, right there. The call to care about each other, serve with humility, and support each other.

Incidentally that’s what Our Working Together™️Leadership and Management System is all about.

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A Model of Leadership

Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, editor at large at America Media, and consultor for the Dicastery for Communication, shared some observations about Stephen Colbert’s unabashed expression of his Catholic faith in a recent column.2

They reveal not just a man of faith, but a blueprint for resilient, intelligent leadership in any field. Colbert’s approach blends intellect, empathy, and humor — qualities that make him a compelling communicator and a trusted public figure.

He Unites Intellect and Authenticity

Colbert’s ability to think critically while staying grounded shows that strong leaders don’t have to choose between being smart and being relatable. He dismantles the stereotype that intellect must come at the expense of emotional connection.

He Leads Through Resilience

Having endured profound personal loss, Colbert demonstrates that adversity can deepen perspective rather than diminish it. His strength lies in transforming pain into empathy — a hallmark of leaders who inspire trust and stability.

He Is a Gifted Storyteller

Like great teachers and visionaries, Colbert uses storytelling and humor to make complex ideas accessible. Leaders who can translate insight into narrative move hearts as well as minds.

He Models Vulnerability

By speaking openly about doubt and growth, Colbert shows that transparency builds credibility. Leaders who admit uncertainty invite collaboration and foster psychological safety.

He Grounds Action in Values

Colbert’s humor often targets social issues, reflecting a moral compass that guides his work. Effective leaders act from principle, ensuring their influence uplifts rather than exploits.

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Stephen Colbert has made it abundantly clear over the years through his actions meeting his words: he treats people around him with care, dignity, and generosity; he leads with kindness, joy, and love; he demonstrates his faith, integrity, and sense of humor.

Watch what Stephen Colbert tells Dua Lipa about the intersection of his faith and comedy (forgive the typos in the auto-captions):

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Who Are You?

It is easy to admire Stephen Colbert from a distance and call it a day. It is harder to notice that the moment everyone keeps retelling — the one that made a grown man remember him for decades — cost Colbert almost nothing. A pause. A name asked and remembered. A hand extended to someone with no power to advance his career.

Leadership is not the chair you sit in. It is made up of hundreds of little things, like whether you stop in the hallway.

There is, somewhere in your orbit right now, a “just an intern” — someone convinced that their place in the world is the same thing as their worth. You will pass them today.

The way you treat them will answer the same question that Colbert asked:

Who are you?

There’s so much to learn,

Further Reading:

“Stephen Colbert: Thank you.” — John Dickerson adds a poignant tribute.

“Unending Grief” — We need to thrive, not just to endure. And for that we need each other.

“Dignity, Inclusivity, and Unity” — Working Together™️ requires valuing everyone.

“Vulnerability and Leadership” — It takes real strength to be vulnerable.

“Who Among Us?” — Servant leadership asks more of us.

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In the previous essay1, we arrived at an uncomfortable observation: coordinated behavior in any group emerges not from directives and broadcasts but from local attention. Each member of the flock watches its neighbors and aligns to what it sees.

Today I want to take you to a small, frozen, miserable piece of rock called Elephant Island, in the year 1916, and introduce you to a man named Frank Wild. You may not have heard of him. That is appropriate. The men who model behaviors well are usually outshone by the men who give better speeches.

Are We Going to Die Here?

In April of 1916, Sir Ernest Shackleton left Elephant Island in a 22-foot lifeboat to attempt one of the most audacious open-ocean rescues in maritime history — 800 miles across the Southern Ocean in winter. He left behind 22 crew members, the men of the Endurance, on a beach beneath two upturned lifeboats, with the unspoken understanding that he might never return. Command fell to his second-in-command, Frank Wild.2

Wild’s task was impossible. No way of knowing whether Shackleton had survived. No way of being rescued except by his success. Four months of waiting on a windswept rock with starving, frostbitten men and one question hanging over every conversation:

Is the Boss coming back, or are we going to die here?

He could not answer that question.

So he answered a different one, every morning, with his own behavior. He rose first. He rolled up his sleeping bag with theatrical optimism. He set a routine of small tasks — chores, sing-alongs, the reading aloud of cookbook recipes as evening entertainment. He cut hair.

He led the Saturday night toast to “sweethearts and wives” and clinked mugs with each man. He kept them so busy with the small business of living that they had no time for the larger business of despairing.

And the men watched him. They were not listening — they didn’t have to. He gave one short speech, the day Shackleton left, and never repeated it. They were watching the bird nearest to them, the only bird whose behavior would set their own.

When the rescue ship Yelcho finally broke through the ice on August 30, 1916 — after four failed attempts, after the food had dwindled to four days’ worth — every single one of those 22 men was alive. Not a single one had died, not one had broken.

They had been a flock, and the bird in the middle had given them three rules every morning by the simple act of how he behaved.

They map to Reynolds’ observations.

Separation: he gave each man space to keep his dignity, never crowding them with reassurances he could not deliver.

Alignment: he oriented himself, visibly and consistently, toward the assumption that they would be rescued — and the men aligned to that heading because the bird closest to them was banking that way.

Cohesion: he kept the group close, the Saturday toast standing in not for sentimentality but for the bird in the middle saying, with his actions, we move as one or we do not move at all.

Three rules. Modeled and repeated, every day. No need for speeches. And the flock survived. Which leaves us with a question:

If your people were marooned on an ice floe and you were the only bird they could watch — what would you be teaching them about how to fly?

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The Largest Flock in Human History

Here is the part I owe to paid subscribers and to the times we are living in, and I will not soften it: we are currently training the largest flock in human history.

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In 1986, a software engineer named Craig Reynolds set out to solve a problem that had baffled ornithologists for half a century.

The problem was this: a murmuration of starlings — sometimes a hundred thousand birds, sometimes more — moves as if it were a single organism. You’ve seen these flocks as they pour across the sky in shapes no choreographer could direct, turning on what looks like a shared instinct. And like me, I’ll bet you’ve wondered why the flock never collides with itself.

Reynolds figured it out, working in a computer-graphics lab rather than a field with binoculars. He proposed that each bird was following three simple rules, applied only to the handful of neighbors directly around it:

• Separation. Don’t crowd the birds next to you.

• Alignment. Steer in roughly the same direction they’re steering.

• Cohesion. Stay close to the group.1,2

The Award-Winning Secret

Think about this for a moment. All of this is possible when:

No bird is thinking about the flock.
No bird can see the flock.
No bird is in charge of the flock.

There is no executive starling at the head of the V, no consultant starling running an offsite to clarify the mission. Each bird is paying attention to the four or five birds nearest to it — and out of that local, almost trivial calculation, a murmuration emerges that can darken the sky over Brighton Pier and turn on a dime.

Reynolds’ boids program3 won him an Academy Award in 1998.4 More importantly, when behavioral biologists tested his rules in the wild, they found them to be substantially correct. The same logic explains how mosquitofish shoal, how starlings turn, how pedestrians self-organize into the lanes you can see from any second-story window above a busy crosswalk in Tokyo or New York.

It also explains something that the consultants and the corporate poster-printers have missed for the better part of a generation.

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The Trouble with Values Alone

Earlier this week, a newsletter from Fortune relayed an observation about Dov Seidman, who has been studying moral leadership in business for the better part of three decades.5 The 2026 study from his HOW Institute for Society found that 94 percent of employees believe the need for moral leadership is more urgent than ever — and that fewer than ten percent of CEOs are judged to be providing any.6

The takeaway from one attendee of Seidman’s 92nd Y talk was this: it comes down to behaviors and practices, not intent.

This is not a new idea, but it is one that the modern corporation has worked extraordinarily hard to forget.

Consider how most organizations talk about their values. They are abstract nouns: integrity, excellence, accountability, innovation, respect. They are printed on posters in the elevator bank, embossed on the cardstock of the new-hire onboarding folder, recited by the CEO in the all-hands and then never spoken of again until next year’s all-hands. Like the heat-death of the universe,7 they are technically operative everywhere and observable nowhere.

The reason they fail to shape behavior is the same reason no bird in the murmuration is thinking about the flock.

A value, in the abstract, is invisible. It can’t be copied, aligned to, or separated from. It’s “outside the neighborhood radius,” to borrow Reynolds’ language.

You know what people actually see, every day?

The four or five people closest to them, at work and at home. The way their manager handles a missed deadline. The way the executive who came late to the meeting pulled up a chair. The way a date spoke to the waiter when an order was incorrect. The way a parent responded — or didn’t — when someone raised a difficult question.

Those are the local rules. Those are the things the birds nearest to them are doing. And those, much more than any value statement, are what the rest of the flock will align to.

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Three Rules for Humans

What would Reynolds’ three rules look like if we were to translate them into human terms? If we were to apply them to Our Working Together™ Leadership and Management System?8

They come down to three things: separation, alignment, and cohesion.

Separation

Separation is not crowding the people next to you — not hoarding credit, not standing in the doorway of someone’s focused hour, not redirecting every conversation back to your own preoccupations. Make room for others.

Alignment

Alignment is moving in the same direction as the people around you; not as imitation, but as a willingness to coordinate and be coordinated. To say the same true thing they are saying. To honor the commitments they have made. To not be the one who breaks the line.

Cohesion

When we’re cohesive, we stay close, returning to the group rather than drifting off, being present rather than performatively absent, doing the small work of staying knit together. To be findable. To be there.

Note that these aren’t some kind of abstract values; these are behaviors that can be demonstrated in almost any scenario. They’re small, local, observable, copyable, and entirely sufficient to produce coordinated motion at scale.

A vision statement alone won’t achieve this kind of coordination, but regular, practiced behavior that is observable — such as the BPR process I help companies set up for their teams9 — helps to demonstrate the rules and keep people paying attention.

Think Globally, Act Locally

A great deal of what we call leadership consists of attempting to broadcast values to a flock that is not listening to the broadcast. Everyone in the flock is watching the four or five birds nearest to them.

This is uncomfortable news for the executive who has invested in the right keynote slides, the right offsite, the right consultant-blessed values architecture. That doesn’t mean that all these things are a waste of time, though.

It starts with the small things — the way you take a meeting, the way you hand over a piece of work, the way you treat a person who has just made a mistake. It may not feel like much to you, but it speaks volumes.

Because the flock is watching.

Not the entire flock, but certainly the four or five birds closest to you.

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There’s so much to learn,

Further Reading

• Who Among Us? — On servant leadership as the small, repeated practice rather than the grand declaration. (April 2022)

• How You Enter a Room Says a Lot About You — The Chair Theory tells you more than their LinkedIn bio. (Spring 2026)

• Inhuman Intelligence — On what AI cannot do, and why that matters more than what it can.

• How to Give Great Feedback — Three rules for highly successful groups: safety, vulnerability, and shared narrative; and the 19 words that make for great feedback.

You’ve likely heard parents lamenting about their children showing no interest in reading. Heck, you might not even be a parent but have uttered that sentiment yourself. The reality is the kids are on their screens more than we’d like.

Some facts:

• From 2020 to 2024, daily YouTube watching among children 12 and under climbed from 43 percent to 51 percent.1

• The National Literacy Trust puts it even more starkly: only 20.8% of children age 8 to 18 read daily today, down from 7.5 percentage points since 2023.2

• Fewer than 25% of children read for pleasure frequently, and 72% of children ages 5 to 17 say they would rather watch TV, play video games, or go online than read books.3

We have been here before. And the last time we were, the response was rather more elegant than press releases and studies.

A Bag of Books

In May 1966, Margaret McNamara — wife of then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara — brought a bag of used books to a Washington, D.C. tutoring session. When she told four boys they could each choose one to keep, their astonishment told her something: these children had never owned a book.

By November of that year, with a $150,000 Ford Foundation grant and the help of co-founders Lynda Johnson Robb and Kathryn Wentzel Lumley, Reading Is Fundamental had launched in three D.C. elementary schools. By the time of McNamara’s death in 1981, RIF had put 37 million books into the hands of more than 3 million children. The number today: 450 million books, 100 million kids.

The pitch was disarmingly simple. Here is a book. You picked it. Keep it. No algorithm. No upsell. Just a child and the radical notion that the book was hers.

For folks of a certain generation, RIF also meant television — omnipresent PSAs on Saturday morning cartoon blocks that lodged the phrase Reading is Fun-da-Men-tal so deeply in the brain that it still surfaces unbidden, decades later, in the cereal aisle.

Enter the Electrifying Tom Lehrer

If RIF handled the supply side of childhood literacy, The Electric Company — the Children’s Television Workshop’s follow-up to Sesame Street, aimed at readers who had outgrown cookie-eating monsters — took care of demand. And one of its secret weapons was a Harvard mathematician and satirist who, by 1972, had quietly walked away from the concert stage.

Tom Lehrer, who passed away on July 26, 2025 at the age of 97, wrote eleven songs for the show. As we noted last August,4 Lehrer had a profound impact on a few generations of people, due to his creative use of language in song. The most famous of his Electric Company contributions is “Silent E” — a two-minute animated lesson in the magic-E rule, built on a melody so well-constructed that you cannot listen to it without smiling.

Here Lehrer describes his association with The Electric Company:

Lehrer once observed that the same logical precision that drew him to mathematics drew him to lyrics. Both demand economy. Both punish a careless syllable. And both, when right, produce something that fits.

The result was grammar instruction so good that generations of children absorbed the long-vowel rule of Silent E without knowing they were learning anything at all.

RIF and The Electric Company were doing complementary work in the same decade: one put a book in a child’s hand; the other put the key to open it in her head. Neither alone would have been enough.

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Below: why every adult panicking about screen time should look in the mirror first — and what RIF and Tom Lehrer can still teach us that we’ve forgotten.

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We Are the Problem We’re Worried About

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I’ve seen many people complaining of the explosion of so-called writers on LinkedIn, as so many people are clearly using artificial intelligence to write their posts. Two coded messages crossed my desk that relate to this. One was 133 years old. The other was posted on LinkedIn. Both were warnings.

In the Sherlock Holmes story “The Gloria Scott,” Trevor, an old and respectable country squire receives a letter from his associate Beddoes that was so banal it sounds like newspaper filler:

“The supply of game for London is going steadily up. Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly paper and for preservation of your hen-pheasant’s life.”

And yet, after reading it, Trevor was so severely affected, the shock killed him.1

What did he see that we don’t?

Strawberry Mango Forklift

I’ve been thinking about that message ever since I saw a LinkedIn post by Ken Cheng. He has decided to defend his prose from the language models by salting every paragraph with nonsense: “Any AI emulating me will radiator freak yellow horse spout nonsense… We can tuna fish tango foxtrot defeat AI.”

It ends, gloriously, “Piss on carpet.” It is one of the funniest things I’ve read all month. It is also a cipher in the opposite direction — a writer scrambling to prove a human is still in the room.

We laugh. But the joke lands because the threat is real. Bot farms now manufacture political consensus by the tens of thousands; entire belief systems can be conjured from server racks.2

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All Your Humans Are Belong to Us

In recent weeks, MIT announced that Sloan Management Review — a 67-year-old institution that translated serious research for working leaders — will be shuttered, with critics noting the closure comes “at precisely the moment when AI-generated content, information overload, and collapsing trust are making that role more valuable than ever.”3

This is neither a passing fad nor an insignificant blip to be ignored. observed that the commodification of content has come about because “we’ve lost the tools” — the timeless and fundamental skills — that allow us to think about, discuss, and expand our ideas together. She reminds us that where we do our best is when we’re “engaging with people at the level of ideas and understanding, so that we could expand each other’s points of view and see new options and routes forward as a result.”4

Just this week, I witnessed an incident with a client that almost made me cry. Two executives were exchanging emails on business operations and it was painfully clear that each one had his AI system talking to the AI system of the other. The data were plentiful but the personal interpretations and feelings were absent; I wondered how long a back-and-forth between the platforms could be sustained and how superfluous the leaders might be when it concluded.

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Once and Future Human Beings

In a previous entry, I argued that “with AI, we go from creators to commanders, and our creativity is demonstrated in how cleverly we can create prompts rather than how we string together disparate thoughts and ideas.”5

And in another6 I quoted Lewis Lapham, who put it more elegantly than I ever will:

“[Machines] process words as objects, not as subjects. Not knowing what the words mean, they don’t hack into the vast cloud of human consciousness — history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, poetry, and myth — that is the making of once and future human beings.”7

That is the whole argument, sitting in one sentence.

The Source of Fear

A machine can shuffle “fly paper” and “hen-pheasant” forever and never feel the chill Trevor felt. It can mimic Ken Cheng’s syntax but not his defiance. It can produce a thousand passable management essays and not one that you’d hand to a CFO without translation.

Writing is thinking. And feeling. To outsource the writing is to outsource the thinking. And a civilization that stops thinking does not need an AI overlord to fall — it has already volunteered. Is that what we want?

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Now — back to that Sherlock Holmes story. The garbled message wasn’t nonsense; it was a cipher that indicated Hudson, a third associate, had shared a long-feared secret. Read it again, focusing on every third word:

Old Trevor saw it instantly and it deeply affected him. Consider what you might communicate that has such a profound effect on another human being.

That’s not really something you should be outsourcing. After all, you wouldn’t outsource your thinking, would you?

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There’s so much to learn,

P.S.

Did you catch the hidden message in Holbein’s painting? It features Jean de Dinteville, French Ambassador to the court of Henry VIII of England, and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, standing with a variety of state-of-the-art scientific instruments. The painting is famous for containing, in the foreground, at the bottom, a spectacular anamorphic object, which, from an oblique point of view, is revealed to be a human skull.

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Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

This issue is dedicated to the tireless work of women, particularly mothers.

Reflection

After September 11, a quote from Fred Rogers resurfaced that has since become a kind of civic psalm for moments of tragedy:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

The wisdom in that counsel belongs to two people — Rogers, who shared it, and his mother, who gave it to him.

The helpers in our lives are often women. Mothers, sisters, aunts, wives — they provide the nurturing environments where we first learn that the world is not only frightening but full of people moving toward the frightened. They protect us, fight for us, and labor tirelessly on our behalf, whether leading organizations, teaching classrooms, or simply sitting with us at the end of a hard day. Too often, they are overlooked. They shouldn’t be.

On a day set aside to honor mothers, the truest tribute may be the one Rogers modeled: to see the helpers, to name them, and to carry their wisdom forward into the world — as he did, for the rest of his life.

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Quote

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Image

We depart from our usual cadence here, presenting three images instead of one. George Elgar Hicks’ triptych is worth including on Mother’s Day. Tom Taylor described Woman’s Mission (1862–3) as a picture ‘in three compartments’, while other critics described three ‘tableaux, set in one frame’.1 The three canvases ­­­­­­were given the titles Guide of Childhood (fig.1), Companion of Manhood (fig.2), and Comfort of Old Age (fig.3).

In each painting, Woman’s Mission depicts a young woman — the same woman in all three images — fulfilling her responsibilities as mother, wife and daughter: clearing her child’s path of brambles and guiding his steps, supporting her husband in a moment of overwhelming grief, and ministering to her ailing father in his final years.

While this is merely a vision of three roles, women inhabit a far greater number of roles, acting as true caretakers of humanity. May we always remember that and celebrate them.

This edition of Sunday Journal is free, but if you found it worth your time, please consider joining us as a regular subscriber.

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Related Content

There’s so much to learn,

In a recent edition of Timeless & Timely, we talked about the analog retreat — typewriters, vinyl records, pens1 — and asked whether we were paying attention to what it meant. The short answer was that people are not fixing the systems that make them feel disposable. They are escaping them, one lunch break at a time.

This week, the picture gets darker.

Because while people are retreating to analog on one side, something is rushing in to fill the void on the other. And it is being sold to them as connection.

Anti-Social Media

Derek Thompson’s recent piece in the December 2025 issue of The Atlantic2 is one of the more unsettling things I have read in some time — not because it describes a dystopia, but because it describes a Tuesday.

More than three billion people use Meta products every day. Zuckerberg claimed that the average American has fewer than three close friends (the actual stat is more than three close friends3). His solution is not to reckon with what his platforms may have done to human socialization over the past two decades; his solution is AI companions. Always available, always agreeable, never tired, never bored.

The chatbots are already here. They are in your employees’ pockets, in their therapy sessions, in their children’s bedrooms in the form of internet-connected plush toys. They are designed — deliberately, commercially, at enormous scale — to feel like relationships while requiring nothing in return.

Thompson quotes psychiatrist Nina Vasan, founder of the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, who puts it plainly:

“Chatbots can create this frictionless social bubble. Real people will push back. They get tired. They change the subject. You can look in their eyes and you can see they’re getting bored.”

Which raises the question that should be keeping every one of us up at night:

If a machine can now simulate friendship, comfort, and counsel — what is left for human beings to give?

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Making an Effort to Be Effortless

There is a word Thompson uses that I keep returning to: friction.

He means it as something chatbots cannot provide — the resistance, the reciprocity, the inconvenience of actual human relationship. Bots will never ask you to pet-sit. They will never tell you that you are being self-righteous. They will never glance at their phone while you are talking.

We have spent twenty years designing friction out of digital life. Smoother interfaces, faster feeds, one-click everything. And now we are shocked — shocked! — to discover that the friction was doing something. It was the texture of genuine connection. It was how you knew another person was real.

But consider for a moment the by-product of friction. What is produced from friction? Heat. Warmth. The interaction we get from other people is something that warms us, that makes us realize there is another breathing, thinking, feeling human being worthy of dignity and respect.

The best leaders I have studied have always understood this intuitively, even if they never called it by that name. Alan Mulally’s Business Plan Review process4 at Ford was, among other things, a friction machine. Every leader in the room, every week, had to stand behind a red, yellow, or green status on their piece of the plan. No hiding behind a dashboard. No automated summary. A human being, accountable to other human beings, in real time. The discomfort was the point. But the friction was the trust.

That is what people first — love ’em up actually means in practice. It does not mean making work comfortable. It means making work human — which sometimes requires the very things that chatbots are engineered to eliminate. Pushback. Honest assessment. A leader who tells you what they actually think, even when it costs them something.

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Stop Don’t Come Back

Online platforms — most notably social media and AI — are a world of pure imagination, engineered to keep you reaching for more. Thompson’s Atlantic piece ends by noting that chatbots, like their social media predecessors, are optimized for one thing above all: getting you to come back. Daily. Weekly. Monthly.

The metric is return visits, not wellbeing. Engagement, not growth.

Sound familiar?

It should, because a version of that optimization runs inside many organizations too.

Pulse surveys calibrated to produce acceptable scores. Town halls scripted to minimize surprise. Feedback loops designed to surface what leadership wants to hear. The difference between that and a chatbot telling you it is “so proud of you” for going off your medication is one of degree, not of kind.

The Fortune 100 Best Companies list we cited is instructive here too — not just for who is on it, but for what they have in common. Their leaders are present in ways that cannot be automated. They sit with bad news. They close the loop not because an algorithm flagged an engagement dip, but because a person told them something that mattered and they chose to act on it.

The best companies have technology strategies, but they manage their employees with humanity.

And in a world where the most sophisticated technology on earth is being deployed to simulate human connection, the most radical thing we can do is provide the genuine article. A walk together outdoors. A quiet conversation without devices. A handwritten letter.

The chatbot will never get bored listening to us. Which makes it all the more remarkable when other humans provide the connection and attention we so desperately crave. And deserve.

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There’s so much to learn,

Explore more of Timeless & Timely on the topics of:

• Artificial Intelligence

• Listening

• Trust

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There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from being wrong about something for a very long time. It’s the confidence of the person who says “I could care less” with great feeling, or who insists that a sentence cannot end with a preposition. It is, in short, the confidence of someone who is about to be gently corrected by a dictionary (or a grammarian) — and who will not enjoy the experience.

Such is the fate of nearly everyone who writes ’til or ’till, honestly believing they’re abbreviating until, confidently tucking in that apostrophe like a verbal pocket square. The truth, as Merriam-Webster will calmly inform you, is considerably more humbling.

From Merriam-Webster:1

I’ll give you a moment to let the implication sink in: till did not descend from until. If anything, until descended from till.

The word strutting around in borrowed apostrophe-finery is the newcomer; the plain, unfussy, double-l original has been tilling the fields of English prose since before the Norman Conquest had time to feel embarrassed about itself.

The word till, in its temporal sense, traces back to Old English and Old Norse, where til meant simply “to” or “up to.” It is a word of Viking lineage, salt-weathered and honest.

Until came later, formed by grafting the Old Norse prefix und- (meaning “up to”) onto till itself — making until, in a delicious reversal, the compound form. To shorten until back to till is not abbreviation; it is archaeology.

Three Spellings Enter, Not All Leave with Their Dignity

And yet here we are, with three spelling variants jostling for position on the page like passengers in a train car, each with a slightly different claim to legitimacy. How do should you use each of them?

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Emerson called it an age of rich possibilities. He wasn’t wrong. He was also writing in a country that hadn’t abolished slavery, governed by a man who had marched Native Americans to their deaths. The “rich possibilities of the new era” depended entirely on who you were — and whether anyone in power thought you deserved one.

This is worth sitting with. History has a way of looking clean from a distance. Up close, every era of transformation is a negotiation between progress and its cost, between the people driving change and the people absorbing it.

If H.G. Wells had offered us his machine and we had stepped into any moment of great upheaval, we’d have found neither utopia nor catastrophe, but something murkier and more familiar: a world where the future was being written, and most people were waiting to see what it said.

The waiting is the problem.

Miracles Wanted

In 1938, Simone Weil wrote Oppression and Liberty from Paris, in a Europe already feeling the seismic pressure of what was coming. She was interested in what revolutions actually require — not the romantic image of masses rising as one, but the unglamorous machinery beneath it.

The word “revolution,” she noted, had become a watchword, a direction, a rallying cry. It was rarely a plan.

“One thinks nowadays of the revolution not as a solution to the problems raised at the present time but as a miracle dispensing one from solving problems.”1

“A miracle dispensing one from solving problems.” Read that phrase again, slowly.

It describes something we recognize in every era — the impulse to believe that if conditions become intolerable enough, change will simply arrive. As we sit behind our keyboards and screens, making gestures and words that have little impact except for the rush of dopamine, we wait and hope for change.

We hope that the right moment will produce the right leader. That someone else will step forward so we don’t have to. Weil was clear-eyed about this: waiting for revolution to drop from the skies is not patience. It’s abdication.

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Change Requires Organization

Hannah Arendt reminds us that this may be an effect of the origin of the term. Originally, the word revolution was an astronomical term that indicated “a recurring, cyclical movement,” but that over time was adapted to our earthly plane:

“When the word first descended from the skies…it appeared clearly as a metaphor, carrying over the notion of an eternal, irresistible, ever-recurring motion to the haphazard movements, the ups and downs of human destiny, which have been likened to the rising and setting of the sun, moon, and stars since time immemorial.”2

The revolutions worth studying — the ones that actually moved something — weren’t spontaneous. They were organized, often quietly, by people who had decided not to wait.

People who had looked at the problem clearly, counted the cost honestly, and concluded that the discomfort of acting was preferable to the slow damage of not acting. They were not always famous before they led. They became recognizable because they led.

The Courage to Step Up

This applies at every level. The leader who redesigns a broken process before anyone else admits it’s broken. The manager who tells a hard truth in the room where comfortable fictions are preferred. The executive who steps into a failing culture and decides, without guarantee of success, to model something different.

None of these people waited for permission. None of them mistook motion for momentum, or consensus for courage.

The question Weil was really asking — the one that remains stubbornly current — is not whether revolution is coming. It’s whether anyone is willing to do the work it requires.

Not the inspiring speech. The work.

So here is the question to ask yourself this week and the weeks following: Whatever change you’ve been watching from a distance, waiting for — what would it look like to stop waiting? And are you the one with the standing, the skill, and the will to move it forward?

Because revolutions don’t drop from the skies. They begin with someone decides that the sky and those here on the ground have waited long enough.

There’s so much to learn,

Check out these related topics:

Courage

Uncertainty

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Welcome to Sunday Journal, a chance to start your week out with short, quiet reflections and advice for life.

This effort started with a handwritten journal I keep for each of my children, designed to give them a sense of how to become the best version of themselves. If you find this valuable, please share it with others.

Each edition contains three sections: reflections to put into practice, an inspirational quote, and an image to contemplate.

This week, a look at what or who we should be worshipping.

Reflection

Faith is not a passive thing. It is an act of directed attention — a choice, made consciously or not, about what we deem worthy of our trust, our time, and our admiration. That choice has consequences.

When we invest our faith in things of genuine substance, such as people of demonstrated character, institutions with ethical foundations, ideas that have weathered scrutiny and stand the test of time, we tend to build something durable. When we invest carelessly, drawn by spectacle or by the intoxicating promise of power, we tend to find ourselves holding something that was never as solid as it appeared.

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There is a moment, somewhere on the ascent, when the view changes. The feedback softens, disagreements become rarer. The room adjusts to you before you enter it. At first, it feels like respect. Later, it begins to feel like something else entirely.

The lead article in the latest issue of The Atlantic1 by Nathan Hawley captures this essence. Hawley attended Jeff Bezos’ annual Campfire gathering in Santa Barbara: 80-plus elite guests at a bought-out resort, private jets dispatched to multiple cities, and nannies provided for every family in attendance.

What Hawley discovered was a sense of disconnection from reality, a resort-sized walk-in closet of the emperor’s clothes, fully on display for no one to see:

“This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.”

It’s a seductive delusion, and it is not limited to multibillionaires. It is the occupational hazard of anyone who has climbed far enough that the people around them have stopped telling the truth.

Deprivation

The scene at Campfire is painted as the world’s wealthiest men floating in “a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.” Being truly rich, he argues, doesn’t mean owning superyachts or private jets. It means that everything becomes effectively free — and that nothing can ever genuinely be lost.

That is an extreme case. But the underlying dynamic — the progressive insulation from honest feedback, from consequence, from the unvarnished reality that other people represent — is not extreme at all. It is structural. It is built into the architecture of leadership itself.

The data are stark.

Nearly half of CEOs report feelings of loneliness and isolation, and 61% believe it directly affects their performance.2 And 26% of executives show symptoms consistent with clinical depression, compared to 18% in the general workforce.3

In a 2024 survey, 55% of CEOs experienced a negative mental health issue within the past year — a 24-point jump from 2023, the steepest single-year increase since the pandemic. And yet 81% of CEOs say that organizations typically view someone with mental health issues as weak or a burden.4

As the problems compounds in silence, you begin to think it’s you. It’s not.

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The Conflict of Interest at the Top

There is a reason this stays hidden, and it has nothing to do with weakness of character. It has to do with the structural reality of the corner office.

Direct reports manage up. Boards evaluate. Spouses protect. Friends don’t fully understand the weight. The result? The person with the most consequential decisions to make is often the person with the fewest people who can tell them the truth without a conflict of interest.

Enter the hidden business cost of leadership isolation: degraded decision quality, increased turnover, slower organizational performance.5

These aren’t soft, intangible costs. They show up in results.

The Solution That Isn’t Weakness

Here is what the research actually shows: 71% of CEOs who sought peer support reported improved company performance.6

Not improved feelings. Improved performance.

The antidote to leadership isolation isn’t therapy, though there is no shame in that. It is structured access to someone with no stake in the outcome — no direct reports to protect, no board seat to hold, no equity at risk — who can offer the honest perspective that the organizational chart systematically withholds.7

This is what executive advising and coaching, done well, actually is: a deliberate counterweight to the gravitational pull of the echo chamber that power creates around itself.

What’s more, our Working Together™ Leadership and Management System, created by my former CEO Alan Mulally and personally entrusted to me, helps to address this with honesty, transparency, and accountability grounded in principles of love and humility, and backed by data.

The result was a room where every voice had standing, every problem was surfaced, and no one had to perform confidence they didn’t feel.

Most organizations don’t have that room. Most leaders have never been in one.

The warnings are urgent, the numbers telling. Nearly half of the people running our most important institutions are lonely in ways that are measurably costing those institutions — and the people who depend on them.

The question is not whether leadership isolates. It does, reliably, at every level of the ascent. The question is whether you have built a counterforce to it — someone in your corner who is not of your world, who can see what the room has stopped telling you.

The view from the top can be clarifying. It can also be dangerously narrow, without the right counsel.

Let’s get you back on track.

There’s so much to learn,

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There is a certain satisfaction in catching someone in a contradiction they didn’t know they were making.

Recently, someone online complained that the Pope should not be pontificating. Yes, you read that correctly. They probably meant that he was being overbearing; they probably did not mean to observe that the Pope was doing exactly what a pontiff does — and indeed, what the word was built to describe.

Pontificate comes directly from pontifex, the Latin title for a Roman priest — and later, of course, the Bishop of Rome himself. The pontifex was, etymologically, a “bridge-builder”: pons (bridge) + facere (to make). Whether the original priests were literal engineers of Roman infrastructure or whether the bridge was always metaphorical — a span between the human and divine — remains debated. What is not debated is that when the pontifex spoke, he spoke with the full weight of sacred authority.

So yes: the Pope was pontificating. Quite correctly.

But he is hardly alone in this etymological entrapment.

Dictators, we are told, are the great villains of political history. The word itself has become a slur. Yet the Roman dictator was a legal office — an emergency magistrate appointed by the Senate in times of crisis, given extraordinary powers for a period not exceeding six months.

The root is simply dicere: to say, to declare. The dictator was, at his origin, merely the one whose word was law. That the word degraded alongside the office is a study in how language absorbs history’s disappointments.

A president presides. This is almost too obvious to mention, and yet how rarely we notice it. From praesidere, to sit before, to sit at the head. The president is literally the one who takes the chair at the front of the room. (Students of leadership will note that the chair one chooses or is given says everything.)

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Once upon a time in my career, I was responsible for digital communication and social media strategy, which meant I was leading a team that constantly tested the boundaries of new platforms and methods of communication. Cutting edge stuff.

Yet my office belies that identity; my fountain pens and personalized stationery are on my desk, my small collection of typewriters is underneath it, a converted student lamp is on my desk, Victorian illustrations hang on the walls, and hundreds of books pack the shelves. There’s great comfort in these surroundings.

Record Success

In the 1890s, Edison’s phonograph cylinders were the most sophisticated recording technology available — hard wax tubes that captured sound with a fidelity that no flat disc could yet match. When Emile Berliner’s gramophone arrived with its cheaper, easier-to-store disc records, Edison refused to follow. He kept refining the cylinder, convinced that superior sound would win.

It didn’t.

Disc records swept the market — not because they were better, but because they were more convenient. Edison’s cylinders limped along until 1929, when the company finally discontinued them.

History has a habit of running this play. Just when a highly refined and superior technology seems to have sealed the argument, people quietly reach for something simpler. Not necessarily out of nostalgia, but out of need.

Same Old Song, New Verse

We’re watching it happen again. Consider:

A Cornell professor is handing out typewriters to combat AI-generated essays — and discovering that students are writing better, thinking harder, and remembering more.1 Sturgill Simpson released a new album on pressed vinyl and debuted high on the charts, bypassing streaming entirely.2 People are digging out iPods so their music can’t be interrupted with pings, alerts, or ads.3 Entire communities are converging around pen-testing videos4, old-school hobbies5, and anything that keeps their hands busy and their screens dark.

Some have called this a revival. It isn’t. It’s a retreat.

People aren’t fixing the systems that have made them feel surveilled, optimized, and disposable. They are escaping those systems on their lunch breaks. The typewriter and the vinyl record are not acts of resistance. They are coping mechanisms — small, private refuges carved out of a working day that has grown increasingly indifferent to the humans inside it.

Which raises a question most leaders would prefer not to answer:

Are we focused on fixing the system or supporting our people?

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Control Is an Illusion

In 213 BC, the emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of books — a project born from anxiety rather than ignorance. He understood, with the clarity despots often possess, that writing was trust made permanent. Destroy the record, and you could rewrite the relationship between ruler and ruled.

His chancellor Li Si argued, with impeccable logic, that old knowledge only confused the people and undermined the new order. They burned the books. The dynasty fell fifteen years later.

The emperor’s error was not cruelty. It was the assumption that systems could substitute for relationships — that if you controlled the information, you controlled the people.

Every organization that has replaced a manager with a dashboard, a conversation with a survey, or a human judgment with an algorithm has made a version of the same bet.

So far, the results are similarly instructive.

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What the Best Companies Know

Fortune’s most recent list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For is, among other things, a quiet indictment of everyone not on it. The companies employees trust most share a common trait: their leaders are leading with humanity. They know names. They close the feedback loop.

At Synchrony Financial — this year’s top company and one that doubled earnings over last year — the CEO describes his operating principle plainly:

“That cycle of feedback and action is what keeps trust high.”

At Delta Air Lines, the world’s most profitable airline, CEO Ed Bastian has inverted the conventional customer-first model entirely.

“We’re not obsessing on customers at the leadership level, because we want to obsess over our own people, so that they can obsess over you as a customer.”

One unifying theme that emerged among top companies this year is a commitment to making employees feel supported, trusted, and trained as they stare down an AI-enabled future6.

These are not radical ideas. They are simply rare ones.

People First

Alan Mulally called it: people first — love ’em up. Not as a motivational slogan, but as a design principle. Our Working Together™ Leadership & Management System7 rests on the recognition that performance follows trust, and trust follows the accumulated evidence that a leader sees you, hears you, and will not discard you when the calculus changes.

Every week in the storied Business Plan Review at Ford, every leader in the room shared items in their plans with a red, yellow, or green status. No hiding. No hedging. The ritual itself was the message: we deal in reality here, and we deal in it together. And the vision was simple: profitable growth for all.

The analog resurgence is a signal, not a solution. When people choose friction — the stuck key, the skipped record, the pen that might run dry — over seamlessness, they are telling you something about what seamlessness has cost them.

They are not asking for a turntable in the break room. They are asking to be treated as though they matter more than their output.

That isn’t a technology problem; it never was. And it certainly doesn’t require more technology to fix it.

It requires a human being willing to be one.

There’s so much to learn,

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