Somewhere around your late thirties or early forties, a thought shows up uninvited. It sounds something like this: “I should be further along by now.” And once it arrives, it brings friends. I picked the wrong career. I spent too long in that city. I should have started sooner. I wasted time.

I was sitting on the terrace and put my book down (reading Jack Reacher series) and picked up my phone to quickly look at something and then a Gary Vaynerchuk post appeared. It made a point recently that stuck with me. He described two people. One builds a successful business, makes serious money, and wakes up at 42 feeling like they missed out on family and real connection. The other goes all-in on family, experiences, and enjoying life, then hits 41 with debt and panic about their financial future. Both arrive at the same conclusion: I wasted time.

And his response was blunt. No, you didn’t. You lived the life you chose for twenty years. Now you have woken up to something different. So adjust.

That framing is worth sitting with.

The “wasted time” story is a trap

Here is what actually happens when you label a chunk of your life as wasted. You do not just write off the past. You poison the present. Because if those years were a waste, then what does that make you right now?Someone who is behind. Someone who got it wrong. Someone starting from a deficit.

That is a brutal lens to look through, and it is almost never accurate.

The years you spent in a job that turned out to be wrong taught you what you actually want. The relationship that did not work out taught you what you will not accept next time. The city you “should have left sooner” gave you something, even if it is just the clarity to know it was not the right fit. None of that is waste. It is data. It is lived experience. And it shaped every decision you are capable of making today. But we do noot frame it that way, because regret is louder than perspective. It is easier to look back and see a wrong turn than it is to see a necessary one.

 

Nobody plays it 100% correct

Vaynerchuk asked a question that I think deserves repeating. Has anyone ever played it perfectly? Has any life worth reading about been a straight line from start to finish?

No. Not one. No matter what social media tries to sell us, it’s full-stop no one.

Every biography, every honest conversation, every career you actually admire up close has chapters that looked like mistakes at the time. Detours that only made sense in hindsight. Periods of doubt, bad decisions, and sideways movement that felt like failure but turned out to be foundation. The interesting part of any story is never the part where everything went according to plan. It is the part where it did not, and the person figured out what to do next.

So why do we hold our own lives to a standard that no one in history has ever met? Why do we expect a clean, optimized path when literally no evidence suggests that is how life works?

 

Process thinking applies here too

If you have spent any time on this site, you know I see most things through a process lens. And this is no different. In any process, you do not get to skip the learning phase. You run something, you observe what happens, you adjust. That is how improvement works. Not by getting it right on the first attempt. Not by avoiding all wrong turns. By going through the cycle and using what you learn to make the next iteration better.

Your twenties were an iteration. Your thirties were an iteration. Whatever decade you are in now is another one. The question is not whether earlier versions were perfect. They were never going to be. The question is whether you are using what they taught you.

Labeling past iterations as wasted is like deleting your data before you analyze it. You are throwing away the most valuable input you have.

The real cost of regret

Here is the part that does not get talked about enough. The “wasted time” mindset does not just make you feel bad about the past. It actively slows you down in the present. When you believe you are behind, you make desperate decisions. You rush into things to “make up for lost time.” You chase urgency instead of alignment. You pick the faster option over the better one because you feel like you cannot afford to be patient anymore.
And that creates a new round of choices you will probably regret later. The cycle feeds itself.

Compare that to someone who looks at the same history and says, “That was part of my process. I am not behind. I am just in a different chapter.” That person makes calmer decisions. More intentional ones. They are not running from their past. They are building on it.

Same facts. Completely different outcome. The only variable is the story.

 

What adjusting actually looks like

Accepting that you did not waste time does not mean you sit still and call it growth. It means you stop punishing yourself long enough to actually think clearly about what comes next. If you spent a decade building a career and neglected everything else, you do not need to burn down what you built. You need to expand. Start investing in the areas you ignored, with all the discipline and focus you clearly know how to apply.

If you spent years enjoying life and now the financial picture needs attention, you are not starting from zero. You are starting with twenty years of living that gave you perspective most people your age are still chasing. That is not a deficit. That is an asset.

he adjustment is real. The work ahead is real. But the framing matters enormously. “I need to adjust” is a forward-facing statement. “I wasted time” is an anchor.

Drop the anchor.

 

It is called life

There is a line from Vaynerchuk’s take on this that I keep coming back to. He said something along the lines of, “I went through the process. I am living life. I am a human being. I am learning. It is called life.”

That is it. That is the whole thing.

You are not a project plan with milestones and a critical path. You are a person figuring it out in real time, with incomplete information, shifting priorities, and the occasional bad call. Welcome to the species. The sooner you stop treating your past like a series of errors and start treating it like the foundation it actually is, the faster you move. Not because you are making up for lost time. Because you finally stopped losing energy to a story that was never true in the first place.

You did not waste time. You lived. Now keep going.

 

Key Takeaways

• Labeling past years as “wasted” poisons your present decision-making and creates a false sense of deficit.
• No one has ever lived a perfectly optimized life. Detours and wrong turns are not bugs, they are the process.
• Regret drives desperate, reactive choices. Acceptance drives intentional, grounded ones.
• Your past iterations are data, not errors. Use them instead of deleting them.
• The adjustment ahead is real, but it starts with dropping the “wasted time” narrative and moving forward clearly.

 

If you have read this far, thank you for being here. I hope this takes some weight off whatever chapter you have been quietly judging yourself for. If it landed, pass it along. A like, a share, or a comment helps it reach someone who is probably stuck in the same loop. I appreciate it.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

Pull up your bank statement right now and read it line by line. Not the mortgage. Not the car payment. The small stuff. The recurring charges that have been leaving your account so reliably, for so long, that your eyes slide right over them.

That is where the money goes.

Not in one bad decision. In a dozen small ones you forgot you made.

I want you to finish reading this and do one thing: look. Just look at what you are actually paying for every month. You will probably find charges you would never sign up for again today if someone asked you fresh.

 

Why we stop seeing recurring costs

There is a reason this happens, and it is not because you are bad with money. When something becomes automatic, your brain stops registering it. That is usually helpful. You do not want to consciously think about breathing. But when automation gets applied to your spending, it creates a blind spot. A subscription you set up once becomes invisible by month three. By month twelve it is just part of the furniture.

The gym membership from January. The streaming service you signed up for to watch one show. That app with the free trial you meant to cancel before the billing kicked in. The “premium” tier you upgraded to during a busy week and never reconsidered. None of these feel like active decisions anymore. They just happen. And things that just happen are exactly the things worth questioning.

This is a systems problem, not a willpower problem

I spend a lot of time thinking about processes and systems, in everyday life. It’s both a blessing and a curse I guess. My brain never stops spotting things that could be optimized, or maybe it’s just the way I’ve wired it over the years. Either way, one of the most useful principles I have picked up is simple: look for hidden waste. Not the obvious kind. The kind that drains your resources while producing nothing in return. In process improvement there is a concept called muda, a Japanese word for activity that consumes without contributing. It comes from the Toyota Production System, but honestly, you do not need to know any of that to use the idea. You already understand it. A subscription you never open is waste. You are paying for something you do not use. That is it.

The fix is not to feel guilty about it. Guilt is not a system. The fix is a small, repeatable process that makes the waste visible so you can choose what to do about it. And that process takes a few simple steps that can be done right after reading this.

The three-step audit

• Step one: list everything: Every recurring charge goes in one place. Subscriptions, memberships, insurance, dues, loan payments, all of it. Pull three months of bank statements so nothing hides behind a quarterly billing cycle. This step alone tends to be uncomfortable. Seeing the monthly total as a single number hits different than seeing it scattered across twelve statements.
• Step two: question each item honestly: For every line, ask yourself three things. How often do I actually use this? Is the value I get worth what I pay? Does it overlap with something else I already have? Here is the blunt version: three streaming services covering roughly the same content is not three separate decisions. It is one decision you accidentally made three times.
• Step three: decide and act: Keep what earns its place. Cancel what does not. Downgrade what you only use occasionally. Then set a date, sit down, and actually do it. A list of good intentions is not the same as a lighter bank statement.

That is the whole method. And if you have ever cleaned up a messy workflow at the office, you already know the logic. Find the waste. Question it. Remove it. Your money works the same way.

 

The part nobody talks about

I will be straight with you. The hard part is not the spreadsheet. It is the looking. Most of us avoid the audit because we already suspect what we will find. It is easier not to know. But “easier not to know” is exactly how the leak stays open. A few minutes of mild discomfort buys you months of recovered money. And the discomfort fades a lot faster than the savings do. You will probably find at least one charge you are slightly embarrassed about. Join the club. That is not a character flaw. It is just what happens when convenient systems run unchecked. The point is not to judge past you. The point is to give present you the information to make better choices.

What you actually get from this

Small changes here add up surprisingly fast. Cutting twenty or thirty euros a month in dead weight is a few hundred euros a year, recovered without earning more, hustling harder, or giving up anything you actually enjoy. You are only removing what you were not using in the first place. But the bigger win is the habit itself. Do this once and you start noticing recurring costs as they show up, instead of discovering them years later. You become harder to quietly charge for things you do not want. Would you rather find the leak now, or keep paying for it? That is process thinking applied to your wallet. And that is really the whole idea behind everything I write about, whether it is work, life, or money. Better systems, less stress, more of what actually matters. So this week, look. The leak is only powerful while it stays invisible.

 

A tool to make this easier

If you want to skip the blank spreadsheet and get straight to answers, I built a simple Excel workbook (in English, German and Spanish) that walks you through this entire audit. You list your recurring costs, score each one, and it tells you what to keep, what to downgrade, and what to cut, along with your total potential savings. It is a few euros on my Gumroad and it pays for itself many times over on the first run. If you want to go deeper into how process thinking can improve your everyday life and work, I write about it regularly over at leansixsigma.cc. Same practical approach, different angle.

 

Key Takeaways

• Recurring costs go unnoticed because automation makes them invisible, not because you are careless.
• An unused subscription is textbook waste: you are paying for capacity you never consume.
• Run a simple three-step process: list everything, question each item, then decide and act.
• The hardest step is looking, not fixing. A few minutes of discomfort buys back months of money.
• Cutting dead weight recovers hundreds a year without sacrificing anything you actually value.

If you have gotten this far, I appreciate you taking the time. I hope this gets you to pull up that bank statement and look at it with fresh eyes. If it helped, let me know, or a share goes a long way in helping someone else who needs to hear this. Thank you.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

There’s a quote I came across recently that stopped me mid-scroll:

One of the strongest signs of intelligence is the ability to consider another person’s perspective without becoming defensive. Curiosity reveals a sharp mind. It shows who is committed to understanding rather than winning.

I’ve read a lot of quotes. Most of them wash over me. This one didn’t, because it describes something I’ve seen play out hundreds of times in meetings, in conversations, in relationships, and in my own head. The gap between people who listen to understand and people who listen to reload.

 

Why Defensiveness Is the Default

Here’s what I think happens. When someone challenges your idea, your position, or your worldview, your brain doesn’t process it as information. It processes it as a threat. Not a physical threat. An identity threat. You’ve attached yourself to the opinion, so an attack on the opinion feels like an attack on you. Research on intellectual humility backs this up. Psychologists at Duke University and other institutions have found that most people struggle to separate their beliefs from their sense of self. When a belief gets questioned, the emotional response is almost identical to being personally criticized. The result? Defensiveness. Dismissal. Or the classic move: doubling down on the original position regardless of new evidence.

This is everywhere. In boardrooms where someone suggests a different strategy and the room goes cold. In relationships where one partner raises a concern and the other immediately starts building a legal defense. In online discussions where the goal stopped being understanding about four replies ago.

The instinct to defend is natural. Acting on it every single time is a choice.

 

Curiosity as a Competitive Advantage

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the people I respect most, both professionally and personally. They ask more questions than they make statements. Not performative questions designed to steer the conversation back to their point. Genuine questions. The kind that start with “help me understand” or “what am I missing here” or even just “why do you see it that way?” That takes confidence, not weakness. Because you’re essentially saying: I might be wrong, and I’m okay with finding out.

Research published in Nature Reviews Psychology found that people with higher intellectual humility make better decisions, maintain stronger relationships, and are better liked in social and professional settings. They’re also more accurate in their assessments because they’re willing to factor in information that contradicts what they already believe.

Think about that. The people who are willing to be wrong end up being right more often. There’s an irony in there that’s worth sitting with.

 

Understanding vs. Winning

I think this is where most people get stuck. We’ve been conditioned to treat conversations, especially disagreements, as competitions. Someone wins. Someone loses. If you concede a point, you’ve lost ground. If you change your mind, you’re weak.

But what if changing your mind when the evidence warrants it is actually the strongest move available?

I’ve been in rooms where one person shifted their position mid-discussion because someone made a better argument. Every single time, the respect in the room went up, not down. Nobody thought less of them. Everyone thought more of them. Because it signaled something rare: this person cares more about getting it right than about being right.That distinction, getting it right versus being right, is probably the single most useful filter I’ve come across for evaluating how someone thinks. People who optimize for being right protect their ego. People who optimize for getting it right protect their outcomes.

 

The Practical Version

This isn’t about becoming a pushover. It’s not about agreeing with everyone or abandoning your positions the moment someone pushes back. Intellectual humility isn’t intellectual servility. You can hold strong views and still hold them loosely enough to update when better information arrives.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

Next time someone disagrees with you, whether it’s a colleague, a partner, or a stranger online, try pausing before you respond. Not to formulate a better counterargument. Just to genuinely consider whether they might have a point you haven’t thought about. Ask one honest question before you make your next statement. Not a rhetorical trap. A real question.#

Notice how your body reacts when your ideas get challenged. The tightness in your chest, the urge to interrupt, the instinct to dismiss. That reaction is information. It’s telling you that your ego just showed up to a conversation that your brain was handling fine. The smartest people I’ve worked with aren’t the ones who talk the most or argue the hardest. They’re the ones who stay curious the longest. They treat disagreement as data, not disrespect. you can hold your ground and still make room for someone else’s perspective. Those two things were never in conflict.

If this resonated, pass it along to someone who could use the reminder. We all could, honestly. The world has enough people trying to win arguments. It could use a few more trying to understand them.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

A man turns down a $20 million offer because he thinks he’s worth more. The market collapses. His company goes from $20 million to a fire sale under $500,000. He gets fired. He rebuilds. He sells the next company for $25 million. Then he takes $25,000 of that money and invests it in a car service nobody believes in.

That $25,000 becomes $100 million.

If you wrote this as fiction, an editor would tell you it’s too convenient. But this isn’t fiction. It’s the documented career arc of Jason Calacanis, and whether you’re a fan of the man or not, the pattern underneath the story is worth studying.

 

Bay Ridge, Brooklyn

Calacanis was born on November 28, 1970, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His father was of Greek descent and ran a small bar. His mother was a nurse who worked multiple jobs. Working-class family in a working-class neighborhood. He grew up watching his father run a business. Not from a textbook. From a barstool. He saw how money moved, how customers behaved, how a small operation either made it through the month or didn’t. By the time he was a teenager, the family faced serious financial hardship when his father lost the business. He went to Fordham University and studied psychology. Not business. Not finance. Not computer science. Psychology. He wanted to understand people. That choice would prove more useful than any MBA.

 

The Magazine That Almost Made Him Rich

After college, Calacanis started covering the emerging internet industry as a tech reporter in New York. This was the early-to-mid 1990s. The internet was becoming real. Companies were launching overnight. Money was moving fast. He started his own publication: Silicon Alley Reporter. It covered New York’s tech scene: the startups, the funding rounds, the deals, the personalities. It started as a photocopied newsletter stapled together. Sixteen pages. Then it grew. Fifty pages. A hundred and fifty. Nearly three hundred. He was profiled in The New Yorker. He appeared on Charlie Rose. Silicon Alley Reporter became one of the defining media voices of the dot-com boom.

A media company offered to buy it for $20 million.

Calacanis was 29 years old. He said no. He believed it was worth more. Then the dot-com bubble burst.Ad revenue evaporated. The companies that had been paying for full-pag ads in his magazine didn’t exist anymore. Silicon Alley Reporter went from a $20 million asset to something nobody wanted. He eventually sold the publication to Dow Jones for just under $500,000.

Think about that gap for a second. $20 million on the table. He walks away. Twelve months later, the same asset is worth 97.5% less. Then he got fired. One year earlier: The New Yorker profile, Charlie Rose appearances, a $20 million offer. Now: unemployed, broke, starting over from nothing.

 

The Rebuild

Most people would have spent years processing that kind of loss. He spent months. Then he started building again. Blogs were emerging as a new medium. Hundreds of writers were publishing online with no real platform, no distribution, and no way to make money from their work. Nobody had built a network to aggregate them. In September 2003, Calacanis co-founded Weblogs, Inc. with Brian Alvey. Mark Cuban provided early angel funding. The idea was straightforward: build a network of niche blogs, hire freelance writers, and monetize through advertising. One of those blogs was Engadget, which became one of the biggest technology publications on the internet. Roughly two years after founding the company, AOL came calling. In October 2005, AOL acquired Weblogs, Inc. for approximately $25 million in cash (some reports suggest the total reached $30 million including earnout provisions).

Two years. From nothing to a $25 million exit. After losing everything.

 

The Check

After the AOL sale, Calacanis stayed on briefly, then moved into a role at Sequoia Capital, one of the most legendary venture firms in Silicon Valley history (early backers of Apple, Google, YouTube, and many others). His role was essentially to find the next great company before anyone else did. In 2009 or early 2010, he was introduced to a young founder named Travis Kalanick. Kalanick had an idea for an on-demand car service. You’d press a button on your phone, and a car would show up.

The response from most people was predictable:

Too expensive. Too niche. Only works in San Francisco. Taxis already exist. Why would anyone want this? Calacanis saw something different. The problem with taxis wasn’t that people didn’t want car service. The problem was that getting a taxi was an unpredictable, unreliable, frustrating experience. If you made it frictionless, you weren’t building a niche product for tech workers. You were replacing one of the oldest service industries in the world.

He wrote a check for $25,000. Uber was valued at approximately $5 million at the time. Over the next decade, Uber expanded from a few thousand rides in San Francisco to operations in hundreds of cities across dozens of countries. In May 2019, Uber went public on the New York Stock Exchange at a valuation of approximately $82 billion.

Calacanis’s $25,000 investment was worth, on paper, roughly $100 million.

That’s a 4,000x return. On a single check.

 

What People Miss About This Story

The Uber investment is the headline. It’s the number that gets shared. But the headline actually obscures the more interesting pattern underneath. Calacanis didn’t just get lucky with one check. He built a system.
After the Weblogs sale and the Uber bet, he went on to invest in over 300 startups, including Robinhood, Thumbtack, Superhuman, Calm, Desktop Metal, Trello, and Wealthfront. He built the LAUNCH conference, where thousands of founders pitch to investors annually. He wrote a bestselling book called Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups, documenting how he turned $100,000 in angel investments into $100 million. He launched This Week in Startups, one of the longest-running business podcasts in history, starting in 2009. And in 2020, he co-founded the All-In podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, which became one of the most influential business and technology shows in the world. His current net worth is estimated at somewhere between $100 million and $150 million. All of this from a kid in Bay Ridge whose father lost his bar when he was a teenager.

 

The Pattern, Not the Person

I want to be clear about something. This post isn’t hero worship. I don’t know Jason Calacanis personally. I’m not endorsing his views, his politics, his personality, or every decision he’s ever made. Public figures are complicated, and turning any of them into a one-dimensional success story is usually a mistake. What I am interested in is the pattern. Because the pattern is useful whether you like the man or not.

Here it is, stripped down:

He overvalued what he had and paid for it. The $20 million offer on Silicon Alley Reporter was real. He turned it down because he thought it was worth more. The market disagreed violently. He sold it for $500,000 instead. That’s a brutal lesson in the difference between what you think something is worth and what someone will actually pay for it. Most of us have a version of this lesson somewhere in our past. The question is whether it makes you cautious forever or whether it teaches you to move faster next time.

He didn’t spend years mourning the loss. This is the part I find most instructive. Plenty of smart, capable people experience a major failure and then spend years in a kind of emotional recovery. They process. They reflect. They hesitate. Calacanis seemed to process the loss and start building the next thing almost simultaneously. I’m not saying he wasn’t affected. I’m saying he didn’t let the loss define his timeline. He rebuilt using what the market wanted next, not what he wished it still wanted. Silicon Alley Reporter was a print-era product in a print-era market. When that market died, he didn’t try to revive it. He looked at what was emerging (blogs), saw an opportunity nobody else was organizing around, and built into that. The Weblogs, Inc. model was simpler, leaner, and more aligned with where information distribution was heading. He read the direction of things correctly and moved into it, rather than trying to bring back what had worked before.

He was in the room because he stayed in the game. The reason Calacanis was even in a position to write a $25,000 check for Uber is because he hadn’t quit. He was still showing up. Still building relationships. Still going to meetings and taking calls and staying close to the people who were starting companies. The Uber opportunity didn’t find him by accident. It found him because he was still in the arena.

 

What This Actually Means for You

Not everyone reading this is going to become an angel investor or build a blog network or write a $25,000 check that turns into $100 million. That’s not the point.

The point is simpler and more universal than that.

At some point, most people experience a version of the Calacanis arc. You build something. You believe it’s worth more than it is. The market corrects you. You lose money, time, credibility, momentum, or all four. And then you’re standing there with nothing, wondering if the whole thing was a waste.

It wasn’t. But only if you keep going.

The loss teaches you things the win never could. It teaches you what’s real and what was narrative. It teaches you to move faster, decide with less information, and hold things more loosely. It teaches you that your identity isn’t tied to any single venture, company, role, or outcome. And sometimes, if you stay in the game long enough, it puts you in a room with the opportunity that changes everything. Not because you deserved it. Not because the universe owed you a comeback. But because you were still there, still paying attention, and still willing to write the check when everyone else in the room was saying no.

That’s not luck. That’s the compound interest of not quitting.

 

A Practical Takeaway

If you’re sitting with a failure right now, or a business that didn’t work, or a career that stalled, or a financial setback that feels like it erased years of progress, here’s the one thing I’d ask you to consider:

What is the next version of you actually good at?

Not the version you wish the market still wanted. Not the skills you’re nostalgic about. The version that fits where the world is going right now. Because the difference between Calacanis and thousands of other people who lost everything in the dot-com crash wasn’t talent. It wasn’t connections. It wasn’t even intelligence. It was the willingness to stop looking backward and start building forward, using whatever was available, as fast as possible. He went from photocopied newsletters to blogs to angel investing. Each chapter was different. Each one used something from the last. None of them required the previous version to still exist.
Your next chapter doesn’t need your old one to come back either. It just needs you to show up and start.

If this one resonated, share it with someone who might need to hear it right now. Not because the Jason Calacanis story is the only version of this pattern, but because it’s one of the clearest: the loss that breaks you is often the lesson that makes everything else possible.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

There’s a version of this story that’s easy to tell. A Louisiana factory boss sells his company, writes big checks to his workers, everyone cries, the internet loves it for 48 hours, and we all scroll to the next thing.

I want to tell a different version. Because the real story here isn’t about generosity. It’s about a pattern of behavior that stretches back decades, through a factory fire, a near-bankruptcy, and a small town that most people will never visit. The check at the end was the consequence. The cause was something much harder to replicate.

 

The Company Most People Have Never Heard Of

Fibrebond was founded in 1982 by Claud Walker in Bossier City, Louisiana. It started small: a dozen employees building fiberglass shelters for telecom and electrical equipment. The kind of business that doesn’t make headlines. No venture capital. No pitch deck. Just a guy who saw a need and started building. Prior to me reading an article about this, and before dooing any research, I had no idea. By the mid-1990s, the cellular boom had turned Fibrebond into a serious operation. They’d moved to a 254-acre facility in Minden, Louisiana, a small town of about 12,000 people, and were manufacturing shelters and enclosures for the wireless towers going up across the country. The company grew. It hired. It became the economic engine of its community. Then in 1998, a fire destroyed the entire manufacturing plant.

Here’s the detail that matters: while the factory was being rebuilt, the Walker family kept paying every employee’s salary. Production had stopped. Revenue had stopped. But the paychecks didn’t. That decision, made over twenty-five years ago, is still cited by Fibrebond employees as the moment that defined the company’s culture. Not a values statement on a website. Not a town hall speech about “our people being our greatest asset.” A decision that cost real money during the worst possible moment, made because the family believed it was the right thing to do. And believe me, because I see and know people in an industry (tourism here in mallorca) where working X months and then being laid off Y months is absolutely common. There is no company culture, regardless of what they put on their websites.

 

The Years Nobody Talks About

The fire wasn’t the end of the hard times. It was closer to the beginning. When the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, Fibrebond’s customer base collapsed. The company went from serving a broad market to having just three clients. The workforce was cut from roughly 900 employees to 320. This wasn’t a strategic restructuring. It was survival.

Graham Walker, Claud’s son, joined the company in 2004 and eventually became CEO. His brother joined around the same time. Together, they took over leadership, paid down the debt their father had accumulated during the downturn, and started looking for what was next. The pivot that would eventually define Fibrebond’s future came around 2020, when the company invested approximately $150 million to begin constructing modular power enclosures for data centers. This was not an obvious bet for a company in Minden, Louisiana. Data center infrastructure was a market dominated by larger players in bigger cities. But the Walkers saw demand building and committed.

The bet paid off. As cloud computing and AI infrastructure spending accelerated, Fibrebond’s engineered-to-order power enclosures became exactly what the market needed. By 2025, the company was generating an estimated $378 million in annual revenue with strong margins.

On March 11, 2025, Eaton Corporation, a global power management company, announced it was acquiring Fibrebond. The deal closed on April 1, 2025. Eaton’s official filings list the acquisition price at $1.4 billion. The total deal value, including the employee bonus commitments Walker negotiated into the terms, has been widely reported at approximately $1.7 billion.

 

The Condition That Changed 540 Lives

This is the part that made headlines.

Before agreeing to sell, Graham Walker told every potential buyer the same thing: 15% of the sale proceeds had to go directly to Fibrebond’s 540 full-time employees. This was non-negotiable. If a buyer wouldn’t agree to it, there was no deal.

The employees owned no stock. They had no equity. There was no contractual obligation, no profit-sharing agreement, no legal mechanism that required Walker to share a single dollar. He did it because he believed the people who built the company through a factory fire, a near-bankruptcy, a pandemic, and a high-risk pivot into data center infrastructure deserved to benefit from the outcome. Eaton agreed to the condition. An Eaton spokesperson later said the acquisition “honors their commitments to both their employees and the community.”

When the bonus letters arrived in June 2025, the average payout was roughly $443,000 per employee. Long-tenured workers received significantly more. The bonuses are being distributed over five years under a retention agreement requiring employees to stay with the company. Workers over 65 were exempt from the retention requirement, allowing longtime staff to retire immediately with full payouts.

When asked by The Wall Street Journal why he chose 15%, Walker’s response was: “It’s more than 10%.”

That line tells you everything you need to know about the man.

 

What Happened When the Envelopes Opened

In a factory in a small Louisiana town, workers opened sealed envelopes and learned they were receiving life-changing money. Some cried. Some thought it was a joke. Some sat in silence trying to process a number they had never imagined seeing next to their name. Lesia Key had worked at Fibrebond for nearly 30 years. She started at $5.35 an hour. Her bonus allowed her to pay off her mortgage twelve years early and open a small clothing store she’d always dreamed of, called “A Key’s Promise Boutique,” which opened on September 27, 2025.

Local officials in Minden reported an immediate surge in spending across the town. Employees were paying off debts, renovating homes, and making purchases they’d deferred for years. Mayor Nick Cox told The Wall Street Journal: “There’s a lot of buzz about the amount of money being spent.”

Graham Walker stepped down as CEO at the end of the year. The Walker family reportedly received more than $1 billion from the sale. When Walker was asked what he hoped would come from the bonuses, he said: “I hope I’m 80 years old and get an email about how it’s impacted someone.”

 

The Part That’s Worth Sitting With

Stories like this tend to get shared with a specific kind of framing: “Wow, what a generous guy.” And Graham Walker is clearly generous. But I think that framing actually misses the point. Generosity implies someone giving away something they don’t think belongs to anyone else. What Walker did was something different. He looked at a $1.7 billion outcome and recognized that the people who welded the enclosures, drove the trucks, worked the production lines, stayed through the fire, stayed through the layoffs, stayed through the dot-com bust, and stayed through a $150 million bet on a market that didn’t exist yet had earned a share of the result.

He wasn’t being generous. He was being accurate. Period.

This is the distinction I keep coming back to when I think about leadership. There’s a version of success where the person at the top extracts maximum value, pays themselves as much as the market will tolerate, and treats workers as a cost to be managed. That version is legal. It’s common. And it’s what most people expect.

Then there’s (my view) a version where the person at the top understands that the outcome was never theirs alone. That a $1.7 billion exit from a family company in Minden, Louisiana didn’t happen because one person had a vision. It happened because hundreds of people showed up every day for years, through conditions that would have driven most workers to find other jobs, and built something that eventually became valuable enough for a global corporation to pay $1.4 billion to acquire.

What would you call a leader who looks at that and says, “Yeah, 15% of this belongs to you”?

I’d call that honest.

 

Why This Matters Beyond One Company

We live in a business environment where the gap between executive compensation and average worker pay has become so wide that it barely registers as news anymore. Fortune noted that the Fibrebond story “goes some way toward countering the increasingly extreme CEO pay gaps that persist in the 21st century.” That’s a polite way of saying what most people already feel: the system is badly out of balance.

Graham Walker’s decision didn’t fix that system. One family company in Louisiana doesn’t change how publicly traded corporations allocate their profits. But it does something arguably more important: it shows that a different model exists and that it works. Fibrebond was profitable. It grew. It attracted a $1.4 billion acquirer. It didn’t need to underpay its workers or treat them as disposable to achieve a massive exit. The loyalty that the Walker family built by paying employees through a factory fire in 1998, by rehiring workers who’d been laid off during the dot-com bust, by maintaining a family-run culture in a world of private equity and cost optimization, was part of what made the company valuable in the first place.

Walker himself understood this. When asked about the retention requirement attached to the bonuses (employees must stay five years to receive the full amount), he told The Wall Street Journal: “I don’t think we’d have many employees on day two” without it. He knew the payout was so large that workers would retire immediately. The retention clause wasn’t about control. It was about keeping Fibrebond functional during the transition to Eaton’s ownership, because he cared about the company surviving as much as he cared about the payday.

That’s the part that separates Walker from a feel-good headline. He wasn’t just writing checks. He was thinking about what happens next. About the town. About the business. About the people who would still be showing up on Monday morning after he was gone.

 

What I Take From This

I’ve written about a lot of leadership stories on this site. Companies that collapsed because the people at the top forgot who was doing the actual work. CEOs who extracted billions while their employees got layoff notices. Boards that optimized for shareholder value and destroyed the culture that created it.

The Fibrebond story is the opposite of all of that. And it’s worth studying not because it’s heartwarming (though it is), but because it illustrates something specific about what makes organizations actually work. Loyalty is built in bad times, not good ones (and I don’t mean CEOs who get paid 8 digit annual salaries and tell their employees that it’s justified because they have to make big decisions).  The Walker family paying employees through the 1998 fire is the foundation of everything that came after. Every other business decision, including the $240 million bonus, is downstream of that one choice. You don’t earn trust by sharing profits when everything is going well. You earn it by protecting people when everything is falling apart.

The payout reflected the culture, not the other way around. Walker didn’t suddenly become a great leader the day the Eaton check cleared. He was running the company this way for decades. The bonus was just the most visible expression of a philosophy that had been operating quietly for 43 years. If your company only treats workers well when there’s a windfall to share, it’s not culture. It’s PR.

Workers know. They always know. They know when leadership respects them and when it doesn’t. They know when the values on the wall match the decisions in the room. Fibrebond’s workforce stayed through a fire, a near-bankruptcy, and a high-risk pivot because they had evidence, not promises, that the family running the business would do right by them when the time came. And the family did.

You don’t have to choose between treating people well and building something valuable. This is the lie that a lot of modern business culture tells. That is what we are educated to believe. That generosity is inefficient. That loyalty is a soft concept with no ROI. That the job of a CEO is to maximize shareholder returns, period. Fibrebond was a $1.7 billion company. The Walker family received over $1 billion. They were not harmed by sharing 15% with the people who built it. The idea that you can only succeed by squeezing every dollar out of your workforce is not just wrong. It’s lazy thinking.

 

The Question Worth Asking

Graham Walker was 46 years old when the Eaton deal closed. He could have kept the entire proceeds. Nobody would have blamed him. Nobody would have even known. The employees had no claim. The market wouldn’t have punished him. The board didn’t require it.

He did it anyway.

So the question isn’t really about Graham Walker. It’s about everyone else. If you’re building something, leading something, managing people who show up every day and make your business work, what would you do when the moment came?

Not what would you say. Not what values would you put on your website. What would you actually do?

Because leadership isn’t tested when things are easy. It’s tested in the exact moment when you could take everything and nobody would stop you, and you choose not to. That’s the test. And most people never take it.

If this story stuck with you, pass it along to someone who leads people. Not because it’s a feel-good story, but because it’s a useful one. The world needs more evidence that doing right by people and building something valuable aren’t competing goals. They never were.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

In 2000, Nokia was worth $250 billion. By 2012, it was worth about $6 billion. A 98% collapse. If you’d invested a million dollars at the peak, you were sitting on roughly $20,000.

The world moved on. Nokia didn’t.

Today, as of mid-2026, Nokia’s market cap sits somewhere between $55 billion and $78 billion depending on when and whereyou check. Revenue for 2025 came in at roughly $23 billion. Comparable operating profit was around €2 billion. The company has over 100,000 employees, operates across 130+ countries, and is positioning itself as a critical player in the infrastructure that will power AI and 6G networks.

This is not a survival story. This is a reinvention story. And I think it contains one of the most useful lessons in business that almost nobody talks about.

 

The Rise Everyone Remembers

If you grew up in the late ’90s or early 2000s, you remember Nokia. The ringtone. The Snake game. The 3310 that you could genuinely throw at a wall and use again the next day. It was like one of my favorite phones ever (aside from Blackberry and the HP Palm). At its peak in 2007, Nokia controlled roughly 40% of the entire global mobile phone market. They were selling over 430 million handsets a year. Revenue hit €51.5 billion. Profits were €7.2 billion.

Nokia wasn’t just a phone company. In Finland, Nokia was practically a national identity. In the rest of the world, it was the default. If you had a mobile phone between 1998 and 2007, there was a solid chance it had Nokia stamped on the back.

Then on June 29, 2007, Apple released the iPhone.

Nokia’s leadership looked at it and, by most accounts, didn’t panic. They had the market share. They had the manufacturing scale. They had the distribution. What they didn’t have was a software ecosystem, a touchscreen strategy, or any real sense of how fast the ground was about to shift. That is when executives are riding the high horse, especially in regards to believing market share is everything.

By 2008, Nokia’s market share had already started slipping. By 2009, revenue dropped 19% even though unit volumes only fell 8%. That gap between volume loss and revenue loss is the clearest signal of a company losing pricing power, and pricing power is always the first thing to go when disruption arrives. By 2011, Samsung had overtaken Nokia. By 2012, the market cap had cratered to €5 billion. By 2013, it was over.

 

The Sale

In September 2013, Nokia agreed to sell its mobile phone and devices business to Microsoft for approximately €5.4 billion (roughly $7.2 billion at the time). Around 32,000 employees transferred to Microsoft. The deal was finalized in April 2014. I remember reading the news on this during my days at HP.

There’s a quote attributed to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop from the press conference announcing the sale: “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” The story goes that he said this, the room went quiet, and the management team cried.

I should be honest here. That quote has been circulated millions of times on LinkedIn and in business blogs. But its authenticity is genuinely disputed. Multiple credible commentators have pointed out that no major news agency originally published it (mainstream these days is something fdifferent), however that no video of the moment has ever surfaced, and that Elop was actually a former Microsoft executive who had championed the sale from the start. He wasn’t exactly the reluctant hero that the viral version of the story suggests. (Based on my research here)

Whether the quote is real or not, the emotion behind it was real enough. Nokia employees were devastated. The brand that had defined an era was being sold for a fraction of what it was once worth. Microsoft would go on to write off the entire acquisition just two years later.

The world treated this as the final chapter.

What Actually Happened Next

Here’s where the story gets interesting, and where most people stopped paying attention. What remained of Nokia after the Microsoft sale was not nothing. It was actually three things: Nokia Solutions and Networks (their telecom infrastructure business), HERE (a mapping and location platform), and Nokia Technologies (a patent licensing division).

Nokia’s board, led by chairman Risto Siilasmaa, made a series of deliberate, unsexy, highly strategic moves over the next few years. In 2013, they bought Siemens’ 50% stake in Nokia Siemens Networks, giving them full control of the infrastructure business. In 2015, they sold HERE Maps to a consortium of German automakers for €2.8 billion, freeing up capital. And then they made the move that would define Nokia’s second act.

In 2016, Nokia completed the acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent for €15.6 billion. This wasn’t a defensive play. It was a bet on the future. Alcatel-Lucent brought fixed-line networks, IP routing, optical networking, and most importantly, Bell Labs, one of the most storied research institutions in technology history with eight Nobel Prizes to its name. Overnight, Nokia went from being a wounded phone company to the second-largest telecom equipment provider on the planet, behind only Huawei and neck-and-neck with Ericsson.

None of this made headlines the way the iPhone launch did. None of it went viral. There were no TED talks. It was just a company, heads down, restructuring itself around what the world was going to need next.

 

The Invisible Giant

What does Nokia actually do now? It builds the infrastructure that makes the connected world work – 5G networks, fiber optic systems, IP routing, cloud-native network software, private wireless networks for factories, mines, ports, and data centers. Submarine cable systems that carry internet traffic across oceans. Just a bunch of stuff. Think about it (even if your not into this stuff)

When you stream a video, make a call, send a message, or download a file, there’s a reasonable chance that Nokia-built equipment is somewhere in the chain making it happen. You’ll never see a Nokia logo on any of it. That’s the point. The product is invisible. It’s also essential. And now, with the AI infrastructure buildout accelerating globally, Nokia has repositioned itself again. In late 2025, the company announced a new strategy built around two primary segments: Network Infrastructure (targeting the AI and data center expansion) and Mobile Networks. Nvidia invested $1 billion in Nokia, specifically aimed at the transition from 5G to 6G (and this can lead into multiple other blog posts for later). The company that most people still associate with indestructible flip phones is now a critical piece of the infrastructure that AI companies need to function.

 

Why This Story Matters

I’ve been thinking about why the Nokia story doesn’t get told the way it should be. The fall is dramatic. The sale to Microsoft is emotional. But the comeback? It’s quiet. It’s incremental. It doesn’t fit neatly into a LinkedIn post or a motivational reel. There’s no single heroic moment. No visionary founder with a TED talk. Just a series of disciplined decisions made by people who decided the company’s identity was bigger than its most famous product. And that right there is the lesson.

Most companies, and most people, define themselves by their current output. I’m the phone company. I’m the sales guy. I’m the person who does X. When X goes away, whether because the market shifts, the industry changes, or life just takes a turn (I’ve been there plenty of times), the instinct is to fight to get X back. To chase the thing you lost. To try to reclaim the old identity.

Nokia didn’t do that. They didn’t try to out-iPhone Apple (hope you read that right :-)). They didn’t launch a comeback phone. They didn’t chase the consumer market with nostalgia plays (well, they licensed the Nokia brand for phones later, but that’s a separate licensing deal, not the core business). They looked at what they had, what the world was going to need, and they rebuilt around that. That takes a kind of discipline that doesn’t get enough credit. It’s not flashy. It’s not inspirational in the motivational poster sense. It’s just clear thinking under pressure, executed over years.

The Part Nobody Wants to Hear

I want to push back on one thing, though. The popular version of this story, the version in the source material I based this post on, frames it as “Nokia didn’t do anything wrong.” They did do things wrong. Quite a few things, actually. They saw the iPhone and underestimated it. They had internal smartphone prototypes years before Apple but couldn’t get them to market because of organizational inertia. Their software platform, Symbian, was falling behind and they knew it but couldn’t pivot fast enough (that is one thing that ticked me off when executives at HP got rid of the Palm and WebOS software). They brought in Stephen Elop, who tied the company to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform instead of Android, a decision that many analysts believe accelerated the decline rather than slowed it. Internal politics and a culture of fear reportedly prevented bad news from reaching senior leadership.

Nokia didn’t lose because the world was unfair. They lost because they were slow to adapt when speed was the only thing that mattered. And I think that’s actually a more useful lesson than “we didn’t do anything wrong.” Because “we didn’t do anything wrong” is a comforting story. It says: sometimes you just lose, and it’s nobody’s fault. That might be true in some cases. But in Nokia’s case, there were decisions that could have been made differently, signals that were ignored, and a culture that prioritized internal consensus over external reality.

The honest version of the Nokia story is harder but more valuable: they made mistakes, they paid for them, and then they had the discipline and clarity to rebuild from what was left. That’s not a story about bad luck. That’s a story about accountability and reinvention.

 

What I Take From This

Whether you’re running a company, building a career, or just trying to figure out your next move after something didn’t work out, the Nokia story has a few things worth sitting with. Your identity is not your product. Nokia was never really a phone company. They started as a paper mill in 1865, became a rubber company, then a cable company, then a phone company, then a network infrastructure company. The thread was never the product. It was the ability to recognize what the world needed and rebuild around it. If you’re defining yourself by one role, one skill, or one phase of your career, you’re setting yourself up for exactly the kind of crisis Nokia went through in 2012. And I know it’s innate. It’s part of our nature. I’ve been there. I’m sure you reading this far have too.

The unsexy pivot is usually the right one. Nobody gets excited about telecom infrastructure. Nobody posts about fiber optic routing on Instagram. But that’s exactly where the value was. The flashy option would have been to try to compete in smartphones. The smart option was to go where the competition was thinner and the demand was growing. Sometimes the best move is the one nobody notices. Reinvention takes years, not moments. Between the Microsoft sale in 2013 and Nokia’s current position as a $55-78 billion infrastructure company, more than a decade passed. There was no single turning point. There was a Siemens buyout, a divestiture, a major acquisition, a 5G buildout, and hundreds of smaller decisions that compounded over time. If you’re expecting your own reinvention to happen in a quarter or a calendar year, you’re probably underestimating what real transformation requires.

Losing one chapter doesn’t mean the story is over. It just means you finally have room to write a different one. Nokia’s best financial years as a phone company are behind it. But the company that exists today, quietly powering the infrastructure that AI, 5G, and the entire connected world depends on, is arguably more important and more durable than the one that made the 3310.

The world wrote Nokia’s obituary in 2013. Nokia didn’t read it.

If this post got you thinking, I’d appreciate it if you shared it with someone who might need to hear it. Whether you’re in the middle of your own reinvention or just starting to realize one is necessary, knowing that even a $250 billion collapse can lead somewhere better might be exactly the perspective that helps.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

I don’t like social media. I’m not performing reluctance for effect here. I genuinely don’t enjoy it. I scroll X occasionally because it’s fast, blunt, and mostly text. Everything else feels like a part-time job I never applied for. So when I tell you that I just sat down and completely rewrote my LinkedIn profile for the first time in years, you should understand that this was not a fun Saturday project. It was an overdue reckoning with a page that no longer described who I am, what I’ve done, or what I actually bring to the table. And my wife said I should do it to reflect just that – it’ll open doors and opportunities.

And the process taught me something worth sharing: most professionals are walking around with a digital first impression that’s either outdated, generic, or actively working against them. Including me, until about a week ago.

 

The Problem with the Old Profile

I want to show you something. This is roughly what my LinkedIn About section looked like before the rewrite:

I’m a seasoned (digital) leader and strategist. I possess a genuine passion for a wide range of areas including (pre)sales, market strategy, business communications, negotiation, operational management, corporate culture, marketing, and process design.

It went on. It listed every hat I’d ever worn. It included a numbered list of personal values like “I am calm” and “I run towards fires.” It ended with a specialty list that read like someone had emptied a bag of LinkedIn keywords onto the page.

Here’s the thing: none of it was wrong. Everything in that bio was true. But it didn’t actually say anything. It was the professional equivalent of introducing yourself at a party by reading your entire resume out loud.Technically accurate, completely forgettable, and slightly exhausting. I’d written it years ago when I was trying to sound impressive to as many people as possible. And that, right there, is the trap. When you try to speak to everyone, you end up saying nothing to anyone.

 

What Changed

Over the past several years, my career has taken turns that the old profile didn’t reflect at all. A decade at HP and HPE. Managing $12M+ budgets, 400+ person teams, leading 120+ cross-border projects across Europe. Running the Order-to-Cash separation during the HP/HPE split. Taking over Lime Germany during COVID. Redesigning a decade-old workflow at DKV and saving €360K in four weeks.

And then the part nobody expected: my wife and I took a small tennis and padel facility in Mallorca and turned it into a five-star operation in two and a half years. Built the systems from scratch. Managed supplier relationships, bilingual content across hotel groups and municipalities, everything. None of that was on the old profile. The story of what I’d actually done, the pattern of how I work, the evidence that I deliver results in messy, complex, sometimes chaotic situations, all invisible. Replaced by buzzwords and a list of specialties that could have belonged to anyone.

So I rewrote it. And I did it with one principle: say what’s real and cut everything that isn’t.

 

The New Version

Here’s the opening line of my new About section:

“I fix what’s broken and build what’s missing.”

Nine words. That’s it. And it does more work than the 200 words of “seasoned digital leader” language that came before it.

The rest follows the same approach. Specific projects, specific numbers, specific outcomes. No jargon about “passion for cross-functional synergies.” Just evidence that when I show up, things get built, fixed, or made to work better than they were. The difference isn’t polish. It’s honesty. The old version was trying to impress. The new version is trying to be clear. Those are very different goals, and only one of them actually works.

 

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Let me share a number that made me sit up. Only about 1% of LinkedIn’s billion-plus users post content weekly. Those users generate roughly 9 billion impressions per week. That’s a staggering concentration of visibility among a tiny minority of active participants.

You don’t even need to post content to benefit from this dynamic. You just need a profile that works when someone lands on it. And people do land on it. Recruiters, potential clients, conference organizers, podcast hosts, collaborators, old colleagues who are now hiring. Your profile is the page they see before they decide whether to reach out or keep scrolling.

Profiles with complete, optimized information are significantly more likely to be discovered in searches. Professional photos alone increase profile views by a factor of roughly 20. Listing your current position increases connection requests by up to five times.

These aren’t marginal improvements. They’re the difference between existing on the platform and actually being found on it.

 

Why Most Profiles Don’t Work

I think there are a few patterns that keep people stuck with profiles that don’t represent them well.

The “everything” problem: You list every skill, every role, every competency you’ve ever touched – I dislike that. I have several certifications and what not but do not list everything online nor in my CV. The logic is: more keywords means more visibility, right? Maybe. But more keywords also means less clarity. When everything is a specialty, nothing is. A recruiter or hiring manager scanning your profile in six seconds doesn’t need to know you can do 14 things. They need to know you can solve one specific type of problem extremely well.

The “2017” problem: You wrote your profile during a specific phase of your career, and it still reflects that phase. You’ve moved on. Your skills have evolved. You’ve led bigger teams, handled harder problems, changed industries or functions. But the profile still reads like it was written by a younger version of you with different priorities. That was me. I’d guess it’s a lot of people reading this right now.

The “corporate voice” problem: Somewhere along the way, we all absorbed this idea that professional means formal, that credibility requires jargon, and that LinkedIn bios should sound like they were written by a consulting firm’s marketing department. So we write things like “leveraging cross-functional capabilities to drive stakeholder value” instead of just saying what we actually do. Nobody talks like that in real life. Why would you write like that in the one place people go to figure out if they want to talk to you?

The “I’ll get to it” problem: This was my biggest issue. I knew the profile was outdated. I knew it didn’t reflect my current reality. But updating a LinkedIn profile feels like a low-priority task compared to actual work, actual projects, actual life. So it sits. For months. Then years. And meanwhile, the outdated version is silently representing you to everyone who searches your name.

 

Personal Branding Isn’t What You Think It Is

Here’s where I want to push back on a phrase that makes most reasonable people cringe: “personal brand.” I get it. The term sounds like influencer culture. It sounds like someone who takes selfies at conferences and writes “thought leader” in their bio without irony. It sounds like something for people who care more about perception than substance.

But strip away the noise, and personal branding is just this: making sure the way people perceive you matches the reality of what you can actually do.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. At least to me. And I am by far any social media influencer.

If you’re good at what you do but your online presence says nothing, you’re leaving it to chance. You’re hoping that the right people will somehow find you, remember you, and know what you’re capable of,despite the fact that you’ve given them almost nothing to work with. I don’t post daily LinkedIn content. I don’t comment on trending topics for visibility. I don’t use hashtags strategically. And I don’t plan to start. That’s not my thing, and pretending otherwise would be exactly the kind of inauthenticity that makes social media unbearable.

But I do want the one page that shows up when someone Googles my name to actually tell the truth about who I am and what I bring. That’s not vanity. That’s basic professional hygiene.

 

The Exercise I’d Recommend

If you haven’t touched your LinkedIn profile in over a year, here’s a simple test. Open it right now on your phone. Read it as if you’re a stranger who has never met you. Ask yourself three questions:

1. Does this sound like a real person, or does it sound like a template?
2. If someone read only this page, would they understand what I actually do and what kind of problems I solve?
3. Is there a single specific result, project, or achievement that proves I’m not just listing skills I think I have?

If the answer to any of those is no, you have some work to do. And the good news is, it’s not hard work. It just requires sitting down for an hour, being honest about what you’ve done that matters, and writing it in language that sounds like you,not like a corporate press release.

You don’t need to become a content creator. You don’t need a social media strategy. You don’t need to post three times a week with carousels and calls-to-action.

You just need one page that’s accurate, current, and clear. For someone like me, who would rather do the work than talk about the work, that’s about the right amount of effort for a platform I’ll never love but have learned to respect.

If you’ve read this far, thanks for sticking with me. If this made you think about your own profile, even for a second, then the post did its job. If you found it useful, give it a share or a comment. It helps more people see it, and I genuinely appreciate it.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

In August 2019, WeWork was worth $47 billion. By October, it was worth $8 billion. The IPO was dead, the CEO was out, and 2,400 people were about to lose their jobs.

Forty-two days. That’s how fast $39 billion in paper value disappeared. Not because of a recession. Not because of a pandemic. Because someone filed a document that showed the actual numbers, and the story couldn’t survive the math.

The man who built the story walked away with a package worth up to $1.7 billion. That is absolutely crazy by any standard.

If that doesn’t make you want to audit every number in your own business, and every pitch you’ve ever believed, I don’t know what will.

 

The Business That Was Always Just a Business

Let me start with what WeWork actually was, because this matters.

Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey co-founded WeWork in 2010 in New York City. The model was straightforward: lease large commercial office spaces on long-term contracts, renovate them into attractive shared workspaces, then sublease individual desks and offices on short-term, flexible contracts to freelancers, startups, and companies.

Buy long. Sell short. Pocket the spread.

This is real estate arbitrage. It has existed in various forms for decades. IWG (which owns Regus) had been doing essentially the same thing since 1989, with five times as many properties, more revenue, and operations in more countries. IWG was profitable. It was also valued at a fraction of what WeWork commanded.

The difference wasn’t the business model. The difference was the story.

Neumann didn’t pitch WeWork as a real estate company. He pitched it as a technology company. He told investors WeWork would “elevate the world’s consciousness.” He said WeWork would reach a billion members. He talked about building a global community that would replace traditional cities and reshape how humanity lives and works.

The glass-walled offices with craft beer on tap and Monday morning yoga weren’t amenities. They were set pieces in a narrative that had almost nothing to do with the underlying economics.

And for nearly a decade, the narrative was the product.

 

The Check on the iPad

In December 2016, Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank and manager of the largest venture fund in history, the $100 billion Vision Fund visited WeWork’s headquarters in New York. He was running late. What was supposed to be a two-hour tour became twelve minutes.

Son invited Neumann to ride with him in his SUV to his next meeting at Trump Tower, 38 blocks north. During the drive, Son pulled out his iPad and sketched the outlines of a $4.4 billion investment. He reportedly told Neumann the problem was that he wasn’t thinking big enough.

By the time the car pulled up, a deal had been scrawled on a digital napkin.

Think about that for a moment. Not the boldness of it, the mechanics. The SoftBank team had done diligence. But the decision to commit billions rested on a twelve-minute walk-through and a car ride with a 6’5″ charismatic founder who could talk about consciousness and community the way most people talk about quarterly targets. I mean business happens that way, don’t get me wrong. It only takes  a few seconds when you meet someone to know whether you click or not (at least on the first instance).

Over the next two years, SoftBank poured approximately $10 billion in equity into WeWork at escalating valuations, first $20 billion, then $47 billion. Total SoftBank exposure including debt would eventually exceed $18.5 billion. The valuations went up not because the business fundamentally changed, but because each new investment round was priced higher than the last. That’s how private markets can work when a single dominant investor is setting the price.

 

What Was Happening Inside

While the valuation climbed, Neumann was operating with almost no accountability. He bought the trademark to the word “We” personally and licensed it back to his own company for $5.9 million. He only returned the money and the trademark rights after the S-1 filing drew scrutiny. Think about that. This is the greed instilled into society over the last decades.

He purchased buildings in his own name and then leased them back to WeWork, making himself both landlord and tenant, collecting rent from the company he ran.

He sold approximately $700 million worth of his own stock before any IPO, locking in personal wealth while outside investors were still holding paper.

The company bought a $60 million Gulfstream G650 private jet. Neumann reportedly brought marijuana on international commercial flights and was escorted off a plane in Israel. His wife Rebekah ran WeGrow, a private school operated inside the company. His brother-in-law ran the wellness division. The S-1 filing would later reveal that Rebekah Neumann had a contractual role in selecting Neumann’s replacement should he die or become incapacitated.

The corporate governance structure gave Neumann supervoting shares, 20 votes per share compared to one for ordinary shareholders, ensuring he could not be overruled on virtually any matter.

None of this was hidden, exactly. But none of it mattered as long as the money kept arriving and the story kept being told.

With this I’m not trying to portray Neumann as a bad person. I’m just reinstating the facts from the sources.

 

The S-1 Changed Everything

On August 14, 2019, WeWork filed its S-1, the disclosure document required for a company to go public. It’s a public filing. Anyone can read it. And for the first time in nine years, the actual financial picture was available to anyone who wanted to look.

What the market saw ended the conversation.

WeWork had lost $1.9 billion in 2018 on $1.8 billion in revenue. They were spending more than two dollars for every dollar they earned. The company had accumulated $47 billion in future lease obligations, long-term commitments to landlords, against roughly $4 billion in committed revenue from members. That’s an exposure ratio that would make any real estate analyst reach for the exit. You don’t need to be a math genius to understand this.

And then there was “Community Adjusted EBITDA.” This is something even I had to dig into a bit. I learned more in depth about EBITDA at university and knew about it beforehand, but this phrasing was interesting.

WeWork had invented its own profitability metric. They took standard EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and then subtracted additional costs like building expenses, marketing, and general administration. Under this custom metric, WeWork could claim to be profitable. Under every standard financial measure, they were hemorrhaging cash.

Wall Street saw all of it. The conflicts of interest. The governance structure. The made-up accounting. The gap between the “technology company” narrative and the reality of a real estate sublease business with negative unit economics.

The valuation started collapsing immediately.

By September 5, the target had dropped to $20-30 billion. Then lower. On September 17, the IPO was withdrawn entirely. On September 24, Neumann was forced out as CEO. By October, SoftBank had written down $9.2 billion and injected another $5 billion just to prevent the company from running out of cash entirely. In November, 2,400 employees, roughly 20% of the global workforce, were laid off. Think about the company culture on this. If you read my post yesterday about Market Basket, you’ll understand. If not give it a read here.

In November 2023, WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

 

The Real Question Nobody Wanted to Ask

Here’s the part that bothers me the most, and it’s not about Adam Neumann. Neumann was a salesman. An extraordinary one, arguably (considering what he did) one of the best of his generation. But he was doing what salesmen do, telling the most compelling version of the story that people would buy (Wolf of Wallstreet anyone?). The question isn’t why he told the story. The question is why everyone in the room agreed to keep telling it.

J.P. Morgan reportedly suggested WeWork could go public at $60 to $100 billion. They knew the financials. Goldman Sachs knew the financials. Morgan Stanley knew the financials. The board approved the S-1 filing. The auditors signed off. The lawyers wrote the disclosures.

Every single person in that ecosystem had an incentive to keep the story alive.

The bankers wanted underwriting fees. The board members wanted a liquidity event. SoftBank needed WeWork’s valuation to hold up because it affected how the rest of the Vision Fund portfolio was marked. The press wanted access to a charismatic founder who made for great magazine covers. Employees wanted their equity to vest at a number that would change their lives.

Nobody wanted to be the one to say: this is a real estate company that loses money on every square metter it operates, and no amount of “consciousness” language changes that arithmetic.

This is the part I keep coming back to: the fraud, if you want to call it that, wasn’t hidden in the numbers. The numbers were always going to come out in the S-1. That’s what the S-1 is for. The fraud was in the gap between the story and the reality, and in how long a room full of sophisticated people agreed to pretend that gap didn’t exist. That blows me away.

 

What This Actually Teaches

I think there are a few lessons here, and they’re not limited to Silicon Valley or venture capital. They apply to anyone who runs a business, invests in one, or works at one.

Stories are powerful. But stories without numbers are dangerous. Every business needs a narrative. You need to explain why you exist, what you’re building, where you’re going. But the narrative has to be tethered to reality, to revenue, to margins, to unit economics, to the actual mechanics of how value is created. The moment the story decouples from the numbers, you’re building on sand. Maybe expensive, beautifully designed sand. But sand.

The absence of scrutiny is not the same as validation. WeWork operated for nine years in private markets where Neumann could largely control who saw what. The valuation was set by a small number of investors, primarily one in this instance, who had their own reasons to mark it up. The fact that no one challenged the story didn’t mean the story was true. It meant no one had been forced to check.

This applies to your business too. If the only people evaluating your model are people who benefit from it working, you don’t have validation. You have a consensus of convenience. Think about that.

When everyone has a reason to keep the story going, the story keeps going. This is the most uncomfortable lesson. WeWork wasn’t sustained by one person’s delusion. It was sustained by a system of aligned incentives where truth-telling was financially punished and silence was financially rewarded. The banker who said “this is worth $20 billion, not $60 billion” would have lost the engagement. The board member who blocked the IPO would have delayed everyone’s exit. The journalist who ran the skeptical story got less access than the one who ran the profile.

Incentive structures determine information flow. If you want to know where the lies live in any organization, look at who gets rewarded for telling them and who gets punished for questioning them.

Custom metrics are a red flag, not a feature. When a company invents its own profitability measure, Community Adjusted EBITDA, or whatever creative accounting language is in fashion (and I’m old enough to remember Enron and co – albeit cooking books is slightly different, argubly) they’re telling you something important: the standard measures don’t tell the story they want to tell. Sometimes that’s legitimate. Early-stage companies genuinely operate differently. But when a company with $1.8 billion in revenue is still needing to invent metrics to look profitable, the question isn’t whether the metric is creative. It’s whether the business model works.

 

Audit Your Own Story

I’m not writing this to pile on WeWork retrospectively. That’s been done. I’m writing this because the WeWork pattern, the gap between narrative and numbers, is everywhere. It exists in startups and in established companies. It exists in personal finances. It exists in careers.

So here’s the exercise I’d challenge you with.

Sit down and look at whatever you’re building (and I do this consistently with everything), your business, your investment portfolio, your career trajectory and ask yourself three questions:

Where am I saying things I can’t prove? Not aspirations or goals, those are fine. I mean where are you stating something as fact to others (or to yourself) that you haven’t actually verified with real data?

Where am I avoiding the number that would tell the truth? Every business has a metric it doesn’t like to look at. The one that’s always “we’ll get to that next quarter.” That’s the one that matters most.

Where would I be embarrassed if a stranger read the operations doc? This is the S-1 test. If someone with no emotional investment in your success looked at your actual financials, your actual processes, your actual results, not your pitch deck, not your LinkedIn, not your investor update, would the story hold up?

If you’re investing in someone else’s business, the exercise is even simpler: find the question they don’t want you to ask. The bigger the story, the smaller the question they’re avoiding. Find that question. If the answer can’t survive the S-1, the company can’t survive the light of day.

 

The Most Expensive Lie Is the One You Tell Yourself

WeWork raised $12.8 billion in total funding. It built over 800 locations in 35 countries. It had roughly 500,000 members at its peak. It put its logo on glass towers in every major city on earth.

None of it mattered.

The underlying business never made sense on its own terms. It made sense only inside a story, and the story was only as durable as the distance between the narrative and the nearest spreadsheet. What kills companies isn’t usually bad luck. It isn’t usually a single bad decision. It’s the lie that everyone in the room has a reason to keep telling. The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just uncomfortable: look at the number you’ve been avoiding. Say the thing out loud. Close the gap between what you’re saying and what’s actually true.

This is true accountability. I know this is uncomfortable, but I genuinely find it important. We all like to sugar coat this or that. But be brutally honest with yourself. Only that way do we become better people, and can build better societies.

That’s also not just good business. That’s how you build something that survives contact with reality.

Mindset First. Keep thriving.

There’s a test for leadership that no business school teaches and no boardroom anticipates. It goes like this: What happens to a company when the person at the top is removed, and I mean not by competitors, nor by failure, but by the people who own the shares?

You might think that is weird way to start a blog post. And you’re right, because in most cases, nothing happens. Literally. For the majority of companies that interest you, you don’t even know until perhaps sheer coincidence. A press release goes out. A new face appears in the quarterly report. The machine keeps running.

I came across an article the other day and put it into my notes to come back on and that is what this post is about.

In the summer of 2014, at a regional supermarket chain most people outside New England had never heard of, the machine didn’t just stop running. It was deliberately shut down, by the workers themselves and what followed was arguably the most remarkable labor action in modern American business history. Not because workers fought against management. But because they fought for it.

The story of Arthur T. Demoulas and Market Basket isn’t just a business case study. It’s a mirror held up to everything we say we believe about leadership, loyalty, and what companies actually owe the people who build them.

 

The Company That Wasn’t Supposed to Work

Market Basket is a supermarket chain operating across New England, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and now parts of other nearby states. It’s a business I have never heard of, read of, or had the slightest hint about until I came across this article by coincidence. It’s a family business, founded by Greek immigrants, that grew into a whopping $4 billion operation by 2014. Today it generates roughly $8 billion in annual revenue.

On paper, Market Basket does almost everything modern business orthodoxy says you shouldn’t do. It keeps prices lower than Walmart. It offers generous profit-sharing to employees, including warehouse workers and cashiers. It distributes year-end bonuses that, at many companies, would have been redirected to shareholders or executive compensation. It resisted building an official website until 2017. It doesn’t have a loyalty card program. It doesn’t chase trends.

And it’s deeply, consistently profitable.

Arthur T. Demoulas, known universally as “Artie T.”, ran the company the way his father Telemachus had built it: with an operating philosophy that treated employees as stakeholders, not costs (imagine that!). He knew cashiers by name. He remembered the families of truck drivers and warehouse workers. Long-tenured employees have described him as someone who showed up at funerals, called people when their parents were sick, and walked the warehouse floors not for show, but because that’s how he understood his business.

This wasn’t performative servant leadership. It was an operational model. Low turnover meant experienced staff. Experienced staff meant better service. Better service meant loyal customers. Loyal customers meant you could keep prices low and still make money. The whole thing was a flywheel, one that depended on the person at the center actually caring about the people spinning it.

Show me a genuine CEO like this. THese are stories and articles hard to come by these days.

 

The Firing

Apparently, the Demoulas family had been locked in a governance war for decades. The two branches of the family, in other words the descendants of two brothers, had fundamentally different visions for the chain. Arthur T.’s side wanted to reinvest in workers and customers. His cousin Arthur S.’s side wanted higher shareholder dividends and, according to multiple reports, was considering selling the chain to outside investors.

In mid-2013, a key family shareholder switched loyalties, tipping board control to Arthur S.’s faction. The board then voted to distribute $250 million to family shareholders, a move Arthur T. had opposed. Tensions escalated. By June 2014, the board voted to remove Arthur T. as CEO and replaced him with two outside co-CEOs, including a former RadioShack executive known for cost-cutting.

The board had the legal authority to do this. It was, by corporate governance standards, a routine leadership change. Having worked for large companies, I know how it is and I’m sure you do too.

However, what happened next was anything but routine.

 

The Revolt That Had No Playbook

Within days of Arthur T.’s firing, Market Basket employees began organizing. Six high-level managers resigned immediately. Three hundred employees rallied outside the Chelsea, Massachusetts flagship store. Warehouse workers and truck drivers refused to make deliveries. Store shelves began to empty.

Here is the critical detail that makes this story unlike anything else in American business (and you need to understand the nuances in operating differences across Europe where I live, and America): these workers were not unionized. There was no collective bargaining agreement. No strike fund. No formal mechanism for organized action. They simply decided, individually and then collectively, that they would not work for a company that had removed the man who had treated them like people.

By July 22, protests had spread to all 71 Market Basket stores. Only three of seventy-five scheduled deliveries were being completed. Managers from 68 of 71 stores prepared a petition saying they would resign if Arthur T. was not reinstated.

The board responded by firing eight protest organizers. This is a move that, in most labor disputes, chills dissent – in other words companies shut down these types of strikes immediately with fear (because understandably people need to make money). At Market Basket though, it did the opposite. Thousands of workers who had been on the fence walked out after seeing their colleagues terminated. The firings became a rallying point, not a deterrent.

And then the customers joined.

Shoppers voluntarily boycotted Market Basket, driving past their local stores to shop at competitors. They taped their grocery receipts from rival stores to Market Basket’s windows as a signal to the board. Local mayors, over 160 of them across Massachusetts and New Hampshire, publicly endorsed the consumer boycott (I add this just to make a point. Now whether or not it eas genuine support or them utilizing “the moment” is a different topic). However, politicians from both parties called for Arthur T.’s reinstatement.

Sales dropped by an estimated 90 to 95 percent. The company was losing roughly $10 million (!) per day. Stores fell behind on lease payments. Perishable inventory worth millions was thrown away. Reports emerged that the new management was discussing bankruptcy and closing all but 10 stores.

 

The Return

After six weeks of financial hemorrhaging, the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire intervened to broker a deal. In late August 2014, Arthur T. Demoulas and his three sisters purchased the controlling shares from his cousin’s faction for $1.6 billion, money he had to borrow entirely.

Arthur T. returned to the company. He walked into the warehouse and was met by workers who had stood outside for two months without pay. Stores reopened within days. Shelves were restocked. The boycott ended overnight.

It remains, over a decade later, the only documented case in which a workforce of 25,000 (not just a handful, we are talking about 25 thousand employees!!! and non-unionized employees for that matter) successfully forced a board of directors to reverse a CEO termination, not through legal action, not through union negotiation, but through showing up and refusing to move.

 

What Most People Miss About This Story

The easy version of this story is: good boss gets fired, loyal employees save him, everyone lives happily ever after. The truth is more complicated and, I think, more instructive. So here a few thoughts:

First, the loyalty wasn’t sentimental. It was rational. Employees weren’t walking out because Arthur T. was a nice guy who remembered their birthdays. They were walking out because his business model directly benefited them in material ways, profit-sharing, bonuses, job security, wages, and they had legitimate reasons to believe the new leadership would dismantle those benefits. The fear wasn’t abstract. The board had already moved to increase shareholder dividends, and the incoming co-CEO’s track record at RadioShack suggested cost-cutting and potential store closures.

The workers understood something that the board apparently didn’t: that Market Basket’s profitability was inseparable from its culture. You couldn’t extract the financial returns while gutting the operating philosophy that produced them. The board saw a CEO who was being “too generous” with workers. The workers saw a system that worked precisely because of that generosity.

Second, this was as much about the customers as the employees. Market Basket served working-class and middle-class communities across New England. For many of these families, Market Basket’s low prices weren’t a nice perk, they were a meaningful part of their household budget. The customers joined the boycott because they understood that the board’s financial priorities would eventually mean higher prices. They were protecting their own interests by protecting the CEO who protected theirs.

Third, the absence of a union was actually the point. Several commentators noted at the time that if Market Basket employees had been unionized, the walkout likely couldn’t have happened. Union contracts typically include no-strike clauses. The formal collective bargaining process would have channeled the dispute into negotiations and legal proceedings, not parking lot protests. The spontaneous, organic nature of the revolt, managers and cashiers and truck drivers deciding together, without institutional scaffolding is precisely what made it so powerful and so impossible for the board to manage.

 

The Uncomfortable Sequel

Here’s where the story gets less tidy, and where I think the real lessons emerge. In 2014, Arthur T. and his three sisters, Frances, Glorianne, and Caren were allies. They jointly purchased the company from their cousin’s faction. Arthur T. went back to running the business. Market Basket flourished. Revenue doubled to nearly $8 billion. The chain expanded to 90 stores and over 30,000 employees. The $1.6 billion in buyout debt was nearly paid off by 2024.

Then the alliance fractured.

By 2025, Arthur T.’s three sisters, who together control roughly 60 percent of the company  had grown increasingly frustrated with what they described as his refusal to share financial information, cooperate with board oversight, or develop a succession plan that didn’t involve installing his own children.

In May 2025, the board placed Arthur T. on paid leave, along with his son, his daughter, and several top lieutenants, over allegations that he was planning another work stoppage. In September 2025, after failed mediation, the board fired him again. Arthur T. sued for reinstatement. In April 2026, a Delaware Chancery Court judge ruled against him, finding that the board had acted in good faith. The judge described Arthur T. as “an excellent operator, but an imperious leader” who “stubbornly resisted board oversight” and created a “toxic” boardroom environment.

This second firing complicates the heroic narrative considerably. The same qualities that made Arthur T. beloved by workers, his absolute control, his personal authority, his resistance to outside interference are precisely the qualities that made him impossible for a board to govern. The loyalty-inspiring decisiveness looks different when it’s directed at your own sisters and their legitimate governance concerns.

And this is where I think the story becomes truly useful, because it raises a question most leadership writing avoids: Can a leader be genuinely extraordinary for their people and genuinely impossible for their institution at the same time?

I think the answer is obviously yes. And I think the discomfort of that answer is where the real learning lives.

 

What I Take From This

I’ve thought about the Market Basket story for a few weeks, and I keep coming back to a few things.

Loyalty is not produced by policy. It’s produced by behavior, repeated over time. Arthur T. didn’t earn a workforce willing to sacrifice their income for two months by giving a good speech or publishing a values statement. He earned it by showing up at funerals, replenishing the employee profit-sharing fund after the 2008 crash, and running a business where people’s contributions were acknowledged by someone who actually knew them. That kind of trust takes decades to build and minutes to destroy, which is why the board’s decision to fire him had the effect it did.

The best business models are often the ones that look “wrong” by conventional standards (think Amazon in its founding days). Market Basket paid its workers more, charged its customers less, and resisted every pressure to financialize its operations. By every metric that Wall Street would approve of, it was leaving money on the table. And it was also more profitable, more resilient, and more capable of surviving a crisis than most of its competitors. Sometimes the “inefficient” model is actually the most efficient one it just takes longer to see.

Governance matters, even when the leader is right. This is the hard one. I believe Arthur T. was right about how to run a supermarket chain. I also believe the board and his sisters (the second time around) had legitimate concerns about oversight, succession, and transparency. A leader who cannot be questioned, no matter how good their instincts, creates a fragile organization, one that depends entirely on a single person’s judgment and relationships. Arthur T. built something remarkable. But he also built it in a way that couldn’t outlast his personal involvement, and that is a failure of leadership too (succession planning transparently – in know this is a topic in and of itself, but I’ll leave it at that for now.)

What workers will do when they feel genuine ownership, not stock options, but real ownership, over their workplace is almost unlimited. The Market Basket employees didn’t own shares. They owned something harder to quantify: a sense that this was their company, that the person running it saw them, and that the model they were part of was worth defending. As one commentator put it at the time, they used the “language of ownership” even though they owned nothing on paper. That psychological ownership, that feeling that this place is mine, that I built this, that it matters is the most undervalued asset in business.

 

The Question Worth Sitting With

We talk constantly about leadership in the abstract, servant leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership. We build frameworks and write books and give TED talks.

Market Basket is what happens when it’s real.

Not a case study. Not a leadership exercise. A real man who ran a real business and treated real people the way he believed they deserved to be treated. And when the system tried to remove him, those people stood in a parking lot for two months in the New England summer and said: no.

It’s easy to admire that. It’s harder to reckon with the sequel, the same man, fired again, this time by his own sisters, with a court finding that his “imperious manner” justified his removal. (And again, I only present what I can find on this. I don’t and can’t judge the second firing aside from my personal understanding and biases)

Maybe the lesson isn’t about finding the perfect leader. Maybe it’s about building organizations where the values survive regardless of who’s in the chair. Where the culture is strong enough that it doesn’t depend on a single individual’s presence to hold together. And I mean genuine culture, like Market Basket, not this fake, forced, touchy-touchy type of culture most companies are trying to create today with their DEI, and team buildings and hooray for everyone.

Arthur T. Demoulas proved something extraordinary in 2014: that if you treat people well, they will move mountains for you. What remains to be seen is whether Market Basket can prove something even harder, that the culture he built can outlast his departure.

That’s the real test. And it’s one we should all be watching. I surely will.

 

If this piece made you think, I’d love to hear your take. What do you think matters more in the long run, the leader or the culture they leave behind? Drop a comment or share this with someone who leads people for a living.

 

Mindset First. Keep thriving.