From CEO to CI-S

You may have noticed I transitioned from CEO of Agile Six last week. The company I helped build and still love.

This had been in the planning for a few years now. I am very excited to see where the new CEO, Dan Levenson, will take us.

My leaving was not about burnout. It was recognition. The kind that arrives slowly and feels right. As planned, better stewards had emerged. The company had grown into something that needed different hands than mine. And the most loving thing a founder can sometimes do is step aside and let the thing he started keep becoming.

So I did.

And then I gave myself a new title, at a new company, one I own outright with no one but myself to manage. I am now the CI-S of Better Places — a company of one, just me, but a passion I hope will touch many great organizations and wonderful people.

I wrestled with whether I even needed a title. Whether I should just call myself retired, or call this a passion project, or a hobby. But I have found initiative and passion reborn, as I did when Agile Six was young. I want to steward a new idea, a new level of consciousness, inside a new kind of company — one not led by the dated roles of the past. So I landed on a title I suspect more than a few CEOs might quietly want for themselves.

Chief In-Spiritor.

Inspire comes from the Latin inspirare. It means to breathe into. Not to instruct. Not to command. To breathe into. Better Places is the company I have built to do exactly that: to in-spirit other people through writing, through travel, and through honest conversation about what comes next in a marketplace increasingly shaped by a higher order of human consciousness.

There is a reason this role could not have existed inside the organizations I used to run, and it is not really about titles.

For a century, work has kept matters of the spirit at the door. Questions of the soul, of what a person believes their life is for, have been treated as a legal risk to be managed rather than a human reality to be honored. We built organizations fluent in the language of skills, goals, even feelings — carefully, through engagement surveys — but never in the architecture of meaning underneath them. We asked people to bring their whole selves to work, then quietly asked them to leave the largest part of that self at home.

I do not think the avoidance was malicious. It came from a real fear of imposing belief on people who did not share it. But avoiding the question is not neutrality. It is just a different kind of flattening: treating people as economic units with preferences, instead of beings who carry questions of spirit wherever they go, including into the office.

This is not a role I invented from scratch. My father was a minister. I once studied to be a pastor myself, before I found my way into building companies instead of congregations. I have spent a lifetime around people wrestling honestly with what their life is for, and decades more watching organizations pretend that wrestling does not happen in their hallways. In-spiriting is not a metaphor I picked up recently. It is the family business, translated into a new vocabulary for a new kind of institution.

That is the whole job description. It is the only work I want left. And instead of retiring, I am integrating my life, following my bliss and continuing to unfold.

Why Now?

For most of the last century, human value lived in the middle of a ladder.

The bottom rung is algorithmic work. Following a path someone already mapped. Think assembly lines and customer service centers with rigid protocols.

The middle rung is heuristic work. Finding a path when none is given, the judgment and craft we spent careers acquiring. In professions like software engineering and management consulting.

The top rung is telic work, from the Greek telos, meaning purpose: deciding which paths are worth taking in the first place.

Machines have always climbed this ladder. What is new is the speed. AI took the bottom rung long ago, and it is now well into the middle. Writing, diagnosing, designing, synthesizing, doing the heuristic work we told ourselves was safely ours. It improves while we sleep. Standing on the middle rung and competing with it is a contest no human wins.

But the top rung is different in kind. AI can find ten thousand paths to any destination you name. It cannot tell you which destination is worth reaching. It cannot care whether you arrive, or what happens to the people who follow you there. That rung remains ours. Purpose. Meaning. Judgment. The breath.

My new mission is simply to help people climb to it. I do not claim to have all the answers. I am still learning what this rung looks like, what it feels like to stand on it rather than just glimpse it from below. But I have come to believe that this is where human value will live in the years ahead, and I want to spend whatever time I have left helping others find their footing there.

The 20/20 Rule

For a hundred years, the productivity gospel has been the 80/20 rule: eighty percent of your results come from twenty percent of your effort, so find the vital twenty percent and let the rest go. It was sound advice for a world where the binding constraint was human effort.

That world is ending. It needs a new ratio. I call it the 20/20 rule.

Twenty minutes of inspiration is worth more to me than twenty hours of labor. And more than twenty years of experience. When positioned on top of AI.

Why? The twenty hours were labor, the grind we mistook for virtue. The twenty years were experience, the accumulated pattern recognition, the hard-won heuristic mastery we used to pay a premium for. AI now does both. Cheaply and tirelessly and better every quarter. What it cannot supply is the twenty minutes: the telic spark where a human being sees clearly what should exist, why it matters, and how it ought to feel. The breath of life.

In the old economy, that spark was worthless without the hours and the years to execute it. And often by the time execution arrived, the life was gone. This is why organizations often feel like the walking dead. In the emerging economy, the hours and the years are the cheap part, and the spark is nearly everything.

I would rather have twenty minutes of that inspiration than twenty hours of anything else. That is not laziness. It is arithmetic. I could be wrong about the exact ratio. But I do not think I am wrong about the direction. And I am hopeful about what it means for innovations in shorter working hours. Because less is truly more, and it’s time for us to start talking about it.

What I Am Building

This is what Better Places is for.

I am writing. A new book is taking shape, and Room to Be Human continues its journey at SXSW. And suddenly there are two more behind those. The space in my life has given me so much inspiration. My blog is where I think out loud between them. Some of it polished, some of it me working an idea in real time, all of it in public. I have made enough mistakes in public by now that I have mostly lost my fear of making more.

I am travelling, literally and metaphorically. Literally, because I have come to believe that a person who never goes to places that are uncomfortable slowly loses the capacity to imagine other ways of living. Metaphorically, because the same is true of the mind. I intend to go to the places and the organizations where a higher order of consciousness is already taking root, to learn from them and to carry what I find between them like seeds between islands.

I intend to fish in wild streams and walk in exotic places. Because life is more than work, because I can, and because all of this contributes to the twenty minutes in a way I must demonstrate.

And I am gathering people. I am building and attending retreats for the founders, leaders, and quiet builders who are trying to work from the top rung: to organize enterprises around meaning rather than fear, around abundance rather than scarcity, around the breath rather than the grind. If you have felt like the odd one out for believing work could be built this way, I want you to know you are in the company of other odd ones out who are building extraordinary things.

You can find all of it at http://www.robertrasmussen.me. The writing, the books, the retreats, the road ahead.

An Invitation

I spent decades as a director, then learned to be a coach, then a steward. This last turn, as in-spiritor, is the one I did not see coming: not to lead an organization, but to breathe purpose into as many of them as I can reach before my time is up.

I cannot do that from a desk. And I do not want to do it alone.

So this is an open invitation. Come travel with me. To a real place or a new idea, it hardly matters which as long as they are Better Places. Read along. Argue with me. Build something on the top rung and let me tell the world about it. Help me do the only work I think is worth doing now.

Help me in-spirit better places.

I do not know exactly where this road leads. I suspect none of us do, not really. But I have learned over the years that the best journeys are the ones where you admit you are still figuring it out as you go. Where you make space for others to figure it out alongside you. Where the destination matters less than the quality of attention you bring to each step.

The title sounds strange, I admit. Chief In-Spiritor. But I have carried stranger titles in my life, and this one finally fits. It is the work of breathing into. Of helping people remember what they already know but have forgotten under the weight of busyness and fear. Of creating the conditions where purpose can take root, surface and grow in inspiring ways.

For more information on my journey, or to share yours, visit my website www.robertrasmussen.me

Further Reading

Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations (Teal organizations, evolutionary purpose, self-management, wholeness). Abraham Maslow, “Theory Z” and The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (metamotivation, Being-values, transcendence). Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (the director-to-coach evolution of the manager).