“Our response is more democracy, more openness, and more humanity. But never naivety.”
He wasn’t being soft. He was being precise. He was saying: a free, trusting society is something we choose to keep being. The test of that choice is what we do on the worst day, not the best one. Continue reading Walls or Words: What We Choose to Build After the Shots Stop
This is how resentment reproduces itself. Keep people scrambling and they stay dependent on whoever promises to name their enemy and fight on their behalf. The resentment architects need your scarcity to keep you as a host. The moment you experience enough abundance, enough space, enough breathing room, you start to see through it. Continue reading THE CROSSING – Part Two of Two
The architects of resentment, of any age, share certain characteristics. They deal in enemies. They trade in scarcity, the sense that there is not enough, that someone else is taking what is yours, that the only answer is to fight. Their nationalism and their religion are transactional and tribal rather than transcendent. They don’t lift people toward higher ground. They plant people more firmly in the mud and tell them to be proud of it. Continue reading Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight
This is the language of dehumanization. Not subtle, not coded, not requiring any interpretation. Just the plain assertion that some category of people belongs in rubble and ruin, that their reduction to ash is their proper place in the order of things. Continue reading A Season of Reflection — An Easter Message
The books that have actually transformed me were not always the ones with the best arguments. Sometimes they were novels that let me inhabit a consciousness so different from my own that I could never quite return to my previous assumptions. And sometimes they were people who stopped telling stories and simply said: This is what I experienced. This is what I now believe. This is what I am asking you to consider. Continue reading When Story Is Not Enough: On Crossing the Line Between Fiction and Truth
Leadership requires the capacity to understand people. Not to manage them. Not to optimize them. To understand them. And you cannot understand people you have never been curious about. You cannot lead humans if you have not done the work of recognizing that other humans are, in fact, as real and complex and worthy as you are.
Continue reading Leadership Malpractice and the Duty to Travel
If you want to lead in a way that actually changes things, you will eventually have to do inner work that no case study can prepare you for. You will have to understand, from the inside, what it means to be a human being trying to be seen and heard and valued. And that requires a different kind of reading.
Continue reading Happy Workers Do Better Work
Dugnad was always my least favorite word in Norwegian. It means voluntary collective work, and it has organized Norwegian communities for over eight hundred years, and it’s not really “voluntary” as my wife would explain. In practice it means your Saturday now belongs to everyone. My neighbors would show up with rakes and rollers and thermoses of coffee, cheerful in a way I found deeply suspicious. Continue reading The Handlekraft Principle: Authority That Gives Power Away
That the richness of America has always come from the layering of cultures, not the flattening of them. That you don’t have to understand every word of a song to feel its heart. That celebrating someone else’s heritage doesn’t take anything away from your own. Continue reading The People Who Feed Us
That’s the thing about the bridge. On the edges, at least, you have company. You have your tribe, your certainties, your enemies clearly marked. On the bridge you have the view, which shows you too much, and the quiet, which never lifts. Continue reading The Bridge
