In San Francisco, you can’t go anywhere without running into some AI-related conversations these days. Even (or especially) the hottest weekend brunch spots aren’t safe from it. In between some egg benedict and home fries, I heard everything from heated doomsday predictions to fairly banal examples of how people are trying it out in their day to day. Not to be outdone by the brunch crowd, Pope Leo XIV just published his encyclical letter on AI – a thorough and thoughtful call to think about the why behind the what of it all, and ponder this question: what does it mean to be human?

One of the most ubiquitous phrases you will hear tech and business leaders utter while on the topic of AI is “human in the loop.” With the best of intentions, “human in the loop” still undermines the role of people as one piece of the grand equation that is the social, political, and economic system. We exist to play a part in this loop, not the other way around. The encyclical letter is essentially the papal version of this phrase, except that he reminds us the loop is ours to define and build to our vision, not a nameless and faceless system that we compliantly file in and fit into:

“...the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision that underlies it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species…It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’”

He’s pointing to something that most leaders gloss over, which is that our current starting point for the future already divides people into a version of have’s and have-not’s. Inside of the companies I’ve worked for, I couldn’t necessarily tackle and successfully address an entire society’s value problem. What we tried to do was to build a better vision of it inside of our own company, product, and brand. That’s why at LinkedIn, we championed the voices reflecting the changing shape and aperture of modern workplaces. That’s why at Visible, we held firm to our simple and transparent pricing and customer service policies. There was dignity in counting each customer as a person with context and choices, rather than a high or low margin unit. There was also a cost to doing so, which made these everyday, principled decisions to realize our vision that much more consequential.

The encyclical letter may have come from a religious leader, but the questions he is asking are far from theological. They are operational, they are here, right now. The choices we’re making today with AI will become the algorithmic reality of our tomorrow, and that of the next generation. We shouldn’t ignore the backlash at graduation speeches or plummeting consumer sentiment as a case of misunderstanding. They’re not asking whether AI is useful. They’re asking who decides what it’s for, and whether the people most affected by that vision and answers are anywhere close to the decisions that are being made today. They’re asking the uncomfortable and necessary questions: what does it look like to build with humans – with me – at the center of the why?

Every Tuesday at LinkedIn, our experience of our own product slowed to a connection speed that was at best clunky, and at its worst, made us want to throw our phones against the wall. But it was intentional. We wanted to be able to use our own product the way everyday users might in their day-to-day, including slower mobile connections. Many of us gave up our Premium subscriptions, too – another key perk – because we needed to understand better what works and doesn’t when you’re using the product as a free tier user, and what would compel us to pay for it ourselves.

At Visible, the number of phones I carried with me was always a family joke, because I constantly signed up for our own service to see if the onboarding flow held consistently, and what changed when using the service on the most affordable to the highest end phones. The point was that we needed to be intentional about going out of our way to step outside of the bubble that work built up around us with the best of our working environments, tools, and conditions. That’s not how most people live and work, and we wanted to build products for most people, not just ourselves.

I’m wondering how those with “unlimited” access to tokens and Tokenmaxxing at work are getting this part of the user experience. This was always the double edged sword of working inside of a company that comes with the benefit of access to the best and the highest tier of your own product at a subsidized cost or entirely free. You start to experience your own product in a way that most everyday people do not, and as much as you try, your own version of reality starts to take departure from the people you’re trying to serve and sell to.

My own experience integrating AI more and more into my work is that I run into the paywall quite often, at times, several times a day every few hours. I know this is by design, because there’s such high demand, and companies, of course, want us to pay more if we want extra usage and access. I’ve gone several times over my budget already, and in the end, my workaround has to be mine, not the one that’s most easily available. That means I’m being more disciplined about what tasks actually deserve my attention now vs. later, and with how much effort and time. Some tasks don’t even make the cut, as I’m doing the math and realizing it’s not worth the effort, time, and most importantly, the tokens likely required to do it. The tokenization of my work is officially here.

To be fair, I’ve always been on top of where and how I spend my time. But nothing says “unit economics of your time” like literal tokens dictating which work can continue when, and the times you’ve got to walk away because you’re cut off and in the “penalty box.” What felt like the breeziness of my initial few months with the LLMs is now entering a “just because you can’t doesn’t mean you should” phase, where discernment isn’t just about the decision making that happens inside of your integrated workflow with AI, but it’s equally about when and how you choose to do the work, if you do it at all. My work has to get better because of better prioritization, less noise, and more intentional selection and sequencing of the tasks before I even start.

The breakneck pace of innovation and progress we’re seeing today, it’s easy to forget that there’s a strategic advantage to constraints. But it shouldn’t just be on end users to exercise that discipline. The best AI habits aren’t formed by just those with unlimited access. They’re being built by the people who’ve had to think twice, and work around the constraints. I’m watching to see which companies decide that’s worth designing for.

Meaningful transformation always starts on the inside before it shows up on the outside. That’s not a metaphor — it’s mechanics. Creating new momentum, or changing its direction entirely, requires internal force first: shifts in mindset, culture, and the systems governing how we work. Only then does it generate the velocity others can see and feel.

This is exactly what businesses are navigating with AI right now. The pressure to show external progress is real and compounding: new products, new efficiencies, new announcements. But that pressure is running headlong into how slow and uncomfortable internal transformation actually is. Doing both simultaneously risks showing the seams around your strategy. That fear, however, cannot be the reason for inaction. At a moment like this, inaction is the worst option available.

The businesses that will start to see meaningful progress in the next 18 months aren’t the ones that bought the most AI seats or shipped the most pilots. They’re the ones doing the harder, slower, less visible work of transformation at the systems level. That requires three things: building conviction with your workforce, redesigning the operating model, and sharing the lessons in real time.

Build it with your workforce. For any business to make meaningful progress, belief and conviction must take shape from within, starting with employees. They are the guardians of your brand and the builders and evangelists of your product. If the frontline doesn’t believe in the premise of what you’re doing together — which includes the good, the bad, and the ugly of any innovation moment — it comes through in every customer call, product decision, and purchase experience.

That means trust inside the company is your biggest foundation. The intellectual honesty and pragmatism with which leaders communicate their point of view and a plan can make or break it. There’s a playbook for this from the Creator Economy, where brands learned to build with communities who know the product better than anyone and won’t be shy about saying what can be better. Many of YouTube’s early employees were creators themselves, and instead of building a wall we invited creators, viewers, and advertisers to sit with us and help build a product that works for all three constituents. It was a hard task but one that ultimately created a flywheel that became a $205 billion marketplace by 2024. The same principle applies internally: invite employees into the process systematically, rather than counting on grassroots behaviors to do the heavy lifting.

Create an operating system. The data this year is sobering. Only 11% of companies have AI agents in production. Enterprise AI maturity scores dropped from 44 to 35 in a single year. 80% of executives report no measurable productivity gains from their AI investments.

The most common response is to double down on the individual: more prompt training, more license seats, more “AI champions” appointed across departments. But productivity is not an individual property. It’s a systems one.

AI compounds when it’s embedded in how teams actually coordinate: shared templates, redesigned workflows, common handoffs, norms for when to use a tool and when to talk to a human. It stalls when it lives on one person’s laptop and goes nowhere when that person is out sick or moves on.

When we first started introducing new model capabilities into some of LinkedIn’s products following the arrival of ChatGPT, our own pace of experimentation and innovation went into a hyper drive. It was exhilarating, with small groups of small and powerful decision makers rolling up their sleeves and operating at a true start-up speed. What suffered initially was the pace of communication and documentation practices, which was still following the logic from a different era. Turning some of the AI tools onto ourselves, we started creating an accountability mechanism that not only drove decision and development processes, but a way to document and communicate those decisions consistently and clearly. It required a systematic change as well as a social buy-in to make sure we could move fast AND scale at the same time.

Experiences like that during the early days of this era of AI taught us that what we’re actually doing is a transformation of both the commercial model and the operating model simultaneously — culture, cadence, mindset, measurement, and incentive systems all included. Efficiency and productivity are means to an end. Process improvement is a leading indicator that you might be on the right track. The bigger “so what” is the new value created for employees, customers, and stakeholders — and measuring that requires new frameworks entirely, not just faster versions of the old ones.

Embrace the lessons now, not later. One of the most counterintuitive things about transformation at this scale is that transparency becomes a competitive advantage. Not the polished retrospective, but the real-time version. Sharing the lessons as you go, including where the strategy bent, where the pilot failed, and what you did next.

What I learned building Visible is that giving away the playbook as you build is your biggest credibility signal, not a risk to it. Leaders who communicate openly about what’s working and what isn’t build something that pilots and tooling alone can’t: trust. And trust is what turns a workforce into a genuine transformation partner rather than a skeptical audience for your next announcement.

During Visible’s launch and growth period, we encountered many hiccups, as new ventures often do. Our services were disrupted at times, and our e-commerce experience didn’t quite work as intended. For a product with a rigid definition for what’s acceptable or not in its functionality and value, there was little room for mess-ups, and even less time to get it back up and running. Those were recovery moments, and a brand building moment. If our product didn’t manifest the promises we made on the outside, we didn’t just make it right, we acknowledged and explained what was going on, why, and what to expect. During one such incident early days, we invited some of our earliest customers to give us feedback for how else we can make our product better, and more than 800 people gave us insightful, essay-length input. For prepaid phone services, as much as 80% of customers left in a given year for better deals or service. For Visible, it was the other way around, despite no contract or special incentives. They chose us because they wanted to, and many even told us they rooted for us.

No organization has been through a transformation quite like this one. The leaders who will be most useful right now aren’t the ones with the cleanest narrative. They’re the ones telling the most honest version of it as it unfolds.

The most honest thing about this moment is that nobody has a complete or a proven playbook. Every organization is figuring it out in real time, under pressure, with seams showing. The leaders who will generate the most momentum aren’t the ones who hide that. They’re the ones who use it, who build with their people, redesign their systems, and tell the story as it unfolds.

Transformation starts inside. The outside follows.

Are you for or against humans?

You’d be hard pressed to find a leader who’d say “no” to this question publicly, especially anyone who is building frontier models or integrating AI into their products and services. The follow-up to that question, however, will get a variety of answers — some meaningful while others, mere talking points. It begs the question, then: what does human-centric AI look like?

A Wired writer recently filmed dirty socks for $0.37. It was a part of his experiment with DoorDash’s new Tasks app, in which gig workers strap phones to themselves and record the process of getting any number of tasks done, like doing the laundry, scrambling eggs, or taking a walk through parks. DoorDash isn’t alone in this quest, although it may be the most visible example of human work being replicated at scale through the infrastructure of the gig economy. Lawyers and scientists who’ve lost their jobs are now being recruited to train AI models, which, for some, was the whole reason why their employer laid them off in the first place. Meanwhile, China already has dark factories full of assembly lines that are exclusively made of robots. The process of automating certain types of work seems reasonable enough, but who is deciding what types of work makes sense to automate, why, and how — and most importantly, what is our vision for a world in which work takes on a different shape altogether, when labor and its output are still a currency of measure for our value and worth?

All of this is getting harder to discern in the age of “toxic confidence,” as The New York Times recently declared. We’ve always used confidence as a shortcut for credibility. Doctors, executives, lawyers — you trust them partly because certainty signals they’ve earned the right to be sure. AI broke that shortcut in leaps and bounds, with LLMs that sound perfectly confident whether they’re right or wrong. But people are picking up confidence as a performance, too, speaking with certainty that would have previously come with experience and expertise. Signals of authority are now mixed up in a whole lot of noise, and worse yet, it’s getting more difficult to see how confidence as a measure of credibility can hold people (or machines) accountable to anything.

Gig workers or lawyers having to train AI models that replace them is the physical version of the same problem. AI is learning the mechanics of laundry and eggs and document review, without any of the judgment. It’s getting the footage, not the context. The decision-making behind when, why, which approach given these constraints — that doesn’t make it into the video or the mark-ups.

This is the moment when the “how” part becomes the most valuable thing you have. Not just the output, but the decision architecture behind it. I can think of so many untold stories from the rooms I sat in over the past 20+ years of my career, where discernment mattered, and being wrong had a cost. Where the brief either landed or it didn’t and someone was keeping score. Where I built the credibility to sound sure by being publicly wrong first and rebuilding from there. AI doesn’t have that — and whatever we’re feeding them right now will be derivative, not formative. Gig footage doesn’t capture it. Executives who perform certainty without it are running the same problem at a different price point.

When I imagine a future with AI that doesn’t leave people behind, I think about the things that make us most human — our imperfections and mistakes and most importantly, our ability to own up to the decisions and actions we make. It’s not about false modesty, but telling the stories of stumbles as well as triumphs as we try something, giving away the playbook. It’s uncomfortable in a culture where confidence is currency. But confidence, one of the most human signals we used to rely on, has been commoditized and diluted, with or without AI. To build a people-first future with a technology-first tool, it requires our leaders to be just that — human: willing to share their process, invite scrutiny, and when wrong, own up to it with enough specificity that it’s legible, accountable, and useful.

So, are you for humans? Most of us will say yes. The harder question is whether we’re building, leading, and operating like we mean it, and follow through on shaping what that means to everyday people.

We live in a world where nearly everyone is vying for our attention so that we’ll buy something they’re selling. I live with the burden of habits I’ve developed as a modern day consumer, indiscriminately and thoughtlessly adding things to my cart, and often compelled by deals that seem too good to be true. There are some things I need on a regular basis that I don’t even think twice about, and would be happy to automate or outsource the shopping experience, like my toilet paper (monthly), face wash (quarterly), or a stack of white t-shirts (annual or whenever they start to show holes or stains I can’t hide). This is what Amazon was counting on when they introduced Auto Buy features, and many subscription products rely on you to forget that you even signed up for something in the first place, and keep that credit card on file.

Some of the first movers in retail are now experimenting with shopping in LLMs, like Gap’s new checkout inside Google Gemini, the first retailer to do it, with loyalty accounts not yet linked and points not yet spendable at launch; and Sephora and Walmart’s foray into OpenAI’s ChatGPT to surface their products. Gap is first, and they’re doing it while 58% of shoppers say they’d blame the brand if the AI gets the recommendation wrong. First mover and liability holder, same announcement. The first movers are borrowing against their existing brand equity as they figure out how to create the most valuable experience for their customers — which, in turn, will accrete in value back to the business. The brands that survive this moment are the ones that treat it as an honest journey with their customers, not an experiment run on them.

All of this is predicated on the assumption that shopping results in buying things, and brands will want you to get from A to B as quickly and often as possible. But there are certain things, out of desire over necessity, that I wouldn’t give up the experience of finding and appreciating. I love combing the racks physically or online for rare finds, like vintage clothing or that last pair of shoes on sale, exactly in my size. I love the hunt, and in the case of pre-owned goods, I look for evidence and stories that they were well loved and cared for by someone who equally appreciates the craft. Most of the time, I don’t even buy what I found because the joy was already in the process of searching for it, reading about it, and appreciating the beauty. Sometimes, I end up coming back to it because the discovery stayed with me long after I left a shop or closed a browser. It’s a quiet and often overlooked corner in the world of shopping in today’s attention span and focus on efficiency, and I have no interest in taking more short cuts there.

So what would I let AI pick and buy for me? Anything I’ve already decided is interchangeable. What I won’t let it touch is anything where the finding is part of what I’m buying. The shoe hunt isn’t inefficiency. That’s the whole point. I suspect I’m not alone in knowing the difference, even if the brands haven’t figured out how to ask yet.

Trust has always been the foundation of enduring relationships. It’s the thing that determines whether a relationship can hold any weight at all. But right now, earning and keeping it has never been harder.

We’re dealing with a world with lots of heightened anxieties from income disparity and regional conflicts to ideological divides. People’s trust in institutions is at an all-time low, and the increasing polarization has turned into insularity, which further fuels a pervasive sense of distrust and skepticism, or at best, trust is reserved for the very familiar and the local. In a world full of information and access to opportunities, more people are feeling their world is getting smaller and disconnected. This retreat toward the familiar is the central finding of the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer released earlier in January: seven in ten people globally say they’re unwilling to trust someone with different values, backgrounds, or information sources.

Plus, building trust takes time and repetition, neither of which we have in abundance with the breakneck pace of innovation and the ever-changing conditions. Even the most consistent of decisions and actions might not find their context or audience in the same place as a few weeks prior. If you’re an existing company like Google, NVIDIA, or Microsoft, your existing trust factor can be an asset to leverage, but it’s not without risks to the overall reputation. If you’re a new company like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Perplexity, you’re building the trust bank and making deposits as you go. There’s simply not enough data yet in these newer relationships, which means every decision and action is an opportunity to build and signal a pattern recognition between what you say and do.

This is why we’re watching each and every move the leaders of the AI companies are making with bated breath, from Dario Amodei holding Anthropic’s red lines at the cost of its federal contracts, and Sam Altman stepping in for OpenAI hours later, to Jack Dorsey’s call to cut Block’s workforce drastically citing AI and productivity gains as the reason. As a consumer, customer, stakeholder, and perhaps an employee or a shareholder, we’re trying to read each message and action to figure out three things:

• Who thinks, speaks, and acts like me? Affinity is often the first signal we read in other people — whether that’s shared background, dialect, or worldview — and we trust it quickly because familiarity feels like safety. We’re drawn to people who reflect something of ourselves back to us. Coming from a similar socioeconomic or cultural background as any of these leaders won’t automatically mean your values are aligned with theirs, but the more initial signals that feel “local” to you, the more willing you’ll be to extend trust, especially now, when so much feels unfamiliar.

• Who gets me? Attunement is the next layer of trust signal. Regardless of existing affinity signals, if I feel that someone is attuned to my needs, wants, and motivations, it will be easier for me to relate to and trust them because they’re genuinely willing to understand me and my context. It tells me they’re paying attention, and that they care.

• Who’s got my back? Accountability is the deepest layer of trust signal that builds with a consistent set of words and actions, especially ones that directly address one’s needs, wants, and motivations. At the end of the day, we’re all living and working towards certain goals for ourselves as well as for those we care for emotionally, financially, and in many other ways. Nothing builds trust more enduringly than when someone consistently shows up for you — regardless of formal or contractual obligation.

Trust signals don’t only live in press conferences and public stances. They show up in the product experience, in how customer service responds when something goes wrong, in what integrations get built, and above all, in the omissions, edits, and absences. The small decisions accumulate. They always do.

We’re in a moment of progress and disruption, one that requires a renewed sense of hope, possibilities, and imagination from all of us. Without trust in each other, in our leaders, and in institutions that are making the most consequential moves, this kind of mindset is difficult to harness and share with everyone. I want to bet on a future grounded in trust. And for that to be possible, we must treat trust the way we treat any other asset worth building – with gravity, intent, and patience. That’s how we break the insularity cycle — and innovate together. Because trust is a foundation, not a feature.

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Last summer, my friend Helen Lin and I sat down for a rare and calm moment of catching up, reflecting, and dreaming over breakfast. One thing Helen said to me then has stayed with me since: “You’re so picky!” We weren’t talking about my choice of breakfast. We were discussing my choices in the professional context, and I knew exactly what she meant by it – and in fact, I was grateful that she saw and acknowledged the efforts that go into the series of choices I’ve made in my life and work over the past decade plus.

The beginning of a new (calendar) year is often an opportunity to reflect on and rethink one’s choices, and in many cases, work and career. More recently, I’ve had some time to do this in a way that was dedicated and intentional, free of other deadlines and distractions. Whether you’re thinking about a new job, company, career, or simply wanting to stay present and intentional about where you are today, one of the most important first steps to be able to make disciplined and discerning decisions about your work and career is to be clear about what you want and need – and by what criteria you’d measure and prioritize them. These are some questions I’ve asked myself in the past that’s helped me crystalize what’s important to me:

What is the “job” my job is doing for me and my life? What role does it play and what do I need and want from it? I’m someone who takes great pride in my work, and work plays a big part in who I am as a person and how I experience joy and purpose in life. That said, I know by now that there is a difference between treating work like it’s everything vs. intentionally choosing to make it a meaningful part of your life; hence, starting with this contextualization helps me think about my job not as a self-contained and sealed corner, but a connected part and perhaps a means to something more meaningful in my life. For example, no one will dispute compensation matters for one when finding the right fit. But beyond compensation as a form of value exchange between you and your employer, being clear about what it means for you (livelihood for me and/or my family, savings, means to play and pleasure, access, etc) now and/or later is important. Learning or gaining skills is another potential criteria, as is some level of kinship with the people you’re working with. Draw up your own list of criteria and know why they matter to you (not why it matters in the eyes of others), why they matter to you now, and which ones matter more vs. others.

How would I measure it? What types of progress or outcomes would I like to see along the way, and by the time I’ve moved on? There’s no constant and hard “currency” that can be universally applied from one individual, job, or a company to another. The currency of your own values and priorities should be dictating how you’d measure these criteria. For compensation, there is always a number, but whether or not that is “enough” is a question for yourself based on where your life is and what your priorities are, and depending on the structure and composition of the compensation, your assessment might offer many different ways to think about the value realization on different timelines and scale. Same thing with learning criteria. At the macro level, there are certain skills and expertise that will be considered more valuable or critical, but which types of skills you think you might want to gain should be a criteria that’s defined by you, based on what you’ve done in the past vs. what you’d like to do next. As for kinship with your colleagues, maybe you’re an introvert or an extrovert, or somewhere in between, and need different things from people and relationships at work...so how do you assess and measure that in the potential culture of the company? What might look like a great job on paper for most people might not be the best job for you right now, or if it is, you should know that based on your own criteria.

What’s changed since the last time I’ve visited these questions, in my life and/or work? How would that change (or not) my priorities? Since no one’s job or work exists in a vacuum, it’s important to remember that the same set of criteria or priorities might not work for you depending on other factors that could influence you and the world around you. Maybe you’re in a different stage of life (single, in and out of a relationship, situationship, kids, pets, empty nesting, supporting parents, etc etc), maybe the industry you’ve been in is facing some headwind, maybe there are geopolitical shifts in the region you call home. The changes could be minuscule and temporary, or much more meaningful and permanent, not to mention, you may not be the same exact person yourself as the last time you considered these questions. Allow yourself these spaces to mentally bungee back and forth, from your past to your present to the future, from reflection to imagination, taking stock of what’s been working and what’s not and why. The best outcome could be a complete pivot, or staying exactly where you are today and doing your best, but doing so intentionally and with clear reasons.

If needed, with whom can I have a conversation to think through this more clearly? This is where the power of the network comes in first, not just with your first interview prep or the email to ask for an introduction to a potential opportunity. Just as in life, work and career is a series of conversations, too. Look to the left, right, around and ahead to take note of people who might have gone through different phases of life and work you’re about to embark on, whether that is a job change, promotion, demotion, reduction in force, changing industries, starting your own business, etc etc. Ask them about how they thought about these decisions, what they’ve learned, and who else might be helpful for you. Look for peers – and I don’t mean just people who are in a similar career trajectory or stage – who might be contemplating or working on similar questions themselves. Being singular and clear about your own thinking first means when you participate in these community conversations, you can listen, discern, and learn more clearly vs. being swayed by other people’s criteria and priorities. Seeking meaningful progress and growth is a universally shared experience. Why and why now, and what that should look like for you should be uniquely your own.

So as Helen said, yes I am picky, and being picky has served me well. But being picky isn’t about acting like I’m too good for this or that, or being unreasonable, inflexible, or close-minded. It’s about knowing myself well enough to be able to say “not now or not for me, but thank you” to others so that I can preserve my time and energy to the things I say “yes let’s” to be able to engage open-minded and wholeheartedly in exploring things with the biggest potential for fit. It’s about discipline and discernment – one might even say, a distinct taste in how we choose to move about the world in this one precious and incredible life.

Today, I’m going to share with you something I had shared with my team at LinkedIn earlier this year. It’s a lesson I wish to have practiced consistently much earlier in my career, but once it clicked, my relationship with work changed.

By now, I’m sure we’ve all experienced something in life or at work that created a setback. It could have been for a variety of reasons from organizational restructures to a family matter. No matter how public or private, institutional or personal, these types of changes often create a disruption in the path you were expecting to take for a period of time. And the thing about disruptive elements is that they will wobble you for a moment, making you feel like you don’t have control over the most fundamental pieces of what makes up your day to day. It’s completely normal to feel the wobble long after it’s gone. But it’s important to regain your balance with an intentional approach:

First, recognize the obstacles, name them and face them. Letting the situation surround and settle into your day to day without confronting it will only make you feel worse and that you have no control. The other reason it’s important to take stock, process, and make sense of what just happened and what you’re dealing with is so that you don’t end up creating a story that doesn’t actually exist. As you know, any good story with a proper dose of drama and a story arc involves some sort of obstacles for the protagonist. A hero’s resolution often involves an enemy of sort and who doesn’t love a satisfying journey of finding something to fight against? It’s only human to identify someone or something as the obstacle of your story, but don’t make the mistake of spending all of your time and energy building them up in your mind. Obstacles aren’t the main character of your story. It’s simply an arc and possibly a catalyst for something else...

...which means opportunities are often disguised as obstacles. Think about the last time something didn’t work out as expected, and where and how you’ve ended up since then. I once had a new job sealed and signed to go, only to have it rescinded because they chose to relocate the role to another city two days before my start date. I wasn’t in a place in my life to uproot my family and life, and having already left my previous role, I was suddenly jobless. I needed to go find a new way to make a living, which turned into a fun and productive stretch of being my own boss. Another time, I didn’t get the promotion I was so sure was locked in for me. I spent days trying to analyze and find my “enemy” in this situation, only to realize that I was the one holding myself back, and that the work I was ready to do ahead was one that would take me beyond that particular job or the company. I’m sure this list will go on for me, and for you, too.

The most interesting part of the story, of course, is you. Your story doesn’t begin and end with the obstacles or even the opportunities. It is about who you are and what you choose to do in these moments, and how you’ll own your decisions and actions forward. That job that fell through was the beginning of a huge growth moment for me as a mom and a professional. I would never have had the courage to strike out on my own and start a business without the push. What I chose to do then was out of necessity, i.e. needing to find a way to make money, and that necessity turned into discovering what I could do on my own. That promotion that I never got turned into a two-year exploration to find out why I wanted to “get ahead” in the first place, and what versions of that could exist outside of the path I’d previously imagined. I may have been perfectly comfortable letting the circumstances become the story, but I am glad I put the work in, surrounded myself with people who helped me capitalize on these breaks in the routines, and chose to make something out of these disruptive moments that became catalysts.

I’d like to add a footnote on ownership, too, which is that sometimes it can also take the form of doing nothing about the obstacles or the opportunities [insert record scratch sound]. Minjae, after ALL that, what do you mean do nothing about it, you might ask. We live in a world where activities have become proxy for productivity so I feel compelled to spell out more explicitly that sometimes, the right decision and action may be to do nothing—but as always, with intention and reason. Only you know what’s the right thing to do for you at this time, when it comes to putting energy towards people and things that align with your values and goals. And sometimes, that may be doing nothing about one thing so that you spend that time and energy towards another. Just be clear about the why, and know that what may unexpectedly stop you in your tracks may be a fork in the road.

When I chose to study film in graduate school, I simply followed my way into something that sparked joy and ideas. Having still been in earlier parts of my dance with English as my second language, most movies were easier to understand than some books. Stories came through in facial expressions, landscapes, and music. Born in the era of the Industrial Revolution when humans started to make things and move about at the speed and scale previously unimagined, this craft of motion picture still held a place for both fast and slow build-up and reveal, moments small and big, all in each its own memorable and lasting. With the unconditional support of my parents who never questioned what kind of a job one might aspire to as a film school graduate, I could truly indulge in the experience of learning through love. When I graduated, I walked away with a more informed view of the history and theory of cinema, a group of lifelong friends, and one more thing I didn’t expect to gain—an ability to think, write, and communicate more clearly and expressively.

I attribute this wonderful by-product of my film education to the fact that I was studying a subject matter that was already near and dear to me. I didn’t have to struggle to access the substance, which meant that there was more time and space to explore both the meaning of the message as well as the medium. There was so much more time to flip everything upside down and inside out, look at it in every which way possible, even previously thought impossible. New ideas and connections formed, and the canvas of my thinking and writing got bigger and more sophisticated as I played with different ways to express what I was observing and formulating. I went to study film to immerse myself in other people’s storytelling, and walked away with the possibility that maybe, I, too, am one myself.

Something similar happened as I navigated through the early days of my marketing career and what was the beginning of online communities and various media for expressions. Even though I was no expert at the time, the idea of being there and experiencing it firsthand to learn about the new ways of communicating and connecting with other people felt essential. First there were the message boards, then something called Twitter (where I once claimed the first name only @minjae handle!), and blogging. By the time blogging was a thing, I was working at an agency advising my clients to get in to this new way of building brands and cultivating relationships. And I wanted to walk the talk, so I picked something else near and dear to me to write about—handbags.

Some asked, how frivolous and irrelevant, you’re a marketing strategist, why handbags? Dear reader (or shopper?), much like film, handbags were something I spent outsized proportion of my time studying, admiring, poring over, and aspiring to. It was accessible to me (maybe not in price range) but the emergence of e-commerce retail meant I could find and study them online, and try to track them down in person for the tactile experience. For me, fashion has become an indisputably powerful form of self-expression, and I appreciate so much the art and craft of what I get to wear and carry with me as an extension of what I’m trying to signal to the world. And each object has a story behind it, where it was made, why, and how, and how the handbag represents something about the maker’s view of the world and that of the person who chooses it. So my blog was a little bit about the history of the brand and the bag, and my own impression and observations about both the aesthetics and the practicalities of each object as a potential owner and a buyer.

Once again, learning through love (of handbag) this time taught me something more than just being a savvy shopper and an admirer of leather goods. I learned how to find and build connections in new ways, discovering other people who shared similar interests, where they were congregating and talking about, using my own blog as a way to create additional connections. I learned about building a content strategy, how to read some basic analytics about my readership, and even started to get pitches from certain brands, which then taught me about this thing called affiliate marketing. I even learned a little bit about the business of retail and fashion, and what role handbags play in that portfolio. I had set out to teach myself a new tool but ended up walking away with whole other sets of useful skills and information, because I chose to fuel my curiosity through something I already loved. My only regret is not having kept up with the said blog, as many others who started similar blogs at the time have gone onto become fashion influencers who are often found in the front rows of major fashion shows.

Today, I’m doing something similar with AI tools. The process of figuring out what types of data sets one cares about, analyzing and organizing them, and building and experimenting with them has been more enjoyable through topics and matters of substance that already come natural to me by my own curiosity and interest. My latest explorations have taken me anywhere from building sample data sets of pre-loved items and fashion archives, to learning about the global supply chain tagging systems and implications for reverse logistics. I realize all of this is someone else’s expertise, industry, and job, and there are people who are professionally solving for some of these problems already—and my amateur exploration of these topics isn’t meant to compete with that. I’m simply doing this to get myself closer to the medium and a process that are new, through something that is already familiar, everyday, and well-loved by me.

How will YOU choose to learn through love?

I’ve been fielding lots of questions from you since my last post, in which I shared a little bit about how I’ve been approaching my time off. Two questions, by far, rise to the top, no matter who I’m talking to: (a) how do you know when to leave a job? (b) how are you feeling? Both can be intensely personal and unique to each person’s context and circumstances, yet what’s been universal is that there’s a sense of curiosity for something that we all long for at one time or another, hoping to get a glimpse of what it’s like to have committed to a decision and living through it. I’ve also been hearing from many of you who’ve taken time off in between work, with tons of sage advice and anecdotes that are becoming a relational (vs. institutional) structure to my day-to-day. But for now, I’m going to put a pin on the first question. It’s a meaty one and I’d like to give it a bit more time and collect my thoughts.

When people ask me how I’m feeling, it comes from a place of care but also curiosity. They genuinely want to know how I’m doing, but they’re also doing that thing, a.k.a. “asking for a friend.” Listen, there’s no shame in this. In fact, I welcome and encourage it. In order for us to be able to make certain choices in our lives, we need to be able to imagine what that might be like. Imagination often taps into our memories and the past, but if you’re trying to do something you’ve never done before and there are no existing source materials in your own “data” set, you need to gather it from other people’s stories and give your mind something to work with.

I’d describe my current state of mind as a “renewal” of sort. Here are a few things I’m noticing so that you can get a sense of what renewal “feels” like:

I can dive into a deep state of focus much more quickly. Any time I sit down to read or listen to something, or even getting into conversations with someone, I am finding that I can go from point A (before the task, book, podcast, conversation) to B (being in the activities and stories) much faster. I guess it’s akin to your body needing a beat to adjust to different temperatures when you first jump in cold water, but now that reaction and calibration time is much quicker for me. When I’m in it, I’m in it. Another way to describe it is that I can be present in whatever the task or interaction at hand much more fully and on demand, whereas before, it would take me a few repeated attempts, or at best, in a distracted state.

At the same time, my capacity to jump from one topic to another has increased. While being deeply focused in one topic is great, my natural disposition is to hold space to many different tasks and topics at once (see: reading multiple books at the same time). And I’ve found that my appetite for this type of learning and “intake” of information has increased. I’m constantly on the hunt for something new to learn about, from Sashiko, a Japanese mending technique that makes the most of patterns, fabrics, and designs in repair; the philosophy of silence and aspiration; data architecture for secondhand goods; history of paper making; and more. Most of the time, the exploration begins randomly, from something I’ve been meaning to look into, or something I’ve recently stumbled upon, and the most exciting part is that one subject often has nothing to do with another until, out of nowhere, a pattern emerges. That’s a special kind of “big brain” feeling which is rather addictive.

Bonus: I’ve started to dream new dreams. I’ve always been a big dreamer, in the sense of dreaming dreams that feel like real life, in full color, sound and motion, recurring dreams, and even at times, lucid dreaming. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that most of my latest dreams are ones I’ve never encountered before — new people, scenes, and interactions. Whereas my previous dreams were in a way regurgitating situations and emotions that were already too familiar and played out, these new dreams involve entirely new things, nothing I’ve lived through in my life. Rather than processing something I’ve been holding onto, it feels like my brain is creating something new, and much quicker to take in new ideas into the plot. I’d imagine this is what it’s like to have an improv partner with endless ideas and boundless energy.

Renewal, to me, feels like I’m readier than ever to learn, absorb, and create — not because I’m made to, but because I am savoring every bit for myself. No doubt there’s scientific explanation for all of this. And I’m convinced that being present, here and now, is how I’m going to figure out what’s next.

It’s been a couple of months since I hung up my corporate citizen hat and chose to take some time off. I’ve never left a job without another one waiting for me right out the door, and it’s been a brand new experience getting used to the quiet and this new pace of life. As much as I’d like to say work doesn’t define who I am, the truth is that one’s sense of purpose is heavily wrapped around in one’s professional identity. How could it not, for all of the amount of time and space we give to work—especially when I’ve been lucky enough to have worked at places and with people who made me feel I belonged.

Without the constant stimulus of calls, meetings, emails, and pings that made me feel “needed,” I’ve had to sit down and get reacquainted with me, myself, and I. It was really hard, and still is. There were days I had done all the things by 10am (getting to the dentist, doing school drop-off, breaking down all of those cardboard boxes, reorganizing my closet, catching up on the latest podcasts...) and buzzing with a sense of doing something useful. I needed to find some new ways to dispense my time, attention, and energy, including getting comfortable with doing less.

Care

I’ve been doing more to take care of myself and those who matter most to me. And care comes in a lot of different forms.

First, I started digging into my health and well-being. Turns out there’s a lot to learn about how one’s body and mind change when in mid-40s, plus, a bunch of “maintenance” work to be done if you don’t want stuff to break down. I know this about my car but the car used to get more regular and thorough check-ups than I did. So now, I practically live at my primary care physician’s office, checking off things on my list that I’ve been willing to live with and “work around” (hi perimenopause) rather than taking the time to understand and address. I’m fortunate enough to have access to good healthcare in my time off and using the heck out of it. I want to live a good life in a healthy body as long as I’m here.

I’ve also started to go to pilates more often. It’s the only workout I’ve ever been able to consistently stick to, because there’s a great studio within a walking distance, with a teacher who challenges me firmly and lovingly. For 60 minutes at a time, I can quiet the noise in my head, because every move requires utter concentration to get the position and alignment right. I’ve now met muscles in my own body I’d never known, plus flexibility and strength that make me feel stronger than I ever did in my 20s. I can feel it while walking up and down all of those steep hills in San Francisco, and it’s nice to be able to feel “solid” in one’s own body.

I’m trying to help my family eat better, too. My husband and I took a stroll in Noe Valley the other day and picked up a couple of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks from Omnivore Books on Food. We aren’t vegetarian or vegan, but I want to see if I can make veggies the main dish. Good food can take time to plan, prep, and make, and I used to opt for the easiest and fastest way to put food on the table. Now I have the time to wait for things to marinate, simmer, and roast, and read a book while waiting and keeping my impatience at bay. I’m enjoying these experiments and sticking to seasonal ingredients, putting sticky notes on each page with what I’m learning along the way. And someday, when work re-enters our life, I’ll know what to skip and substitute when making these recipes in batches ahead of a busy week.

Connections

One of the best things about making life and work transitions is that it creates reasons for people to reach out. I’ve heard from people near and far, old friends and new acquaintances, counting time in the ages of our children and the differences in our hairstyle (or lack there of). These conversations help me “scratch the itch” that is of wanting to be useful to other people, now without the day-to-day context of work. Something always comes up in these chats, where we’re both going through similar things, or one of us has insights and wisdom from the past that can shed some clarity to the other person’s next step. They say knowledge is power, and in this case, it’s the know-how of the people who’ve lived through stuff—sometimes really tough things—and their willingness to generously share their experience that open up your minds. Talking to other people who’ve seen and known you at various times and context is both a reminder of things that will always be a part of you, as well as how far you’ve come. And meeting new people in my free, exploratory, untethered yet grounded context is a catalyst for all of the possibilities ahead and how I might make the most of what’s to come.

Creativity

I’ve been seeking creativity in many different shapes and forms. This is one of the ways I’m finding joy and betting on myself, because there’s motion, emotion, and imagination in creativity, and all three are key ingredients to originality. Creativity, much like care, takes many different shapes and forms:

• Cooking, for example, is a highly creative “output” for me, because even as I consult cookbooks, I improvise and experiment quite a bit every step of the way, all the way to plating. I’m not looking to be a professional chef but I like trying different things to make my food look and taste great.

• Reading, on the other hand, is a form of creative “input.” In general, I read multiple books at a time, skipping between fiction to non-fiction, and following whatever I’m craving at any given moment. This habit appeals to my tendency to chase connections between different concepts, or how something completely unrelated can spark new ideas when marinated over time. By the way, when I say reading, holding physical books in my hand is a critical part of this experience, because a part of the fun is choosing books by their cover art, smell of the paper, and font type. The form and function of the object that is a book matters to me just as much as the substance of what’s in the book itself, and I am often grazing the titles at our local bookstores, hunting for the one that’s been waiting for me.

• Talking to people whom I consider creative has been another fun “input,” either because they are working in creative industries or I’ve seen them make decisions or actions that were ingenious, different, bold, and new. People have been generous with their time sharing with me what creativity means to them, how it manifests in their day-to-day, and what they do to instigate and nurture it.

• Writing has become a more private form of creative “output” lately. You should see the number of notebooks piled high on my desk, each with many thoughts started, stopped, and then started again. I forced myself to write this today, because I want to write more publicly again. Sometimes letting half-formed ideas out there as a question brings back new ways to carry them forward.

• Using and noticing AI in life more vs. AI at work. This probably requires a whole other conversation, but suffice it to say, it’s been interesting to experience and observe how other people (like my doctors) are using these new tools in their day-to-day, what they’re finding easy and helpful vs. not, and how I am finding myself dabbling with one tool vs. another in these everyday activities. The “why” behind the “what” of these choices and behaviors make me think about the implications for the choices and behaviors of those who are building and marketing these new models, products, and services. Being in touch with real people and the world in which they live is at the heart of your ability to do your job well as a product or marketing leader, and yet it’s incredibly easy to lose sight when you’re also managing through a living organism of the organization you work within. I’m using this time to “unlearn” some of my own assumptions and behaviors, and exercising my mind to stretch the space between the novel and the routine (see what I did there) as far and widely as possible.

I’m noticing there’s a lot of physicality and tactile aspects to the forms of care, connections, and creativity I’ve been pursuing. I’m also recognizing that as rewarding and productive as many of these activities have been, I’ve likely been filling up my time and staying “busy” to avoid doing less, and scarier yet, just sitting with my own thoughts. I may still be where Amy Hwang hilariously captured in her New Yorker cartoon “Time to Relax” in October 2024, trying to relax but not really. It’s a work in progress.

When I was in 2nd grade (and honestly, throughout school years...) I was a model student. I was good at school, good at saying, doing, or avoiding the kinds of things that my parents or teachers would approve or disapprove of. Even in these earliest days, I wanted to be liked and for that image to never falter, because I liked the feeling of it.

One day, I was heading home with a friend after helping my teacher with some after school tasks (extra credit! approval!! model student image!!!), when we stumbled upon a crumpled piece of tissues right outside of our classroom. It looked disgusting, nothing I would ever want to touch voluntarily with my own hands. But my teacher was right there, so I did what I thought he’d want me to do — I picked it up without any complaints or hesitation. Disgust and panic quickly rose inside, and my mind raced to think of the closest trash can I could think of. We happened to be passing by the boys’ bathroom all the way on the other side of the hall, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. With the greatest force I could project upon an object without much weight or momentum, I casually flung the offending ball of tissue through the open door of the bathroom, relieved to have gotten rid of it.

Then, I heard someone clearing their throat behind me. It was my teacher. I’d been found out. The model student who couldn’t do wrong was caught littering. Worse yet, littering merely two minutes after pretending to be a good person who selflessly picks up after other people’s trash. Mortified, I ran into the bathroom and picked up the tissue again (that’ll teach me), and also started picking up after other trash that was scattered on the floor (that definitely taught me all the lessons). My teacher briefly stopped with a knowing smile, and moved on.

This memory has stuck with me for decades because it starkly represented what I was willing to do vs. not when I thought someone was paying attention to what I was doing vs. no one was around (at least I thought) to check on me. I couldn’t believe I had fallen so quickly. Am I really a good person if the difference between one vs. the other could so easily be made in a matter of minutes? That a dirty piece of tissues is all it took? Sure, I was only a child, but the choices and the context almost make the point even clearer. I still think about this moment a lot, because the tissue dilemma still happens, even as an adult with a bit of a clearer sense of my own choices and values, but also a lot more run-ins with situations and circumstances, especially at work, that one’s decisions and actions seem more consequential when someone is, indeed, looking.

The perception aspect of how we form trust, relationships, and ideas about other people isn’t new, nor is it unique to specific types of jobs, industries, or even countries. In some places, this is much more pronounced and even touted as a skill, that you be able to demonstrate your value, worth, and meaning to other people and to the workplace in gesture as much as in impact. And when perception seems to outweigh other factors in how your reputation gets formed, it’s hard not to prioritize the visible vs. invisible moments to do the good or the right thing — make it count when someone is paying attention. I wish I could say doing good and right is always easy, but the truth is, some of them are the hardest things you’ll ever have done in your life or in your career, because they are worth doing despite obstacles and opposition. So to put the effort in, and for that not to be “counted” in some way because no one was there to witness it, should we even bother? Am I a bad person for even thinking this way, asking this question?

Many balls and boxes of tissues later, I still bring my model student tendencies to work. But today, the difference is that I try to make my decisions and actions based on my own beliefs and values, not just because I think it’s going to help me get on someone’s good side or high on their radar. And while I have gotten skilled at using public presentations of my work to perform and demonstrate what I’m capable of, I have also learned that there are these private, small, and everyday acts of one’s values and commitments that often leave the most indelible impressions and impact on others. It is a gift to be able to be useful to another person when they need you, and no one else needs to be paying attention to these moments — except you.

I thought about writing an end of the year post. And then maybe another about the beginning of the new year. Then the end of the year came and went, as did the beginning of a new year...(grace period until the Lunar New Year). These times are ripe for some profound reflections or commitments of sort but I couldn’t bring myself to pick a topic that felt so singularly representative of what the world looks like today, how I am making sense of it all, and what I am going to try to do to make my life and work more meaningful. Instead, I am circling back to a topic that’s been on my mind for some time now — something I’m going to be thinking about and no doubt, will come up in conversations again and again (thanks to today’s inspiration...you know who you are!). And that topic is authenticity.

Authenticity is about being real and genuine, “true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character” according to the Merriam-Webster Inc. definition. On the one hand, it seems like something that’s completely innate and comfortable to you, because it’s really about who you are as a person, what you believe in, and how your decisions, actions, and interactions with other people reinforce “you” the person in a consistent and recognizable pattern. At the same time, especially in work settings, the idea of authenticity feels rare, unattainable, and somewhat performative. What is supposed to come natural to you as a part of your personhood has become a heavily manufactured concept, a skill, even. And the irony is that the very effort of trying too hard lands you somewhere farther from what true authenticity means.

Why, then, is this so hard? There’s no simple answer, but I believe it’s because authenticity started being defined by externally driven factors vs. internally driven ones. Here’s what I mean by externally driven factors: What are other people’s expectations about who I need to be and how I need to show up? What’s their perception of my ideas, how I say it, what I’m wearing and where I’m standing when I present them? Who do I need to become in order to be successful...or let’s just start with, fit in? We are social beings by nature, and it would be impossible to eliminate these types of questions and dynamics entirely from how we make our choices. However, making choices based on other people’s expectations and perception alone — or worse yet, our speculation of it — is a cognitive and emotional burden that inadvertently ends up obscuring who we are and what we are trying to say and do.

If we were to think about the idea of authenticity as an internally driven concept, what you’d be asking yourself will shift to things you can reasonably control and manage. What are my expectations of myself as I walk into this meeting? What are my goals and objectives by the time it’s done? Which outfit would make me feel more confident and comfortable so that I’d be feeling at my best? Is it important to me that I address this topic that’s rather difficult to talk about — if so, do I understand my “why (eg. integrity, peace of mind, etc)” and how do I also plan to bring those values to how I address it? How would I feel if someone challenges or disagrees with my idea, and how do I plan to give space to my feelings while also using it as an indicator of how I’m landing the parts I can control? Nothing changes about the context or circumstances of the situation, including different people with whom you’re going to need to address and convince. But your questions get reframed and anchored back to you, so that you’re recommitting to your own beliefs, values, and priorities, and whether or not there’s a gap between your intent vs. your decisions and actions.

Like anything in life (and in work), sticking to your own principles and intuitions takes some courage. Addressing your own anxiety and fear in this is very much a part of what genuine authenticity looks like. The real question is, are we willing to live by other people’s anxiety and fear, many of them manufactured and manipulated in the first place, or are we going to choose to occupy and live fully in the body, heart, mind, time, and space that is ours? As a storyteller and a futurist very much invested in, and in the middle of, how AI will change the way we live and work, I want more of us to keep curiosity alive and think for ourselves, form our own opinions and perspectives, and express them not as a dupe, fake, or a replica of ourselves, or worse yet, just a hint or a shadow of who we’re meant to be. I am hungry for more true, genuine authenticity and originality. It’s scary and exhilarating at the same time.

People often ask me if I’ve got some professional help for what I write on LinkedIn, and what my content strategy is. The genuine truth is that I do not have a ghostwriter, and I simply write when I feel like it. Sometimes, weeks go by without a single word written. Other times (this week!) I can’t seem to stop. This admission seems to have resonated with many of you, and even got some of you thinking about writing (or picking up the phone to record a video!) again. As a part of that, you also shared with me why you haven’t done more so far. And I love and appreciate that very much. We are ultimately social creatures, constantly observing and assessing the cultural cues and social norms around us. Depending on what signals you pick up, these cues and norms can open you up to many new and different kinds of experiences, but also, they can be quite oppressive and overwhelming. Is this OK for me to say? What do I even have to offer on this topic? What will so-and-so think of this when they see it? Worse yet, what if no one even reads what I write? There’s a lot of fear and anxiety weighing down your choice to not to say or do something, especially at work, and as a result, here on LinkedIn, too, where the context is the best yet the scariest thing for many of us.

Here are some top reasons I hear from people when I ask them what might be stopping them from writing or sharing more:

“I don’t have anything to contribute.”

Are you sure? You really just might have something to say! You don’t need to be 30 years into your career or a certified and recognized expert in your field to have a point-of-view or snippets about the work you do. There’s knowledge, but there’s also the know-how. I think about the former as a set of information or skills one can learn from a more formal manner, such as schools, courses, business books, on the job training, etc. The latter is about your lived experience at work and working through your career. It’s the application of the knowledge in workplaces where the people part of the work teaches you something about how to get the work done. We’ve got stories and insights about that part, no matter how early or well into your career you are. You can’t learn about these from textbooks or corporate trainings. The value of learning from other people’s stories is infinite, and yet, it’s hard to find them because talking about hard things is uncomfortable (and most good lessons come from having lived through some hard stuff). That’s why know-how often gets passed around like some sort of urban legend or a secret family recipe. But the best part of know-how is that they are essentially behind-the-scenes stories, a director’s cut. And who doesn’t love a good peek at a moment or a day in the life of how other people get their work done?

“I don’t have the time.”

Yeah, me neither. And when you put that next to my tendency to overthink in life, no word was ever going to escape my brain and make its way to paper or digital surface of any sort. So I started small by looking at what other people were writing and commenting on them. Commenting on someone else’s writing is really about sparking a connection. When I read something that I find interesting or helpful, I go ahead and just say that, and why. That’s it. Sometimes that leads to a bit of a back-and-forth about the topic, and I’ve “met” a lot of new people that way on LinkedIn, in and outside of my specific line of work. My other favorite activity is to put a note on someone’s post where they seem to be at a moment in need of support or celebration because of work-related events or milestones. Is that comment going to win you some kind of recognition or award? Maybe not. But it’s an easy way to show someone (whether you already know them or not) that you see them and you care. Spending a few minutes of my day in these ways eventually gave me some ideas about what I might like to talk about in my own way, which turned into this newsletter.

“I’m scared I might mess up in front of my colleagues.”

Me, too. In fact, LinkedIn is the only place where ALL of my old classmates, bosses and teammates are ALL HERE together with my CURRENT bosses and teammates, plus who knows, a WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER PEOPLE who are probably going to matter in my career in some shape or form (*cue blood curdling scream, runs*)??! If messing up at work is already a part of the general fear and anxiety we all carry with us, the possibility of putting one’s foot in mouth in front of ALL OF THEM (*wildly gesticulates with both hands*) is simply frightening. But think about it this way. All of your old and current and future classmates, bosses, teammates are here. All of those people who will matter in your career, opening doors and imagining possibilities beyond what you are capable of dreaming for yourself, they are here, even if you haven’t met them. What I’ve found over the years is that until I was crystal clear, consistent, and explicit about who I am, what I’m about, what I am looking for, and where I needed help with, no one could really help me effectively despite all of the collective wealth of knowledge, know-how, the network, and their influence. I needed to find myself first and show up clearly and loudly. In fact, doing that with consistency and integrity helped me avoid bad situations and fits as much as it helped me find the right jobs and opportunities. I recognize that not everyone is going to agree with what I say (but isn’t that simply...life?). What I can control and receive in return is how I say what I say, and why.

As is always the case, the why matters the most here. Why do you want to write, or say something about the work you do or what you’ve learned? Some people try to encourage themselves or others about showing up on LinkedIn as a way to get straight to the outcomes (better personal brand, jobs, network, you name it) as the sole motivation. Many do end up getting to those results by putting themselves out there, because let’s be honest, we are all here (at work and on LinkedIn) to make something of our work and careers and make the most of it. But those “rewards” alone were never enough for me to get over my fear and anxiety (see all of the above). What really got me to start sharing my writing was, well, I enjoy it very much, and doing this for myself made it less scary. Then, I started to hear from people near and far, in both time and distance, that something I said meant something to them. Specifically, the three pieces of feedback I’ve found especially helpful and encouraging are that (a) people see their own words and experiences mirrored in mine even if they might never say it out loudly (b) something I’ve shared made them think differently about their own situation (c) they appreciate seeing an “executive (I still giggle a bit when referring to myself as such)” who is also being “real.” There’s no greater gift than feeling like people see me for who I am, and that they want to hear more about it.

There are, of course, days that I simply don’t have the energy, time, or ideas to write, and as an introvert, I just want to go hide under the blanket (see photographic evidence above). But I’ll always come back, whether that’s days or weeks later, because I’ve found my own joy in this, and maybe my stories can help someone else out there, too.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get together with the entire global marketing team at LinkedIn. My whole team and I hadn’t been in the same place together like that in two years, at my first offsite at LinkedIn, about a year into my job. I still remember vividly that mixture of lightness and gravity that hit me all at once when I realized just how many people were relying on me as their boss (!). And this time, when I boarded the bus to head to our first offsite activity this time, all of these feelings rushed right back. Honestly, it took my breath away. I know that sounds too obvious and almost silly, but really, look at that photo. Those are my people. And I am responsible for all of them.

As we spent the next few days together focusing on our work and each other, making the most of the short time to bank connections, memories, and familiarity again, I sat with that lightness and gravity once more. We are surrounded by managers everywhere, but I know very few people who started out in their career with a clear understanding of what it means to manage other people. It simply comes with the territory in many jobs, and we accept and understand it to be a construct of most workplaces and a tangible way to imagine one’s career progression. Nowadays, at least there are many more resources (like LinkedIn Learning courses!) for people who want to get better at various aspects of being a people manager. But most of us in my and previous generations of management, I’d argue we learned by watching other people succeed or stumble. Perhaps there is no better way to learn than living through the experience. But if we believe people managers are one of the most important parts of an organization’s ability to move well as one, there should be much more explicit conversations about what it means—and more importantly, what it takes to be an effective people manager.

Let’s first talk about why the role of people management matters. The idea of management is often aspirational—a manifestation of one’s career growth and progression—but the day-to-day conversations about the management work is perhaps less inspirational. You’re always in the middle, middle of the work, middle of your team and your boss, middle of decisions that get made above you, and observations that get made below and around you, etc etc. You’re pulled into many directions, and it often seems impossible for you to make anyone happy (p.s. I don’t believe it is anyone’s job—people manager or not—to make someone else happy at work; and that happiness in life is different from fulfillment at work and up to each of us to define and own). And despite all of that, you keep coming back to be in the middle of it because a manager’s job is to make the most of the shared and vested interests between your business’s goals and objectives, and your team’s skills and their career objectives.

How does one, then, make sense of this messy middle? Focus on the work and the people and be the matchmaker. Set a structure and scope for your team that as closely matches your intended strategy designed to meet the business’s objectives. If the strategy is a set of ideas and a point-of-view, you need to enable and activate your people around it with a plan, i.e. how the team is organized in their operation and held accountable in goals and milestones. At the same time, as you hire and grow your team, constantly update your understanding and knowledge of their skills—including ones they’ve got but may not been able to utilized in this job at this company—as well as their career goals. You’re not always going to get it right, but the intent is to match the business needs to what your people bring to the table, and what they can also gain from that experience. And remember, this is never a one and done exercise. Organizations and people are not static, which means a big part of the job is to stay alert, aware, and ahead of both business trends as well as people trends.

It’s one thing to put the best of your business and people together, but another for you to take the opportunity of your job to let other people learn from how you’re doing it. I mentioned how many of us “grew up” into a managerial role by watching other people. Most of those lessons were implicit and subtle (but also visceral at times), as in it took work on my part to pay attention and pull insights from the situation, or sometimes, experiencing what it’s like to be on the other end of inexperienced or careless approaches to management. I often thought about what my managers were thinking or learning at the time in their experiences, and wished for opportunities to hear about them. So now, I try to practice it with my own team as appropriate. With my team leads in particular, I often share what I am trying to solve for, how I am thinking about it, which parts I am struggling with, specifically in the work of people management. I invite them to talk about the same in their respective areas. I talk about examples from my past experiences that I wish I had handled better, when there are parallels. Most importantly, I talk about how I feel about these situations and try to assess how they do, too, because management is about people, and people have lots of feelings, and feelings can both get in the way and help us see things more clearly—an important data point. All of this takes trust, because it’s not easy admitting I don’t know something or I messed up somewhere. I’m lucky to have that in my team, which means I’m comfortable sharing these lessons as they happen, without the safety of the retrospective distance.

All that said, people management is not for everyone. As I’ve progressed in my career, I can’t count the number of heart-to-heart conversations I’ve had with many of my peers who often lament how much they miss doing the hands on work, and how little of the messy middle that is the work of people management they find rewarding. I am not saying this to judge people. This is an honest and important admission we all need to take measure of because the job is that important, and requires intentional choice and active participation on the part of both the company who makes these opportunities available, and those who take them. Many organizations, unfortunately, conflate career growth and progression with people management. That often translates to assumptions that just because a

At least once in your career, you’ll find yourself in a position in which you’ve increased your responsibilities, whether through an official job change like a promotion or growing your scope as the team and business needs evolve. It’s an exciting moment, and sometimes you don’t even have to change a thing about your current environment to step into this new job—not even your desk, your commute, your laptop screen saver, or even your passwords. But what you might not realize is that you’re the one who needs to change some things about your habits and routines to step up into your new situation. Too many people slide back to their old habits or retreat into their comfort zone, which is not only going to get in the way of their ability to succeed but also hinders a whole team or organization’s ability to adapt and adjust to new attitudes and altitudes required to take itself to the next level.

First, adjust your altitude. By definition, increasing your scope means you need to keep your eyes on a broader set of problems, challenges, and opportunities at any given moment. The time horizon against which you need to think about your business and your team’s work also start to stretch into years, not just a matter of weeks and months. You need to think about the present more and more in the context of the future, and many versions of them. Depending on your product and business, this can get even more complex when accounting for various dependencies like your partner ecosystem or marketplace dynamics upon which you’re integrated and built upon. Your job is to think and act at a higher level, broader aperture, and longer timeline than those you’re asking to play a specific part as a function or a component of running and growing your business. This is what sets the vision, clarity, and the plan that has a purpose and a hypothesis to be proven or disproven.

Next, assess your time spent. I mean this literally. Look at your calendar. Has anything changed in how you spend your day? What standing meetings are you still showing up to that someone else can now run or attend on your behalf? What decisions are you making vs. delegating? What’s the purpose of all of those meetings in the first place—to share information, make decisions, bring people together, etc? And what role do you need to play to make those meetings productive or not? Are you setting aside enough time for your own thinking and strategizing? How and when do you communicate to your teams or partners now that the number of people who need to know and understand how you think has increased by a few folds? Are the habits of an individual contributor still the best ones to relay on, or do you need to spend your time differently as someone who is trying to maintain a POV and many plans at a different altitude? Does your calendar reflect the intent of your new job or scope and how you should be spending your time differently?

And as scary as this might sound, go make some new friends. I don’t mean you need to abandon your existing friendships at work. But if the scope and desired impact of your job changed, so will your influence mapping across the business, inside and outside. Think about which of your existing relationships at a peer level that you can now invite someone from your team to be a part of and own over time. Consider how building new relationships is a part of increasing your impact and influence when it comes to decisions and actions that permeate throughout the business. You’re no longer just responsible for one dish out of the kitchen but the whole menu, so it’s time to get to know the supplier for the whole kitchen.

Go deep only when necessary and do it in a time bound way. Staying at a higher altitude and longer time horizon doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to care deeply about how the business run at a day-to-day level. But do it strategically. Do it to make a point and teach the team something, not to retreat to your old comfort zone. Before you start asking questions, ask yourself first, are you trying to fix something quick and dirty here, or is this a symptom of something bigger in the way we operate that you’d like to take the opportunity to shift? Am I gravitating towards this topic because it’s a familiar territory for me (and therefore more fun and easier to feel productive) or is this truly a topic worth creating some high focus around? Why and why now? When doing this, always have a specific timeline in mind, i.e. have some “exit criteria” in mind based on what you’re trying to do (process shift, team mentality shift, accelerate progress, etc). Linger here too long, and you’ll soon find yourself suffocating your team with your micro managerial vibes.

Try practicing some combination of these even without a job or scope change. You don’t need a promotion to set intentions about how you’ll design your perspective, time, space, and relationships to drive different outcomes. This is mostly about habit building for yourself and for your own benefit. But let’s be honest. Stepping up to new, bigger jobs, especially internally, is an even trickier one at times, because people who’ve known you don’t stop seeing you as old you. Whatever habits and routines you create to step up to the job will help other people see and understand how you as a person and your job as a component of the organization can evolve into something bigger or different. Changing other people’s perception and behavior is hard, but at least you can start with things you can control and take up space in the direction you want to grow.

Last but not least, all of this isn’t just about you and your growth, especially the higher you go in an organization and the broader your impact and influence become. Your ability to recalibrate yourself is critical in creating the necessary shift in altitude and attitudes of the people around you now need to take, too. Organizations are surprisingly organic in nature, meaning one person can have a tremendous impact in how an entire team or a business can shift its mentality and behaviors to step up to the tasks ahead. Self-instigating those changes in mentality and behavior is not an easy task, and it will take intention and consistency until new habits and routines stick. And once in a while, it’s only human that we will want to retreat into our comfort zones. When that happens, find something to do that fulfills your need but don’t slide into old habits or disrupt the rhythm of an entire team or a business.

Exactly three years ago today, I started my new job at LinkedIn, ten days after moving my family back to San Francisco. We had nothing but suitcases full of our clothes, back in a familiar town—in fact, the birthplace to one of my children, and essentially childhood home to the other child in her core memory—but in someone else’s home with no routines that felt like our own. I’m not a stranger to taking on several new things at the same time, but it doesn’t necessarily get easier after each experience, especially when you are changing many aspects of your family’s life and your work at the same time.

As I was reflecting on the past three years, the first part of a conversation I’d shared with Charlotte Rogers at Marketing Week just happened to drop (“LinkedIn’s marketing VP on introvert leaders and plot twists”). Charlotte gave me the space to discuss what it’s like to start a new job at a highly relationship-oriented company like LinkedIn, balancing being visible and invisible at the same time as an introvert who happens to be in a highly visible role and function, and why it matters so much to anchor back to who you are and why you do what you do at any given moment. Revisiting this conversation also made me realize that starting a new job (a bet the company took on you, and one you took on them) as a marketer (a highly visible but very little understood function—more on this later) in a leadership position (a highly visible, aspirational for many, but also potentially mystifying) is precisely why this matters so much more, but not for the most obvious reasons.

When you’re in a new environment, and no one knows who you are yet, everyone will start to form an opinion based on your past record that’s available by reputation or Google search. It’s one thing to let your track record speak for itself—which played a part in getting the job in the first place—but now, it’s time to focus on making new, present-day impressions, which must come from your active decisions and actions. When you start a new job, especially in a leadership position, everyone’s watching your every word and move, curious to learn more about you as a person and a boss. Play an active role in setting that first impression. Treat it like you’re launching an existing line of product (you) in a new market (your company). Be explicit about what you want people to know about you, especially when you manage a big, hybrid team around the world. Write a manual about you and share with your new colleagues (and maybe even make a fun go/link if you can).

Your job, when you start that new job, isn’t simply to fit in and get along, especially when you’re in leadership position. You likely chose a job and a company over other options because hopefully, the opportunity fit the hypothesis of your career goals and plans better than others. Actively participate in defining your value and impact to the company, and in turn, consider everyday a part of making progress against your career hypothesis (eg. “I chose this role because learning new things is a priority at this juncture of my career, and I believe I can learn more about x by doing more of y because of its scope.”). Getting the job was just the start. Doing the job is going to help you find out how much of the potential you saw in the role is actually there for you to materialize, both for you and the company, and what else you can do with the opportunity to make it count. The key is to instigate these ideas and activities vs. sitting passively.

On top of all this, being new and being a marketer poses an interesting dissonance in being seen but not always quite understood. Almost everyone will have an opinion about your work and how your entire industry works before you’ve done a thing yet. Some will think they can do it better than you (most definitely). Others think what you do all day is simply write clever words on command or, oh by the way, where’s that Super Bowl ad? I wish I could tell you, having been in this industry for 20+ years, that it gets better. Dear reader, it doesn’t (sorry, but what am I good for if not for some real talk). These opinions will never stop coming. But that’s precisely why knowing yourself and the value of work, and what you do with that knowledge matter so much. Don’t lose yourself and what you can uniquely bring to the table in the swirl of opinions. If people are going to have an opinion about it anyway, you might as well be clear and loud with your own opinion about who you are, and how that shows up in your work. You’d never compromise on how you communicate and position the benefit, value, and the strength of the product you’re marketing and selling, so why should this be any different for you? Focus on getting the job done with your distinct point-of-view and a plan. Don’t let the seemingly familiar and accessible nature of marketing as a discipline get in the way of letting people see your unique capabilities as an expert in this field. Just because we all need to eat and occasionally address that need with our own cooking doesn’t make all of us a chef. Play your own game, not anyone else’s.

I’m still doing my best to practice these habits every single day. That makes showing up fully present at work a daily choice and a commitment for me, and because of that, I know I am exactly where I am meant to be, doing my part to make a difference in the work we do. That’s a gift I hope you’ll feel in your work, too, on day three as well as on day 1,095.

When I was growing up in Seoul, one of the constants in my life was the after school English lessons. These lessons didn’t make me fluent overnight, but they taught me the fundamentals of rolling my tongue in ways my native language didn’t, and some basics of learning to string words together. One day, I had made enough of a progress to make it to the next level of lessons, which was no longer about learning vocabulary but moving onto reading comprehension. I’d never felt so lost in my life, and what really drove me crazy was that the teacher kept repeating one word and phrase in particular that seemed to be pretty important to the discussion, but I had no idea what it meant. That word and phrase, dear reader, was “meaning” and “what does this mean.”

How meta is it to be lost in a conversation about meaning in a language you don’t understand? You’ll have to pick a word from a language you don’t know and imagine what it would be like if someone kept asking you a question with that word—and the central premise and substance of the conversation seem to be all anchored around this one word you do not know the meaning of. Plus, in order for you to ask them to clarify what it means, you actually do need to know some version of that word in question to pose it. What a conundrum. I eventually caught on, closer to the end of the 90-minute class than the start of it, but to this day, I think about that feeling of confusion and wall of fog forming around me, in which everyone else in the room seemed to know exactly what was going on.

I was reflecting on this memory this morning, because I’ve been thinking about the work I do as a marketer, and how much of that work is actually about giving something meaning. I don’t mean this in some sort of a divine authority way. But anything you buy and use, from whom you buy, where you get it, and why, all of it, whether you’re intentionally thinking about it or not, is attached some sort of meaning you as a consumer is perceiving from that brand and product. We want you to associate our stuff with a certain feeling and meaning, hopefully as closely connected to what you need and want in your day to day. You may choose some things solely based on price, convenience, or availability, but even things like dish soap, which you might have been buying the same brand just because that’s what you grew up with, that’s an intentional choice your brain is making in the context of your childhood memories, and all of the feelings and meaning that go with them.

Giving meaning to something new is especially hard. Working in tech, and often working on business models or products that are completely new solutions of their kind require an even more farfetched exercise of bringing in imagination to this work. What do we think the potential of this product is right now, and if this works, how far could it go in helping people do xyz? And if it doesn’t exactly work out the way we assume now, how else could it still evolve to play a role in people’s lives? If people don’t already have a relationship with something like this in their lives, what first impressions do we need to make, and how do we want to show up with the first impressions in our product as well as outside? And most importantly, sometimes you need to take a bet, and put a stake in the ground as to who and what you aspire to be in your customers’ lives. Then you start to deliver on that promise through the proof of your products and services, which builds resilience to the meaning you breathe into the new relationship. That was true for most of the work I got to be a part of during YouTube‘s early growth phase, everything from making creators real so that it may someday become multibillion dollar Creator Economy, to convincing people there’s value to paying for something we’re offering (eg. YouTube TV) when as long as you have known us, you’ve been using it for free.

Keeping that premise and promise requires saying it and actually meaning it, too. You’ve got to follow through, especially when “no one is looking” and checking every part of your decision-making process and how that translates to subsequent decisions you’re making as a business, brand, and with your product. You can’t simply tell people to trust you, and not do the kinds of things that will make people feel safe and trusted. You can’t simply tell people your product is of high quality in service of their needs, and when the product tells a different one when it starts to fall apart a couple of weeks after usage. You can’t simply tell people your product is for everyone when your price point or where people can buy it simply tells you otherwise. This is why the work of marketers—which helps businesses define and hold onto these types of meaning making practices upfront and throughout—has to live in the product, in the commercial decisions, in the customer service interactions, and everywhere. And it’s pretty cool to watch my former colleagues at Visible holding onto the customer first principles and continuing to build that business forward. It wasn’t always easy choosing our commitment to salience over mixed signals, but I feel fortunate that my colleagues were willing to engage in that debate vs. choosing to ignore it.

There’s plenty going on right now that requires marketers to be a part of giving meaning, whether that’s creating new meaning to old things, defining new meaning to new categories of things, or simply doubling down on what your brand and product have meant to people all along while context and circumstances may have evolved. The key is never losing sight of this work and being intentional about what it takes to be a meaningful part of someone’s lives.

I’m turning 45 this Sunday. A part of getting older and wiser is continuing to shed some of the doubt and second-guessing other people put on me and instead, being able to move about the world more weightlessly. Maybe you do that more because there’s literally not as much time left of your living days to worry about what other people think of you. It could also be because a lifetime of judgment and whatever defense mechanism you’ve developed to shield yourself from all of that is just too tiring to carry with you anymore. In my case, it might be both of these, plus the fact that I am ever more sure of myself and my choices because I have people around me who chose to, and have done the work themselves to see me for who I am. That kind of love and support, at work and home, keeps you warm all day long, no matter what kind of chill happens in the air. They compel you to keep your shield down and just be you.

They are the kind of people who will see you even when you just want to be invisible (shoutout to my introverts out there). They are the kind of people who will see the best in you, even when you don’t look or feel or have the energy to show up at your best once in a while. They are the kind of people who will see what’s possible for you when you can’t quite see things clearly for yourself, even when you squint hard. They are the kind of people who will see you across the room, and make you feel like you not only belong in that room, but you own that room, with just a nod and a knowing smile sent your way.

To be honest, I don’t let a lot of people into my life deeply. I’m pretty fiercely selfish about my time and space, because I have learned it the hard way that more than any defense mechanism, what I really need is the intentional repose and breaks for myself. Some people read it as coldness, others think I am shy or anti-social. Some even think this is quite at odds with how they have seen and known me, because I do socialize gregariously and love to tell stories that connect with big groups of people and laugh with them until I cry. I am a seeming contradiction, because I’ve got a lot of specific terms with which I am negotiating my time and space and moving about the world, measured and intentional in when, how, with whom, and why I share my time and space. This, sometimes, leaves people feeling like they aren’t so sure if they really know me.

And yet, some of my memories of the most meaningful conversations took place with people I’d met for the first time in social or professional settings, because I chose to make the most of the time I had with them, knowing my social battery is on sprints rather than marathons. That means we opened up about aspects of our lives and thoughts and feelings one wouldn’t normally share with strangers, with deep connections that formed in minutes not months. I believe this is the reason why I am lucky to count many people in my life who fit the descriptions above.

I am not available to everyone all the time in ways they would fully understand. And I understand that means I am not accessible to all, nor would I expect everyone to choose or do the work themselves to see me for who I am. Those are moments of cyclical vulnerability, when the self-assurance feels thinner and old habits creep up—simply wanting to say or do things that don’t feel like my own words or actions, but remnants of signals I learned at some point to paint myself brighter and try to be seen by someone who will never understand or value the real me. It’s not because I’ve got some invisible shield on. It’s because their world view doesn’t recognize me as a familiar pattern. This used to upset me quite a bit. I felt the need to kick and scream and beg to be seen, whatever it took. And sometimes I did do that, only to realize that I have made myself invisible and unrecognizable to my own eyes.

My life and work are no longer about contorting myself to be seen and understood by everyone and everywhere. In fact, sometimes, I choose to be invisible to even the closest people in my life because that’s what I need in order to be myself. And that’s OK. I used to think “just be yourself” was such a vacuous and meaningless advice. But now I know the power of it because the difference is, I now fully occupy my own body and mind to mean exactly what that means no matter where I am, and that being myself is a strength not a liability, because it’s on my own terms. Now you see me, now you don’t.

Despite endless conversations about the necessity of change and the daunting task of change management in the business world, it usually ends at the usual, basic stuff — why change is necessary, that change isn’t all that bad and something we shouldn’t fear it, or that change is the only constant. The myth of change as a big scary wave we have no control over, or something that happens organically over time, only compounds our anxiety. Worse yet, some people talk about change like it only happens organically. Either way, both narratives are devoid of any agency (or accountability) on our part.

If businesses and leaders believe change can often lead to innovation and growth, why wouldn’t we treat the process of creating and managing through change like it’s a critical investment, and put the work behind it? In other words, what must be true for our people and organization to not only effectively navigate through change, but create the kinds of changes necessary to drive our businesses forward?

Of the many ways to instigate and institute change, I’d argue a successful change creation and management requires strategic investment and commitment in the following components:

Mindset (i.e. belief). While the business may believe change is necessary to innovate and grow, this can only be realized if its people believe it, too. This is about value alignment between organizations and its people that change is indeed something we believe in as an operating principle in order to grow and succeed. Without internalization of this belief at an individual level, how each person or team makes decisions and choose to act may create inertia against require change creation and management.

Behaviors (i.e. habits). We are our habits. As much as leaders might repeat the language of change in their day to day, if we aren’t living out the value of change with our habits and actions, we are creating a gap between our intention and commitment. Actively assess what types of organizational habits you’d need to break or shift from, in order to create new habits that will build muscles and resilience behind the budding mindset. Do this at the individual as well as team level, including how the organization makes decisions and act on them. Figure out what stands in the way of creating new habits — this is not going to be easy, but that is precisely why you need to be informed and aware of what it takes to change behaviors as well as the mindset of an organization.

Incentives (i.e. reward systems). People respond to how their organizations reward, penalize, or ignore their decisions and actions. I’m talking about the output of decisions and actions, as well as how we make those decisions and actions real. If we say we value change as a key operating principle of our organization, what types of mindset or behaviors do we recognize, and how? It’s important to assess whether or not your existing incentive structures are in fact standing in the way of making change happen in the first place or accelerating the pace of required changes.

Process (i.e. operational systems). It’s impossible to expect growing organizations to organically manage and embrace change and stick to it consistently. Change creation and management require cognitive and emotional work across mindset and behavior, which means you’re asking your people to do some extra work investing in this important work. It’s the responsibility of leaders to spend equal amount of time and space thinking about and building the necessary changes at the systems level, so that there are some structural guidelines and guardrails to get people back on track when mindset and behavior changes fall by the wayside. Don’t put that burden entirely on the individuals, no matter how motivated and capable they are. It’s your responsibility as a leader to enable change at scale.

Culture (i.e. social contract). We are social beings, even, and especially, at work. People will take cues and learn from each other, and the value we put on change creation and management has to be a social contract and norm we must be willing to adopt and live out together as a collective. Do people know how to spot, recognize, and participate in opportunities to change? Is there any social stigma against change that gets communicated, even if implicitly, in how people interact with each other? What does it take to create a shared sense between individuals who make up your organization that change is something they are willing to hold space for?

Don’t be naive or lazy about the work and the investment it takes to create lasting, positive change. If you want it, and believe in its value, take the time to be intentional about creating the necessary conditions to enable change creation and management up, down, and across your entire business.