Writing Surrender to Lead was the most uncomfortable “practice what you preach” experience of my career. First of all, writing doesn’t come naturally to me. Second of all, being vulnerable doesn’t either.
At one point we were going to use a ghostwriter, because outsourcing can look like the grown-up answer when the calendar is packed and the stakes feel high. That idea didn’t last long. Surrender to Lead is built on stories, not slogans, and stories don’t work when they’re polished into something safe. A ghostwriter can help shape language, but they cannot carry lived experience. If this book was going to be honest, we had to write it ourselves, with our fingerprints on every line. Our first act of surrender was deciding to write it without a net.
The writing itself was effort, but the real work was internal, because you cannot write a book about surrender while clinging to control, image, and perfection. Joe and I struggled to tolerate the vulnerability of putting it on paper in our own voices, knowing it would be seen, judged, interpreted, and possibly misunderstood.
Ego kept whispering that it had to be brilliant, flawless, and undeniable. Fear kept whispering that the wrong story could make us look weak, or worse, exposed. We surrendered our ego and kept writing.
The part that still surprises me is how fast it came together once we finally committed. After years of circling it, we sat down and wrote the first draft fairly quickly. The material was already inside us. What changed was our willingness to stop negotiating with ourselves. When we surrendered ego, fear, and scarcity, we recovered focus, momentum, and a sense of freedom that had been missing for years.
That experience sharpened the core idea of the book in a very real way. Surrender is not passive, and it is not soft, and it is not a retreat from leadership. Surrender is the internal shift that makes leadership effective. When leaders surrender those forces, they can lead from love, gratitude, and abundance, and that is where clarity, alignment, and accountability come from. Writing this book forced me to live the message before I could ever share it, and I can admit now that the only reason it exists is because we finally stopped gripping so tightly.
Elsewhere In Culture
The Minnesota CEOs’ joint letter stood out to me because of its restraint. Rather than positioning themselves as moral authorities or political actors, these leaders focused squarely on the disruption rippling through their organizations, their workforces, and the broader community. I’ve long believed that CEOs are not meant to serve as the ethical compass of society. Their responsibility is to lead operations, safeguard employees, and ensure the business can function in an environment that is stable enough for people to do their jobs. Read through that lens, the letter is less about ideology and more about acknowledging that fear and instability have begun to interfere with the basic ability to operate.
That choice is also why the response has been so conflicted. Some see caution as weakness and wanted a more forceful stance, while others believe any public statement is an overreach. Leadership, however, often requires navigating that narrow middle ground. Whether the letter will hold up over time is an open question, but it already shapes a belief that matters: that conditions on the ground have deteriorated enough to warrant collective action, even when that action is careful, imperfect, and intentionally limited.
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/701195/frequent-workplace-continued-rise.aspx
Gallup’s data captures an interesting reality about AI in the workplace that most leaders are skirting around. Use is intensifying, but it is not spreading, which means the people who already have access, context, and autonomy are going deeper while nearly half of the workforce remains untouched. AI has become concentrated in knowledge work, remote capable roles, and leadership positions, creating a sense of momentum that feels real in boardrooms and strategy sessions but is barely felt in many operational and frontline jobs. When leaders say AI is everywhere, what they often mean is that it is everywhere they work, and that distinction matters far more than the headline growth percentages.
What stands out most is that fear is not the primary blocker, usefulness is. Many employees are not resisting AI, they simply do not see where it fits into the reality of their work. That makes this a leadership issue, not a technology one. Adoption follows relevance, and relevance only comes when leaders slow down enough to understand how value is actually created role by role, workflow by workflow. When executives live in a future shaped by AI while large portions of the organization operate in the past, alignment erodes and trust weakens. Over time, that gap hardens into culture, and culture always shows up in results, whether leaders are ready to confront it or not.