About this site

I started this site as a kind of therapy. The pandemic was hard. My wife and I had our third child. We spent a great deal of time looking after and trying to protect our other two as well. It was also a time where I had a considerable amount of time to think about what I'm doing with my life, including my profession.

Mostly I felt that leadership as a topic had become a kind of commoditized concept that people infused meaning into. It was something to be described, packaged, and sold, and the packaging of it was more important than perhaps the substance.

I also noticed that writing on leadership seemed to fall into two opposite categories, at different ends of a spectrum. Most writing on leaders seemed to be either short, pithy, surface level content marketing designed to gain clicks or short bouts of attention online, or deeper academic articles that were less accessible to mainstream readers.

I wanted to create a space to articulate some of my deeper thinking on leadership, that was more nuanced and substantial than the content marketing, but also more accessible and digestible than the academic work - a middle ground.

I also began asking deeper questions about what I'm doing with my life, and the nature of my profession. I developed some strong negative views about the consulting industry in general, which were probably too negative, hardened amid the isolation of Covid, and therefore unfair. I began to see other consultants as a group of confidence men and women that ran around claiming expertise about leadership, with no actual evidence that they had spent any significant amount of time thinking about it. Leadership in that sense had become something to portray, a series of jargon terms, and corporate-fashionable concepts, which if memorized and recounted in a convincing way, could persuade others that you knew what you were talking about, and to give you their money. So in a jaded, jaundiced way, I felt the subject of leadership had become theatre among consultants. The costume was nice clothes, maybe a suit. The script included buzz words and the headlines from the latest article in HBR. I wondered if anyone really knew what they were talking about, or if so much energy was invested in keeping up this pretense, that they didn't bother to question what they were doing. It seemed like a kind of infotainment-ization of leadership. I wondered if any expertise lay beneath it all.

So I wanted to push back on that. I grew up thinking about leadership and talking about it with my father, who himself was a leadership development consultant. Dinners were filled with stories of him working with interesting executives. Through my involvement in sports and in high school, I gained early first hand experiences of what it was like to lead others. And then, I decided to go to graduate school primarily to study leadership - it seemed like the best way to do it. So I was, and still feel, a little protective of the topic. I give it some reverence, and respect, and it pains me a bit to see the armies of false prophets saying whatever they think others want to hear about leadership, in order to gain some kind of advantage.

Of course I know this is too negative, too skewed, that there are capable and intelligent people in the field guiding leaders and organizations, but it was where my head was at during the late stages of the pandemic.

So I wanted to carve out a place where thinking and writing on leadership could delve deeper than the content marketing, and explore interesting ideas - IDEAS! - about leadership.

I think coming out of the pandemic, perhaps like most, I was interested in giving voice to so many inner feelings I had.

I also was struck like many during the pandemic with a sense of the impermanence of life. I started thinking about this theme in the context of my work too. Every consulting project comes, rises to the fore, you work on it, sometimes sweating and bleeding and clenching every muscle to ensure it succeeds, and then it fades into the horizon never to be seen again. It's almost like it never happened. Some projects, you can't even put on your CV. With coaching engagements, confidentiality may preclude even telling other people that you worked with a leader. Poof, it's gone. I longed to create something that was an expression of my thinking, and to know it would exist in the world. That you could look at it, read it, a year from now, five years from now. If I was hit by a bus, my kids could read this and know what I was thinking at the time, peer into my heart and mind. I longed to work on something that would create some kind of humble legacy, that would represent my work and ideas and creativity, and that would live on. It wasn't about - I don't think - gaining clicks or recognition, but moreso about just being seen and visible in the world.

This site is a place where I write essays, some short though many lengthy, on the subject of leadership. This topic has been an area of fascination for me since I entered graduate school. Beginning at that point, I've focused my professional life on first studying, and later working directly with leaders in organizational settings.

As I've progressed in my career, I've been increasingly humbled by the complexity of the topic - a posture that sometimes runs counter to the dominant mode of operating in my profession, where many project confidence and certainty about leadership and it's guiding principles. By contrast, I now stand more in awe of the vastness of the terrain, and wonder whether I'll have enough time left in my career to avail myself of all it's contours.

As the years passed in my career, one that was often fast paced and focused on running a profitable business, I realized I lacked a place for reflective writing about ideas related to leadership. I wanted to carve out a space to capture fluttering intuitions as they passed by, research new curiosities, and imprint enduring beliefs that were coalescing in my mind into foundational principles. In short, I wanted a place to explore the topic of leadership, but also share what I thought I believed about the topic.

Another purpose behind this site is to simply catalogue those ideas as they develop, in the hope I might refer back to them and build on them later, or share them with others, like clients I work with, if it makes sense.

I hope you'll join me in exploring the many nuances, ambiguities, and meanings in the field of leadership, and embrace a willingness to think more deeply about a topic that is both ubiquitous in our current culture, yet remains somewhat mysterious.

About this site

This is an independent publication launched in March 2023 by Tim Jackson. If you subscribe today, you'll get full access to the website as well as email newsletters about new content when it's available. Your subscription makes this site possible, and allows it to continue to exist. Thank you!

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