From: Department of Strategic Leadership
Date: Effective Immediately
Summary:
Due to recent incidents, management would like to remind employees that power abuse, sexual harassment, discrimination, infancy, cynicism, positivity, or misconduct of any kind will not be tolerated. Any future complaints will be recorded for training purposes.
We acknowledge that we are navigating unprecedented times that have not changed much since the American run of The Office concluded in 2013. As such, we have uploaded new custom Slack emojis to accommodate the rainbow of emotional expression (pepes, peepos, cowboys, and the politically neutral blobs).
We are also distributing this memo to outline key decision-making principles for leadership effectiveness. It is particularly relevant for:
- Founders helming a yacht that's moving like a cruise boat
- Executives navigating the responsibility of power
- Managers looking to build a culture of innovation
- People who've never had to wrestle with identity politics
- People who are too tired to be militant about anything
- People looking to perceive unspoken truths and value systems at work, and work generatively with them rather than fearfully
We regret to inform you that our set of The Harvard Business Review archives were set ablaze in the lobby. While our UX intern attempts to piece the ashes back together, we have opted to reference Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone for our operating ethos. Please refer to how character Michael reflects on a Klonopin-induced state of mental reprieve:
"Instead, I found myself bewildered at the equanimity of my response [to bad news]. It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear. For a moment there, I was able to step outside that, to hear what she wanted to be."
We do not endorse drugs at work, but help yourself to the cold brew on tap. Refills are on Tuesdays!
While you wait, see below for leadership advisories, featuring stories from our Brand Lead Vicky in Ted Cruz's office, Figma's Kaitie Chambers, PepsiCo's Indra Nooyi, and Microsoft's Satya Nadella. We will cover these insights for employing EQ at work:
- Know when to speak the truth and when to practice restraint
- Remember squishiness is strategic
- Win through trade-offs and lose with grace
Know when to speak the truth and when to practice restraint
Overview
- Employees are encouraged to challenge prevailing narratives when doing so increases revenue and reinvigorates others who are LARPing their job.
- However, caution is advised when questioning illusions that maintain necessary political stability.
- Leaders should balance conviction with calculated restraint—when in doubt, ask your nearest colleague who has navigated geopolitical displacement or charged family dinners.
Background
This addresses The Willful Suspension of Disbelief (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817), which GPT notes as "where people knowingly accept contradictions, inefficiencies, or even outright fabrications because doing so allows them to function without cognitive dissonance. They play along with the narrative because questioning it is exhausting or career-limiting."
Case Study: Always Engage The Eyes
In college, Brand Lead Vicky briefly volunteered with an organization devoted to ending child hunger. They assigned her to lobby her state senators for nutrition in public school lunches, which is how she found herself in Ted Cruz's office staring at the Dr. Pepper fridge while waiting for a sleepy legislative aide barely older than her to come out and hear her memorized spiel. Whether an exercise in resilience or futility, she's still unclear.
She conceded in certain places you do need to suspend disbelief, abide by rusty rules, look into someone's limp eyes and both know nothing will come of your efforts. Why fight when your paycheck amounts to a rounding error compared to big tech salaries?
While lobbying wasn't for her, a few years later she would start her own food media collective and co-lead OpenIDEO's NYC Chapter. Advocacy work now looked like reporting and organizing.
She then brought community thinking into her role as a brand lead in B2B SaaS. Here she faced the challenge of democratizing content while upholding standards. It didn't feel right to lay down the laws as brand police, or manufacture excitement around a brand that she herself was still figuring out how to build into something she was proud of. She first had to know the people.
Once while shooting team images and videos, she came across the inescapable conundrum of the marketing person staring at a lineup resembling the food she exclusively ate in elementary school: rice, dumpling wrappers, bananas.
Everyone from Philly to Peru had flown into this banquet hall for the company retreat. After a hesitant beat, she walked up to Sasha, said hey, from one female POC to another, are you open to being in our company pics? They looked in each other's eyes and realized they actually had a choice.
Takeaway: Learn the system first. Understand what kind of impact you are uniquely positioned for before you make your move.
Remember Squishiness is Strategic
Exciting news! Managers have the opportunity to join a leadership development module: The Strategic Value of Squishiness.
Course Objectives
- Learn how self-expression creates psychological permission structures for teams to experiment and innovate.
- Explore examples from Figma’s Kaitie Chambers and Brand Lead Vicky on how elasticity—not rigidity—builds the strongest innovation cultures.
- Apply these insights to internal teams, cross-functional projects, and vendor relationships.
Case Study: Bringing Energy Elasticity to Meetings
Brand lead Vicky would amend "bring your full self to work" to "show up as yourself, but no sweat—no need to exercise your full self at work." Work wasn't a practice of expression; it was a practice of healthy restraint.
But then she sat in meetings led by facilitators who approached collaboration differently—more fluid, designed for play, structured for flexibility. One of the most memorable examples came from Kaitie Chambers, a Figma Advocate, whose "you belong here, too" approach to design and community-building made work feel expansive rather than extractive.
She’d rarely been in corporate spaces with such playfulness, a spirit of learning and listening, a pliancy bouncing off the browser walls—a place for minds to not just meld, but squish around. It modeled an energy elasticity that she hadn’t thought to methodically exercise at work. And then like 8 months later clicked: Squishiness was her edge.
She'd seen how psychological rigidity creates fragility. People become afraid to experiment, question assumptions, or admit what they don't know.
What Kaitie modeled wasn’t "no structure"—it was a different kind of structure: one that could stretch and accommodate new ideas without snapping.
Vicky carried this revelation into her own collaborative practices, initiating:
- A visual meeting template for the brand & marketing, product, engineering, and ops teams to make progress on complex, cross-functional needs
- An AI opportunity/discovery matrix within the brand & marketing team to get everyone on the same page with usage standards and needs
- A monthly bullpen between creative leaders on the brand and product teams to trade tips and stakeholder stories
Takeaway: Being squishy is necessary for innovation and the invariable blips along the way. By practicing psychological elasticity rather than rigidity, leaders create cultures for people to grow in ways neither could have foreseen.
Win through trade-offs and lose with grace
Overview
- Acknowledge success doesn’t come from having the dream team.
- When rogue actors disrupt the illusion of peace, integrity means eating the cost.
- You have now experienced what Michelle Obama refers to as "becoming."
Inspired by consultant Vaughn Tan's tradeoff-oriented goal-setting process Boris:
"Because thinking about tradeoffs is not habitual, Boris asks participants to do something they’re not used to doing. This is uncomfortable enough. More: Thinking and talking about tradeoffs surfaces often hidden or taken-for-granted value systems. These value systems are rarely (never?) easily or fully explicatable. Invariably, the most important and determining aspects of values are inherently tacit."
Not Really a Case Study: What GPT Didn't Say About PepsiCo's Nooyi and Microsoft's Nadella
We asked GPT to look into how psychology has been effectively used in business. It came back with PepsiCo's former CEO Indra Nooyi and Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella as those who've made empathy and EQ cornerstones of their leading style.
Brand Lead Vicky noted a clear trend that GPT didn't point out, which is they are both immigrants, born in Chennai and Hyderabad (respectively). They moved to the states for master's programs.
Immigrants and their children intuit trade-offs not just as strategy, but as identity. They move between places with different definitions of freedom. The very traits that yield clients, recognition, and reward—may be the very things in conflict with where they come from.
They know that (part of) the cost of being the vanguard is the judgment or the envy they will incur. They keep going.
They carry an unbearable burden, a soul tearing apart by virtue of becoming the most true and most beautiful self it can be.
They know it's not all hardness; it's also beauty. As framed by Poet Eli Siegel (in Aesthetic Realism, founded in 1941): "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."
When they lead, it is from a larger spirit that has knows no growth without loss. They are gracious, not territorial. When they think upon their people, there is no bitterness, only longing.
Takeaway: There is actually an illusion that's good to accept: the dream team. You might not have this, but what you will have—is choosing to honor how human dignity is not a rounding error.
In Closing
In The Vatican's Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, human dignity is referenced 56 times.
"There is the risk of AI being used to promote what Pope Francis has called the “technocratic paradigm,” which perceives all the world’s problems as solvable through technological means alone. In this paradigm, human dignity and fraternity are often set aside in the name of efficiency, “as if reality, goodness, and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” Yet, human dignity and the common good must never be violated for the sake of efficiency, for “technological developments that do not lead to an improvement in the quality of life of all humanity, but on the contrary, aggravate inequalities and conflicts, can never count as true progress.” Instead, AI should be put “at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral."
Replace AI in the paragraph above with "how startups scale" or "how big corps keep x percentage points of market share." Amidst our instinct for progress, life is a lesson in losing with grace.
Amiri Baraka writes in The Washington Post about Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 Broadway play A Raisin in the Sun's Broadway, portraying a black family moving into a white neighborhood and the harassment and violence they faced:
"And their burden surely will be lifted or one day it certainly will explode."
With every action you contribute to either lightness or explosion. Choose well, and let no one corrupt your light.
Yours,
Management
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