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People & CultureJune 27, 202611 min

The Research Behind Acting with Authority alongside Exercising Authoritarian Power

A 2023 chapter from Managing with Sense and Sensitivity maps the terrain between legitimate authority and coercive leadership and what decades of leadership theory reveal about why the distinction still matters.

Authority and authoritarian power, while often conflated, are demonstrably different forces with distinct psychological effects on those who comply with them. Research shows that true authority is earned through perceived expertise and inspires willing followership, while authoritarian power relies on coercion and evokes obedience rooted in fear. This article explores the key research differentiating these approaches, detailing how they impact organizational dynamics and individual behavior. Understanding this...

People & CultureJune 26, 202611 min

Dolly Chugh and the Quiet Work of Fighting Bias From Inside the Room

A social psychologist at NYU Stern traces how good intentions collide with invisible psychological barriers and why the gap between who we mean to be and how we actually behave is where the real work begins.

It's often assumed that simply *being* the “only one” in a room - the only woman, the only person of color - is the core problem. But Dolly Chugh's work suggests the real challenge isn't the isolation itself, but what happens *after* you notice it. Her 2019 New York Times essay, “What to Do When You're the Only Woman in the Room,” wasn't a lament about representation, but a deeper exploration of the costs of systemic imbalance and how to navigate them. Chugh is a social psychologist and management professor at the...

People & CultureJune 25, 202613 min

The Unlikely Professor How Dr. Dacher Keltner's Decades of Research on Power and Compassion Quietly Became the Emotional Backbone of a New Leadership Generation

From Laurel Canyon to the halls of Berkeley, one psychologist spent thirty years studying what makes humans good and why that science is suddenly what every leader needs to hear.

There is a moment, Dacher Keltner tells audiences, when the body knows something before the mind catches up. You hear a sound a cry, a whimper, a sharp intake of breath and within thirty milliseconds, your brain has already begun to orient toward care. You have not yet identified what you heard. You have already begun to respond. This is the science of what Keltner calls the "vocal bursts," emotional sounds that predate language and appear across mammalian species. It is also, in miniature, the story of Keltner...

People & CultureJune 22, 202616 min

The Map Leaders Trust When Everything Changes Dr. Herminia Ibarra and the Working Identity Framework That Rewired Career Reinvention

For decades, career guides told professionals to find themselves first, then act. Then Herminia Ibarra watched hundreds of mid-career professionals closely and discovered the real path runs backwards. This is the story of how that finding became one of the most trusted tools in modern leadership development.

The Moment the Old Map Stopped Working There is a particular kind of professional exhaustion that does not announce itself with drama. It arrives instead as a slow accumulation of Sunday evenings that feel like Thursdays, of projects that once energized now draining, of a vague sense that the career you built was built for someone who no longer lives at that address. Millions of people recognize it. The standard advice for navigating that feeling has been consistent for decades: know yourself first . Figure out...

Leadership & GovernanceJune 20, 202612 min

Celtic knotwork quietly conquers corporate branding

How a nine-pointed figure born from Sufi contemplation, Gurdjieff's teachings, and a Bolivian-born teacher's Arica school found its way into executive coaching, leadership retreats, and organizational development programs around the world.

The Symbol Before the System Long before the Enneagram appeared in corporate retreat brochures or leadership coaching curricula, it was a geometric figure whispered about in Sufi lodges, contemplated by Christian mystics in desert monasteries, and carried westward by an Armenian-Greek teacher who believed most humans were walking through life asleep. The nine-pointed symbol had already survived centuries of reinvention before anyone attached nine distinct personality types to its points. This is the story of that...

Home & Local ServicesJune 18, 20269 min

Fast Roof Repairs Save Washington Homes From Water Damage

A closer look at how chimney displacement connects to deeper structural concerns, and what the visible signs in and around your home can reveal about the work that lies beneath.

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a homeowner when something looks slightly wrong with the house but isn't loud enough to demand immediate action. A brick appears offset. A joint seems wider than it should be. You tell yourself it's an optical illusion, or maybe the tower in Pisa has leaned for centuries without catastrophe. But in residential construction, visible displacement rarely resolves itself. It waits. That moment of noticing standing in the driveway or crawling through an attic...

Editorial ResearchJune 15, 202611 min

Tech's power players ditch offices, reshaping city centers

How hybrid work has rewritten the power dynamics between landlords, tenants, and the cities that depend on them and what it means for anyone studying where authority lives in 2026.

On a Tuesday morning in March 2026, the lobby of a 1980s-vintage office tower in downtown San Francisco sat nearly empty at 9:30 AM. A single security guard watched a delivery driver wheel a cart of packages toward the elevator bank. The coffee kiosk on the ground floor had closed three months earlier. Upstairs, a mid-sized software company was subleasing two full floors it no longer needed, having renegotiated its headquarters lease the previous autumn. This scene repeated across dozens of similar buildings in...

ResearchJune 14, 202615 min

The CRM Moment What Happens When Your Small Business Outgrows the Spreadsheet

Most small businesses don't need a CRM until they do. Here's how to know when you've hit that threshold, and what the right tool can actually do for you.

The Moment Everything Almost Slipped Away Maria had just wrapped a meeting with a promising new client when she got the email a different client, confused and frustrated. They'd sent an invoice two weeks earlier and heard nothing back. Maria stared at the screen, heart sinking. She knew exactly what had happened. The follow-up lived in her head. It lived on a sticky note that had fallen behind her desk. It existed in a vague intention she'd had on a Tuesday afternoon and then forgotten entirely. >"More leads to...

Health & BehaviorJune 14, 202613 min

The No Surprises Act at Four What Patients Actually Gained and What Still Lingers

The federal law took effect in January 2022 with broad ambitions, but understanding its real boundaries matters more than ever for anyone navigating American healthcare.

The Morning the Rules Changed On the morning of January 1, 2022, millions of Americans woke up to a healthcare system that had quietly rewritten one of its most infuriating rules. For years, patients who did everything right choosing an in-network hospital, trusting their insurance, showing up for scheduled care could still open an envelope to find a bill from a doctor they had never met, who did not accept their insurance, and whose name they had no reason to know until that piece of paper arrived. The amounts...

Health & BehaviorJune 14, 202611 min

The Question That Opens a Door to Understanding Major Life Transitions

A closer look at cross-country moving costs reveals something unexpected about how we plan, stress, and rebuild our lives around the biggest changes we make.

Someone asks you how much it costs to move across the country. Your first instinct is to think about trucks, gas stations, and cardboard boxes. That instinct is not wrong. But it is incomplete. There is a reason this question keeps appearing at the top of search results, in home services guides, and in the planning conversations of families, young professionals, and retirees alike. The question sounds financial. Underneath, it is behavioral. It is about the weight of starting over the mental load, the emotional...