REBEL LEADERS
You've been playing
the wrong game.
NARRATOR
The leadership industry spent $366 billion teaching people to manage. Nobody taught them to be human. Until now.
CHAPTER I: THE DIAGNOSIS
Something is deeply wrong
and everyone can feel it.
The institutions that once formed us — families, churches, civic organizations, neighborhoods — have hollowed out. What remains is a $366 billion leadership industry selling competency models to a world dying of loneliness. Aristotle called it akrasia — knowing the good but being unable to do it. Gabor Maté calls it something else: collective trauma wearing a lanyard. This is The Great Transfer: the impossible burden placed on the transactional workplace to do what formative communities once did.
The result is what we name Vulture Culture — organizations that extract human energy without replenishing the soul. Leaders wearing the Hollow Crown, performing authority while hemorrhaging meaning. A machine that optimizes for everything except the one thing that matters: what the Greeks called eudaimonia — human flourishing.
STATUS REPORT
$366B
Spent on leadership training
annually
77%
Workers disengaged
globally
0
Addressing the real crisis
the soul gap
CHAPTER II: THE BELIEF
We believe the rebellion
is one of remembering.
"Eudaimonia — human flourishing is the point. Not profit. Not productivity. Not performance metrics. The point is that people become more fully alive."
We believe that every human being carries an irreducible dignity that no system can grant or revoke. That leadership is not a position but a posture — the posture of one who has done their own inner work and now creates conditions for others to grow. The crisis under every crisis is not economic or political but existential: a formation crisis, a disconnection from self, from others, and from purpose.
Humanity is not a liability.
— contra the Machine
Character cannot be outsourced.
— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Hope is rebellious.
— Václav Havel
CHAPTER III: QUEST LOG
The Rebel OS
AN OPERATING SYSTEM FOR THE SOUL OF AN ORGANIZATION
Built on the philosophy of Holistic Shaping, the Rebel OS is our orbital system for transforming organizations from extraction machines into formation communities. It recovers what the ancients already knew — from Aristotle's phronesis (practical wisdom) to the Desert Fathers' kenosis (self-emptying) to the Buddhist concept of beginner's mind. Then it confirms those truths through modern science: McGilchrist's hemisphere research shows why our left-brain institutions killed what the right brain always knew. Boyatzis's resonant leadership research proves that renewal, not relentless drive, is what sustains performance. Maté's trauma work reveals why organizations keep producing traumatized leaders who reproduce traumatic systems. Ancient wisdom and modern evidence, converging on the same answer.
◆ THE FLYWHEEL ◆
Know who you are
Rediscovering our unchanging essence of being and its connection to the universe. Requires relationship to be developed.
Connect with depth
Separation is an illusion. We only truly exist in relation to everything else, as does the rest of reality.
See what could be
What happens when connection and relationship give birth to a potential new future. Always bottoms up, co-created — 'hey, wouldn't it be cool if…?'
Steward the conditions
The Bowl, Water, and Current. The Bowl is attention and intention (Iain McGilchrist). The Water is Howard Thurman's 'deep ocean within.' The Current is Martin Buber's I/Thou philosophy. Leaders don't fill cups — they hold the bowl.
CHAPTER IV: LORE
Ideas worth sitting with.
ANCIENT WISDOM RECOVERED · CROSS-DISCIPLINE SECRETS UNCOVERED
CHAPTER V: THE VISION
Millions of organizations,
mobilized as a distributed
formation network.
We're building toward it: leaders of character equipped to live with hope and courage in the modern world. Not better managers. Not more efficient systems. Whole humans — formed in community, tested by reality, and sent back into the world to face the biggest boss fights of our time: the loneliness epidemic, a crisis of leadership at every level of society, and a planet that needs people who can think beyond the next quarter.
"It's not my job to fill your cup,
but it is to empty mine."
CHAPTER VI: JOIN THE PARTY
You're not crazy.
You're not alone.
There's a language for what you feel. A community of people who refuse to accept that this is just how things are. These days, being hopeful is an act of rebellion. Join the party and receive essays, lenses, and invitations to go deeper.
NEW QUEST AVAILABLE
Notice
Pay attention to the ache. The Buddhists call it dukkha. McGilchrist calls it the left hemisphere's betrayal. Either way — that's not weakness. It's wisdom.
Name
Give language to what you see. The Great Transfer. The Hollow Crown. Rohr calls it 'naming the shadow.' Naming is the first act of resistance.
Take One Step
Start the inner work. Find your people. Hold the bowl. As Lao Tzu said: 'A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.'