In early 2025, I was working inside a Fortune 100 company building the AI hardware and data center infrastructure powering this entire moment. One afternoon I held an NVIDIA chip in my hands. I did not work for NVIDIA; I worked for the company integrating this hardware into the systems that would power AI at scale for global enterprise. I was close enough to hold the chip itself, to feel its density, to understand in my hands what the whole world was racing to build.

I am wired to ask the next question. So I asked it. I turned to our corporate head of social responsibility, her team, and one of the vendors in the room, and I said: walk me through it. When the liquid cools this hardware, where does it actually go?

The answer was honest, and it has stayed with me. Most of the liquid recycles back through the system. Some of it, though, leaves as hot vapor, released into the air. No one has yet figured out how to trap that vapor and convert it into usable energy, the vendor told me in that conversation. Whoever does will get rich and help save the planet, he said. I believed him.

Subscribe now

What I did not yet know in early 2025 was that my Gen Z mentees outside of work had already been asking me about the water problem with data centers for months before that conversation. They wanted to understand what was happening, and I did not know enough to give them a real answer. That gap is part of what sent me to that vendor with the questions born out of my curiosity: explain this to me from scratch, like I’m 5.

Much has changed since that conversation over a year ago, for better and for worse. We are at a genuine crossroads with AI data centers being built very differently across the world, and the decisions made by corporate leaders, government officials, and citizens in the next few years will shape the world that Generation Z and Generation Alpha inherit.

The vacuum where the rules should be

In the United States, we have largely decided not to decide. At the federal level, the posture has been speed, a rat race: executive action to fast-track the largest facilities and ease the environmental review that might slow them down.

What that leaves behind is a vacuum, and into that vacuum step the people with the least power to fight. Residents show up at town halls. They hold handmade signs. They ask their city councils a simple question: what is this going to do to our water, our power bills, our houses, our land?

Subscribe now

I do not have to read about this from a distance. It is happening fifteen minutes south of where I have lived in Los Gatos, CA for the past six years.

Gilroy, California, sits in Santa Clara County, the county in the heart of Silicon Valley, though it is known throughout the state for growing garlic, not for building AI infrastructure. A fifty-six acre Amazon Web Services data center is under construction there now, located on Camino Arroyo next to active farmland and adjacent to the Gilroy Premium Outlets. By the numbers in the public record, it is designed to draw roughly forty-nine megawatts of power, the equivalent of approximately twenty thousand homes, and millions of gallons of clean water annually.¹ It was approved on July 3, 2025, without a city council vote, signed off by a community development director because the parcel was already zoned for industrial use.² Residents found out when construction equipment arrived. Thousands have signed petitions. Their mayor told reporters there was nothing the city could do to stop it.³ Silicon Valley Resistance, a local advocacy group, has noted that once one data center opens in a city, more follow, and the cumulative strain on utility bills accelerates.⁴

The woman with the brown water

Travel to Morgan County, Georgia, and the cost stops being abstract. In a documentary produced by More Perfect Union titled “We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez traveled to meet residents living in the shadow of a 2.5 million-square-foot Meta data center, roughly sixty miles east of Atlanta. This is a county where more than seventy percent of voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump in 2024. They welcomed her anyway, because they believe nobody else has been listening, and they were desperate for leaders to just listen.

Share

The documentary introduced Beverly and Jeff Morris, who live just four hundred feet from the facility. Since construction began in 2018, their tap water runs brown and carries visible sediment. Their water pressure has dropped. Their appliances have stopped working. They ship in bottled water at roughly one hundred dollars for ten five-gallon jugs, spending thousands trying to address what the construction did to their well.

Ocasio-Cortez also visited Pamela Felder, who purchased her dream home three years ago. When explosive blasting began nearby for data center construction, she said it sounded like someone had picked up her house and dropped it. A week after the blasting started, she saw a crack in her porch extending all the way across. Then she found cracks throughout the interior of her house. A neighbor showed the documentary crew a sinkhole she said the blasts had caused. “Makes you want to cry,” the neighbor said. “That no one’s listening. Why a data center? Why now? Why here?”⁵

On May 20, 2026, Ocasio-Cortez held up two mason jars of opaque, brown well water at a congressional hearing before the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, questioning the EPA’s assistant administrator for water about whether the agency had received complaints connected to data center construction. The official said she was unaware of the issues. “I think both of us can agree that neither one of these things is drinkable,” Ocasio-Cortez said.⁶ Residents’ water bills in the area are projected to increase by thirty-three percent.⁷

Back in California, my PG&E bill had been climbing steadily for years before I finally heard a woman founder of an AI startup say it out loud from a stage at a conference here in Silicon Valley: “Our PG&E bills are going up due to the data centers being built.” She named what many of us had been experiencing but not connecting. According to the California Public Utilities Commission, average residential electricity rates increased one hundred and four percent between January 2015 and April 2025. The average combined gas and electric bill rose from approximately one hundred and seventy-nine dollars in 2020 to around three hundred dollars in 2025, with the largest single jump occurring in 2024.⁸ In the last three years alone, rates rose fifty-six percent.⁹ PG&E itself has said it expects the data center pipeline to help bring bills down over time, projecting roughly one to two percent reductions per gigawatt of new load, but that math is cold comfort to families watching their bills double before those projections arrive.¹⁰

The AI race is bulldozing its own people

There is a logic operating here that I want to name directly, because I have been in enough boardrooms to recognize it. The argument goes: we are in a race against China, AI infrastructure is a matter of national security, and speed is therefore non-negotiable. I understand that argument. I have worked in environments where the stakes were genuinely that high.

What I know from that experience is that moving fast without a robust understanding of the problems you are creating is not how you win a high-stakes race. It is how you create new casualties while trying to avoid losing ground.

Subscribe now

Meta is investing $600 billion in data center infrastructure through 2028.¹¹ SpaceX has filed with the Federal Communications Commission for authorization to operate a constellation of up to one million orbital data center satellites.¹² The US GAO released a spotlight report in April 2026 noting that space-based data centers could theoretically reduce land, water, and electricity demands on Earth, but that cooling solutions at scale remain unproven and the engineering challenges significant.¹³ My Gen Z mentee who is studying aerospace engineering offered what I thought was an admirably honest assessment when I asked him about it: “Well, I guess there’s lots of room, and it gets cold.” He is not wrong. He is also describing something that will not solve the crisis in anyone’s backyard this decade.

The heat has to go somewhere. We do not get to skip that question by launching a satellite.

The dilemma I actually have empathy for

Here is what I will not do: pretend the people running these companies are not navigating something genuinely difficult. I have spent more than twenty years advising leaders in the C-suite and in the boardroom, and I know the chair they are sitting in is challenging.

A CEO right now is being pulled in every direction simultaneously. Shareholders demand AI capacity built yesterday. Tariffs wars and supply chains delays in the Strait of Hormuz affecting aluminum, copper, cement and more are moving the cost of hardware beneath their feet in real time. Boards want growth and want it de-risked. In that pressure, the stakeholders who are not in the room, including the family near the fence line, the town downstream, and the grid everyone shares, can become easy to treat as externalities. This happens usually not out of malice, but most often out of velocity. The distinction matters, because velocity without a human layer is exactly where institutional trust goes to die.

Share

I have watched this same failure mode play out inside organizations deploying AI internally. Leaders move fast, treat the behavioral science and change management work as optional, and then spend years trying to repair the misalignment, burnout, attrition and broken trust that follows. The data center build-out is that failure mode written across the physical world, in water tables and power bills instead of engagement scores.

There is also something worth saying about how senior leaders manage overwhelm. A CEO in the middle of tariff chaos, board pressure, and an AI arms race does not have unlimited bandwidth for nuance. Sometimes it is easier to compare notes on the golf course, hear how another CEO is handling the same pressure, and adopt their approach rather than carve out the time to hear from all the stakeholders. I understand that impulse. However, let’s be clear, leadership is hard precisely because it asks you to listen even in the chaos, especially when the stakes are highest, even when the easier path is to follow the person next to you.

My own understanding of that obligation was formed early. I spent years doing tsunami relief coordination in Medan and Banda Aceh after the 2004 disaster. We partnered with UN agencies on one hundred and twenty-one infrastructure projects, and the work required listening across agencies, militaries, governments, languages, titles, and cultures that did not naturally align. I sat across the table from high-level US government officials and Singaporean government counterparts, from Médecins Sans Frontières doctors who had not slept in days, from a woman searching through rubble for her mother. The stakes were measured in whether people survived. Aftershocks kept arriving. Electricity was sporadic. Infrastructure was demolished. We could not afford to simply do what the person next to us was doing. We had to have a robust, real-time understanding of the problems, the risks, and the alternative approaches, because every gap in that understanding had a human cost.

The data center crisis is not a tsunami. The scale of suffering is different. The structural challenge, though, is the same: the leaders with the power to make better decisions have to be willing to slow down enough to build a complete picture, even when speed is being spun like the entire point.

Subscribe now

States stepping into the gap

The federal government has chosen to accelerate. States are choosing something more complicated, and the contrast is instructive.

Maine’s legislature passed LD 307, which would have paused construction of all new data centers larger than twenty megawatts until November 2027, the first such statewide moratorium in the nation.¹⁴ The bill’s purpose, as its sponsors described it, was to give the state time to assess the impact of the AI build-out on electricity costs, the environment, and local communities before locking in decades of infrastructure decisions. Governor Janet Mills ultimately vetoed the bill in April 2026 over a provision she believed would harm a specific economic development project in Jay, though she issued an executive order creating the Maine Data Center Coordination Council to study the same questions.¹⁵ The fight in Maine is not over. Supporters have made clear they will continue at the community level.

Virginia became the first state in the country to pass legislation directing its Department of Energy to study and recommend data center waste heat recovery practices, a meaningful signal that states are beginning to ask what the infrastructure gives back to the communities hosting it, not only what it takes.¹⁶

Share

More than three hundred data center bills were introduced across thirty states in just the first six weeks of 2026, representing a decisive pivot from the incentive-focused legislation of prior years toward oversight, cost accountability, and community protection.¹⁷ Twenty-seven states are advancing requirements that data centers pay for the grid capacity they demand rather than shifting those costs onto residential ratepayers.¹⁸ At least a dozen states are considering moratoriums of their own.¹⁹

Finland, Singapore, Norway, and other countries are demonstrating that it is possible to grow digital infrastructure without destroying people’s homes, depleting their water supplies, or making their energy unaffordable. We need to find that better way here in the United States, and the signal from the current federal administration, which has prioritized speed over safeguards on this issue as on so many others, is that they are sprinting full speed ahead in the wrong direction. This work will have to come from the states, from communities, and from the companies and boards willing to hold a longer, more humane view.

The companies proving it can be done well

The argument that responsible development requires sacrificing speed or scale is not supported by the evidence. The following companies are competing, winning, and building well simultaneously.

Green Mountain (Norway): Green Mountain built its flagship data center inside a former NATO ammunition bunker carved a hundred meters into the mountain near Stavanger, on the island of Rennesøy.²⁰ The rock provides natural insulation and security. Cooling comes from fjord water drawn at a constant eight degrees Celsius, running in a closed loop that requires no evaporation and returns the water to the source. The facility runs on one hundred percent renewable hydropower and has achieved a Power Usage Effectiveness rating as low as 1.2, meaning very little energy is wasted.²¹ Norway’s largest bank, DNB, trusts its primary IT operations to this mountain. The model suggests a different way of asking the siting question: put the infrastructure where the environment works with you, not where you have to fight it.

Subscribe now

Fortum and Microsoft (Finland): In Espoo and neighboring Finnish cities, Fortum partnered to capture waste heat from data centers and distribute it through district heating networks. The goal is for recovered heat to cover a meaningful share of district heating demand across multiple cities.²² The heat has to go somewhere, and the question is whether it goes into the atmosphere or into someone’s home in winter.

Evolution Data Centres (Singapore): Operating in one of the hottest and most humid climates in the world, (I lived there 10 years and loved it) Evolution built fully air-cooled, closed-loop systems that use no evaporative water at all.²³ The company is demonstrating that the most challenging climate for data center cooling is not an insurmountable obstacle when the engineering commitment exists. Singapore has always been the place that overcame all odds to get it done.

Digital Realty (Singapore): At a facility in Singapore, Digital Realty deployed an electrolytic process that allows the same water to be reused three times as many times before discharge, dramatically reducing consumption without replacing the cooling infrastructure.²⁴

Submer (Barcelona): Submer submerges servers entirely in a non-conductive liquid, eliminating air-cooling infrastructure, reducing both energy and water use, and supporting higher compute density in smaller physical footprints.²⁵ The approach is particularly relevant for AI workloads that generate concentrated heat.

Crusoe: Crusoe builds AI data center infrastructure energy-first, pairing high-density compute with efficient liquid cooling and low-carbon power from the start, rather than bolting sustainability requirements onto designs built for a different era.²⁶ Crusoe also designs with impact in mind, from the beginning. They integrate in communities where Crusoe works. Crusoe partnered in Arvada, Colorado for a river clean-up, in Sunnyvale, CA for strawberry planting and Reykjavík, Iceland for tree planting with conservation efforts.

Governments that chose to protect their people

Singapore did not leave this question to chance. From 2019 to 2022, the government maintained a moratorium on large new data center approvals specifically to rethink the policy framework and reset sustainability requirements before allowing further expansion.²⁷ It then launched a Green Data Centre Roadmap with measurable targets, developed a tropical data center standard that cuts IT energy use by at least thirty percent, and is introducing its Digital Infrastructure Act in Parliament to codify these requirements in law.²⁸ Operators must now source at least fifty percent of power from approved green energy pathways, achieve efficiency targets at full load, and meet stringent standards to access new capacity.²⁹ Singapore’s constraints push innovation. Its standards are already beginning to influence policy development across the region.

The European Union requires data centers to report their power and water efficiency metrics rather than operating in the dark, creating the accountability that voluntary pledges cannot provide.³⁰

These governments did not stop digital infrastructure from growing. They decided that growth would have to earn its place, with guardrails, ethics and strategic planning that includes planet and people, not just profit.

Share

The redwoods, and the leadership this moment asks for

I have lived among the redwoods for years now, and they have something important to teach about this moment. A redwood does not stand alone. Beneath the soil, its roots interlace with the roots of every tree surrounding it, sharing water, sharing nutrients, holding each other upright through storms that would topple any single tree on its own. They survive California fires, droughts, and earthquakes not because they are harder than the forces working against them, but because their strength lives underground, in a foundation of mutual support invisible from the surface. The answer, in the redwoods, is always in the roots.

We are built the same way, whether we design our systems to honor it or not. The chip I held in my hands connects a family in Morgan County, Georgia, to a shareholder in a boardroom, to an engineer in Singapore, to a grandmother watching her power bill in Gilroy. The only question is whether we build and lead as though that web exists.

I have spent my career learning that it does, in the hardest possible classrooms. What I carried out of the tsunami response is the same thing I believe about this moment: the people with the most power in the room cannot afford to listen only to each other. A fully informed plan, built from the widest possible range of stakeholders and perspectives, is not an obstacle to speed. It is the only way to avoid the kind of casualties that take years to repair.

In just 21 days, the US is approaching the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The founders declared independence as a beginning, not an end. What this moment asks of us is something harder and more durable than independence: interdependence. Our land, our water, our power grid, our communities, and our future are not separable. They are rooted together, as the redwoods are rooted together, and they stand or fall as one.

Business can be a force for good. Governments exist, in part, to be the check and balance on private power. Corporations carry a social responsibility that does not end at their property line. We do not have to choose profit over people and planet. Green Mountain, Fortum, Evolution, Digital Realty, Submer, Crusoe, Singapore, Finland, Virginia, and the families organizing in Maine and Gilroy are all pointing in the same direction. They are showing us that the better way is not theoretical. It is essential.

The heat has to go somewhere. Let us decide together that it goes into warmth, not waste.

Share

Take action today by contacting your government representative, sharing this article with someone who doesn't already agree with you, following the recent work of Erin Brockovich on data centers, and joining or supporting a local land use or utility watchdog organization in your community. The people winning on this issue are the ones showing up where decisions actually get made.

Lori Adams-Brown is a global human capital strategist who has worked in Silicon Valley-based Fortune 100 AI hardware and hyperscaler data center infrastructure and is the founder of Brava Global Advisory, advising boards and C-suites on leading transformation that is both fast and human. She has led and built leadership programs across six continents in six languages, coordinated post-tsunami relief operations with UN agencies in Banda Aceh and Medan, Indonesia, serves on the board of Justice Revival as it works to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, and hosts the podcast A World of Difference, which reaches listeners in more than one hundred countries.

Subscribe now

If this kind of thinking is useful to you, subscribe to get future essays delivered directly. Paid subscribers get extended analysis, and invitations to monthly live conversations.

Sources

1. Gilroy Data Center, CEQA filing, California Governor’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation: https://ceqanet.lci.ca.gov/2022110127

2. “Residents raise concerns over new data center in Gilroy,” Gilroy Dispatch, January 15, 2026: https://gilroydispatch.com/residents-raise-concerns-over-new-data-center-in-gilroy/

3. “Gilroy community fights against Amazon from constructing data center,” KRON4, February 27, 2026: https://www.kron4.com/news/technology-ai/gilroy-community-fights-against-amazon-from-constructing-data-center/

4. “Gilroy residents push back on Amazon data center project,” NBC Bay Area: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/gilroy-amazon-data-center/4091984/

5. “We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town,” More Perfect Union documentary transcript:

More Perfect Union

We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town

Video by Dan Lieberman and Ian McKenna…

Listen now

11 days ago · 2589 likes · 1 comment · More Perfect Union

1. “AOC holds jar of brown water at EPA hearing,” Yahoo Finance, May 2026: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/aoc-holds-jar-brown-water-151500899.html

2. “AOC Demands EPA Probe After Residents Near Meta Data Center Complain of Murky Drinking Water,” Yahoo News: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/aoc-demands-epa-probe-residents-163137166.html

3. “How PG&E Rate Changes Impact Customers,” Ava Energy, January 2026: https://avaenergy.org/insight/pge-rate-changes-explained/

4. “PG&E’s 6th Rate Increase in 12 Months Approved for January 2025,” Citadel RS Blog: https://blog.citadelrs.com/pge-5th-and-6th-rate-increase-2024-and-2025

5. “Data center growth has helped PG&E cut rates 11% since 2024, CEO says,” Utility Dive, February 2026: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/data-center-growth-has-helped-pge-cut-rates-11-since-2024-ceo-says/812230/

6. “We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town,” More Perfect Union:

More Perfect Union

We Took AOC to a Deep Red Data Center Town

Video by Dan Lieberman and Ian McKenna…

Listen now

11 days ago · 2589 likes · 1 comment · More Perfect Union

1. “SpaceX files for million satellite orbital AI data center megaconstellation,” Data Center Dynamics, May 2026: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/spacex-files-for-million-satellite-orbital-ai-data-center-megaconstellation/

2. “Science & Tech Spotlight: Data Centers in Space,” US Government Accountability Office, April 28, 2026: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109012

3. “Maine Presses Pause on Large Data Centers,” Inside Climate News, April 15, 2026: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15042026/maine-data-center-moratorium/

4. “Gov. Mills vetoes landmark data center ban,” Maine Morning Star, April 24–29, 2026: https://mainemorningstar.com/2026/04/24/gov-mills-vetoes-landmark-data-center-ban/

5. “Turning a Byproduct Into a Community Asset,” ReImagine Appalachia, March 2026: https://reimagineappalachia.org/turning-a-byproduct-into-a-community-asset-why-data-center-waste-heat-matters/

6. “State Regulation of Data Centers in 2026,” ArentFox Schiff, April 2026: https://www.afslaw.com/perspectives/alerts/state-regulation-data-centers-2026-shifting-landscape

7. “State Data Center Laws vs. Federal AI Push: 2026 Tracker,” MultiState, May 2026: https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/4/14/federal-ai-data-center-policy-meets-resistance-from-state-lawmakers

8. “State Data Center Legislation in 2026 Tackles Energy and Tax Issues,” MultiState, March 2026: https://www.multistate.us/insider/2026/2/20/state-data-center-legislation-in-2026-tackles-energy-and-tax-issues

9. “In Norway, Fjord Keeps Financial Data Cool,” Data Center Knowledge: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/investing/in-norway-fjord-keeps-financial-data-cool

10. “Green Mountain Data Center,” Conyx Cloud Solutions: https://conyxcloud.com/2025/02/03/green-mountain-data-center-norway-a-model-of-sustainable-data-centers/

11. “How Companies Are Repurposing Surplus Heat From Data Centers,” Inc., September 2025: https://www.inc.com/chris-stokel-walker/recovering-waste-heat-from-data-centers/91244674

12. “How are Companies Pioneering Data Centre Zero Water Cooling?” Sustainability Magazine, July 2025: https://sustainabilitymag.com/news/how-are-companies-pioneering-data-centre-zero-water-cooling

13. Ibid.

14. “Five Startups Reducing Data Center Water Consumption,” Net Zero Insights, November 2025: https://netzeroinsights.com/resources/startups-reducing-data-center-water-consumption/

15. Ibid.

16. “Singapore’s data centre expansion: Jurong Island and the next phase,” Reed Smith, February 2026: https://www.reedsmith.com/articles/singapores-data-centre-expansion-jurong-island-sustainable-growth/

17. “The Future of Data Centres in Singapore,” Addleshaw Goddard, November 2025: https://www.addleshawgoddard.com/en/insights/insights-briefings/2025/real-estate/future-data-centres-singapore/

18. “Singapore’s Green Data Centre Gamble,” Introl Blog, January 2026: https://introl.com/blog/singapore-green-data-center-mandate-dc-cfa2-2026

19. “Data Center Legislative Trends,” Encino Environmental Services, April 2026: https://encinoenviron.com/data-center-legislative-trends/

Reese Witherspoon posted about AI and women last week. The internet came for her.

She said women’s jobs are three times more likely to be automated by AI, yet women are using AI at a rate 25% lower than men. Her point was simple: don’t get left behind. The response was swift and sharp. She was accused of being paid by AI companies. She was called naive. She was told to start her education with data centers.

She responded with grace, clarifying she was “just a curious human,” acknowledged the concerns were valid, and kept going.

Here’s what I think: Reese was right that the gap is real. The critics were right that the concerns are legitimate. The algorithm that turned both into a fight was the only winner in that exchange.

I want to have a different conversation.

Subscribe now

You Are Already Using AI

Before we get into the legitimate fear, let’s establish something important. If you have used Siri to set a timer, asked Netflix what to watch next, clicked on a product Amazon suggested, let Spotify build you a playlist, or followed Google Maps instead of a paper map, you have used AI. These are not necessarily the scary science fiction kind. They are the kind that has quietly woven itself into the fabric of daily life for the past decade, with very little public debate and almost no governance conversation.

That matters, because the question is no longer whether we interact with AI. We already do. The question is which AI, how, and who decided how it works.

That distinction is where the real conversation begins.

Subscribe now

Not all AI is created equal. The algorithm that recommends your next show is not the same as the generative AI that writes text, creates images, produces legal summaries, or makes hiring decisions. Algorithmic AI has been operating in the background of our lives for years, mostly invisible, mostly accepted. Generative AI, the kind that produces original content on demand, is newer, faster, less understood, and significantly more disruptive to the industries, jobs, and creative ecosystems that many people have built their lives around.

The backlash to Reese was not really about Siri. It was about ChatGPT scraping artists’ work without consent. Many of us have stopped using ChatGPT and Open AI all together (including me last year for it’s lack of guardrails and ethics and due to the CEO’s actions and disturbing statements about it’s usage.) The pushback to Reese was about writers watching their livelihoods get automated. It was about a technology moving faster than the ethical frameworks we need to contain it. That’s a legitimate grievance, and it deserves a real answer, not a dismissal.

Subscribe now

The Fears Are Not Irrational. They Are Structural.

A Harvard Business School meta-analysis covering 143,000 individuals across 25 countries found women had 22% lower odds of using generative AI than men. This article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review shows that the standard narrative frames this as a confidence problem, a skill gap, a reluctance to experiment.

In what I am seeing among women, that framing is wrong.

As workplace AI adoption strategist Mara Bolis told Fortune: “This is not a lack of competence. This is discernment, in terms of how we want our economies and our societies to evolve.” Fortune

The women I talk with, and I have these conversations constantly, across Silicon Valley, across the globe, are not hesitating because they don’t understand the technology. Many of them are building with it. I have spent almost three years working inside a hyperscale AI hardware company, the kind that builds and ships the data servers that power the models everyone is arguing about on the internet. I have also built an AI coaching agent inside an enterprise environment and run A/B tests against vendor tools before global rollouts. I understand what’s under the hood.

I also still hear the concerns.

Women are thinking about their kids, who may not have entry-level jobs to step into by the time they’re ready. They are thinking about data centers, water consumption, and climate impact. They are thinking about the communities where those data centers land. My electricity bill here in the San Jose/Los Gatos area has already gone up. That is not a hypothetical cost. It is landing on real families right now when prices on gas and seemingly everything else is going up.

Women are often thinking about the fact that trust has not been built yet on ethics and guardrails. Deloitte research shows that despite women rapidly closing the adoption gap, women express less trust than men that AI providers will keep their data secure. Deloitte Insights

Given that women experience higher rates of tech-facilitated harassment and that AI systems have repeatedly demonstrated bias against women and people of color, that trust deficit is earned, not irrational.

A systemic review of gender and AI adoption found women consistently cite a lack of transparency and the opaque nature of AI tools as barriers to trust. Stanford Social Innovation Review

That is not a confidence gap. That is wisdom operating at a systems level.

Subscribe now

The Ship Has Sailed. The Question Is Who Steers It.

Here’s the harder truth.

Not using the internet was a choice people made in 1995. Driving with a paper map instead of GPS is still technically an option today. Writing letters instead of email is romantic and possible. However, none of those choices changed how the internet was built, how GPS data was collected, or how email became the infrastructure of global commerce. The technology moved forward with or without the holdouts, and the people who shaped it were the ones in the room.

AI is not coming. It is here. Like every major technological shift before it, the people who shape its values, its guardrails, its governance, and its applications will be the people who show up.

I was at Human X conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago and stood just 4 feet away from the CEO of Chief Alison Moore, just after she had spoken on stage, when she spoke to a room full of executive women at a Chief hosted happy hour. She shared the results of a survey that found that 80% of women leaders are already playing an active strategic role in their organization’s AI efforts, and 83% believe that “being cautious about AI adoption is a sign of good leadership, not resistance to technology.” Fortune

The caution is not the problem. The absence from the decision-making table is.

Subscribe now

Reasons to Be Hopeful

The data has some genuinely good news in it.

Women’s generative AI adoption in the US tripled in a single year, outpacing men’s rate of growth by nearly 50%. Deloitte Insights

Women are not sitting out. They are approaching this with more deliberation than their male counterparts, and research from rapidly digitizing workplaces shows that when women do engage with AI, they report lower levels of anxiety and demonstrate higher adaptability in digital transformation. Sheai

Among senior women in technical roles, AI adoption actually leads their male counterparts by 12 to 16%. Women in Tech

The gap is not about capability or ambition. It is about access, inclusion in pilots, and whose experimentation gets rewarded versus scrutinized.

Female-founded startups in Europe raised 5.76 billion euros in 2024, with 77% of female founders now using AI in their businesses. Sheai

Women are not watching this revolution from the sidelines. They are building inside it.

When women are in the room, the outcomes are measurably better. As IMD research notes: if underrepresented communities aren’t using AI at the same rate, they don’t just miss out on productivity gains. Their insights and lived experiences won’t be reflected in the next generation of AI systems. IMD

Diverse builders produce less biased tools. That is not a soft benefit. That is a system-level risk mitigation. This is something I believe strongly. While it’s being built, we need half the world represented in building something that is for us, not just for the men.

We have seen what happens when you write a constitution that does not in fact “remember the ladies,” even when Abigail Adams asked John to do this one simple thing in a room full of men. Even with an ERA amendment that was conceived 100 years ago and counting, we still can’t somehow seem to enshrine this in the constitution.

Waiting to join later does not work when a foundation is being laid. The time is now. We need women at the table, building, shaping, adding guardrails, drafting global policies, inserting ethics, and questioning the direction of where AI is allowed to go. We need women in the driver’s seat, not the backseat.

Subscribe now

Where We Need to Push Harder

Hope is not enough without accountability. Here is where I think the pressure needs to go.

Women need to be at the AI policy tables. Not as consultants invited to comment after the decisions have been made. As decision-makers who shape what gets built, how it gets deployed, and what happens when it goes wrong.

Women need to be on the boards overseeing AI governance. Women x AI’s AI Board Governance Compass makes clear that AI governance is now a fiduciary responsibility, not a technology question, and that oversight cannot remain informal. WOMEN x AI

I co-wrote an article on AI governance for boards with my friend Mary Lee Sharp that was just published in the Silicon Valley Director’s Exchange. Please send this article to anyone who is on a board or wants to be on a board, and yes, women, I urge you to consider being on one to help shape what is coming. Men, it’s time to stop just looking to your golf buddies when you are looking for someone to join your board. We all have a role to play in shaping what we will hand to our future grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Read more

Hero culture is not devotion. It is a governance failure that predators exploit.

I went live on Substack on Thursday because I could not sit with this story quietly, after the news broke on Wednesday with Dolores Huerta’s statement and the New York Times article about Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas and Cesar Chavez.

If you missed it, I am uploading the video from the first part of the Live here.

Full transparency: I recorded this sitting in my car in the Bay Area on a day with a heat advisory, and my iPhone overheated before I could finish. The recording cut off before the end, though I did share the full conversation live with everyone who joined in real time. So what you are getting here is the first portion. The ideas are all there. The ending just got swallowed by the California sun. Sometimes the conditions are imperfect and you speak anyway. That felt fitting, given what this conversation is about.

What happened

On Wednesday, the New York Times published a multi-year investigation revealing that César Chávez, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers and one of the most celebrated civil rights leaders in American history, sexually abused girls and women over the course of decades. Two women told the Times that Chávez began abusing them when they were 12 and 13 years old. One described being raped at 15 during a famous UFW march across California.

Then Dolores Huerta spoke.

I have been fortunate to develop a deep relationship with these children, who are now close to my other children, their siblings. But even then, no one knew the full truth about how they were conceived until just a few weeks ago.

Dolores said, “I carried this secret for as long as I did because building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work. The formation of a union was the only vehicle to accomplish and secure those rights and I wasn’t going to let Cesar or anyone else get in the way. I channeled everything I had into advocating on behalf of millions of farmworkers and others who were suffering and deserved equal rights.”

Read Dolores’s full statement here.

She is nearly 96 years old. She kept that secret because she believed the truth would destroy the movement she had given her life to build.

“I have never identified myself as a victim,” she wrote, “but I now understand that I am a survivor, of violence, of sexual abuse, of domineering men who saw me, and other women, as property, or things to control.”

I read that line several times before I could move on.

Share

The calculation no one talks about

Here is what I want to sit with, and what I explored in the Live.

Dolores Huerta is not a woman who lacked courage. She has been beaten, arrested, and hospitalized in the course of her activism. She stood on picket lines when doing so could get you killed. She negotiated with growers and politicians who did not want her in the room. She outlasted nearly every one of her contemporaries.

She was not silent because she was weak. She was silent because she is strong and she is smart, and she did the math.

She looked at the movement she helped create. She looked at the millions of farmworkers whose lives had improved because that movement existed. She looked at the man whose name and face and legacy held it all together, and she decided that her truth was a cost the mission could not absorb. She knew how this would go decades ago to say this publicly.

That calculation is the thing I cannot stop thinking about. Because it is not unique to Dolores Huerta. It is happening right now, in organizations and movements and institutions all over the world. Someone who has been harmed by a powerful person is sitting quietly, doing the same math, deciding that the mission matters more than their own pain. Deciding that they will likely not be believed, not next to a hero everyone worships because he is saving people. If they do believe her, it will likely bring the whole movement down, because he has built it around himself.

Predators know this. They count on it.

Subscribe now

The mechanism

This is the part where I put my organizational transformation lens on, because that is how I make sense of the world.

Predators do not just seek positions of power. They seek positions of moral power. They seek roles where they are not merely influential, but where they are perceived as righteous. The pastor. The humanitarian. The movement leader. The nonprofit founder. The policeman. The politician. The visionary CEO who says all the right things about equity and justice.

They seek these positions because moral authority is the hardest kind to challenge. When you accuse a powerful executive of misconduct, people may believe you. When you accuse a man who has murals on walls, a holiday named after him, and is seen as a savior to an entire community, you are not just challenging a person. You are challenging everyone who has built their identity around what that person represents.

The mission becomes the mask. The more noble the cause, the more impenetrable the protection.

I have spent over twenty years working in high-stakes organizational environments across three continents. I have worked in UN disaster relief coordination where the urgency of saving lives made it feel impossible to question the people in charge of global NGOs, faith-based nonprofits and UN agencies. I have worked in corporate environments where a founder’s vision was treated as sacred text. I have sat in rooms where the most dangerous sentence was, “We cannot afford to lose this person right now.”

I know this pattern. I have watched it operate in real time. The mechanism is always the same. A leader becomes synonymous with the mission. Loyalty to the leader becomes indistinguishable from loyalty to the cause, and anyone who threatens the leader’s image is recast as a threat to everything the community holds dear.

The survivors are not silenced only by the abuser. They are silenced by everyone who loves what the abuser built.

Subscribe now

Hero culture is a governance failure

I want to be very direct about this, because I think we avoid saying it plainly.

Hero culture, the elevation of a single leader to the status of icon, of legend, of untouchable symbol, is not devotion. It is a structural vulnerability. It is a governance failure dressed up as admiration.

When we build organizations around a personality instead of a set of principles, we create environments where accountability cannot function. It does not matter how many ethics policies you have on paper. If the emotional architecture of the organization is built around one person’s identity, those policies are decoration.

César Chávez had streets named after him, and schools, parks like the one near me in downtown San Jose, a national holiday. This is not a man who was going to be challenged by an anonymous reporting hotline.

I see versions of this in corporate life constantly. The founder who “is the brand.” The CEO whose departure would tank the stock price. The nonprofit executive director whose personal story is the fundraising engine. The megachurch pastor who has been credited with saving souls and saving marriages. When the person and the institution are fused, accountability becomes existential. Holding the leader to account feels like destroying the organization. So people don’t. They rationalize. They minimize. They look the other way. They ask the survivor to do the same. It’s an inconvenient truth.

Subscribe now

What leaders and boards need to ask themselves

If you sit on a board of directors, I want you to sit with these questions.

Could your organization survive the removal of its most visible, most celebrated leader tomorrow? I don’t mean just financially. I mean emotionally, structurally. Could the mission continue without the persona?

If the answer is no, you do not have an organization. You have a cult of personality with a tax-exempt status.

Does your governance structure allow a junior staff member, a young woman volunteer, or a program participant to report concerns about a senior leader and be believed? Does it allow her more than just to “be heard,” but for her to be believed, be protected? Does your system give her an actual opportunity to be supported through a process that does not require her to prove her value to the mission before her pain is taken seriously? Does it allow someone to have psychological safety to share their story of what happened, to pushback on your image of who this leader is that may be a different side with others than he or she shows to you?

Is your board willing to investigate its own leader, not just when evidence is overwhelming, but when something feels wrong and no one can quite articulate why? Because that is when the investigation matters most. After sixty years of evidence, everyone is willing to act. The question is whether you would have acted after sixty days.

Subscribe now

Honoring the movement by telling the truth

One of the most striking things about Dolores Huerta’s statement is how carefully she separates the mission from the man.

She wrote that Chávez’s actions do not diminish the permanent improvements achieved for farmworkers with the help of thousands of people. She urged continued engagement, advocacy, and activism.

This is the discernment we need. A movement can be profoundly important, and its leader can be a predator. These are not contradictions. They are the reality of how power operates in human systems.

The farmworker movement was never one man. It was thousands of organizers, volunteers, families, and communities who put their bodies on the line for dignity and fair treatment. Honoring that movement does not require protecting the man who used it as a shield. It requires the opposite. It requires the courage to say that the people the mission was built to serve matter more than the legacy of any individual leader, and the reality is, he didn’t build this alone. Dolores and other leaders were key in this movement and care deeply about the mission.

Subscribe now

Why I went live

I went live because I have long admired Dolores Huerta and her strength to lead here in California throughout the last many decades, and because when a survivor speaks up with great risk and personal cost, there will be backlash. I was already seeing many victim-blaming her, as we often see in cases of sexual assault, and even when files produce evidence with multiple women sharing their stories of abuse, they get blamed and their stories get minimized.

Dolores isn’t the only survivor who spoke out. The investigation quotes Ana Murguia, who was 13 when César Chávez was 45 and he sexually assaulted her in his office on his yoga mat he used for meditation. Debra Rojas was 12 when Chávez first groped her and at 15 he raped her at a motel during a weeks long march through California. A winter night in 1966 in Delano, CA, Dolores Huerta told the New York Times that Chávez drove her out to a secluded grape field, parked and raped her inside the vehicle. Dolores, who was 36 at the time, said she chose not to report the assault to the police because of their hostility toward the movement, and she feared that no one within the union would believe her. She is probably right. They likely wouldn’t have, in 1966, nor would they have believed Ana or Debra when they were being abused by Chávez between 1972 to 1977.

This story is not just about Dolores Huerta, Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas and the likely other women and girls that César Chávez abused. It is about every organization, every board, every leadership structure that makes it easier to protect a leader than to protect the people. It is about the architecture of silence. It is about what we are willing to overlook when the mission feels too important to risk. No amount or type of abuse by a leader of an organization or a movement worth protecting a perpetrator while victims continue to be harmed in ways that will cause them years of trauma.

During Women’s History Month, we are celebrating trailblazers and barrier breakers. Dolores Huerta is both of those things. She changed the trajectory of labor rights in this country. She also carried a trauma for sixty years because she believed the cause was bigger than her pain. I wish the system had not asked her to do that. She deserved to be cared for, protected, the chance to heal, to be believed.

Celebrating women’s history means reckoning with what it has cost women to make that history, not just the public battles, but the private ones. It’s about the secrets kept, the calculations made, and the silence endured in service of something larger.

Dolores Huerta said her silence ends here. The woman who gave us the phrase we say in our marches here in California, “Sí se puede,” which Obama asked her if he could use for his own Presidential campaign, “Yes we can.” She now can too.

The least we can do is listen. The most we can do is build organizations where that kind of silence is never required in the first place.

Subscribe now

I write about organizational accountability, hero culture, and the leadership structures that either enable or prevent abuse of power. I also write about how to build workplaces where everyone thrives, about innovative, global leadership development in the AI era and how travel and living abroad has taught me that leadership is contextual across cultures. If this resonates, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next.

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, the Dolores Huerta Foundation has compiled a list of support resources at doloreshuerta.org.

Share A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

Leave a comment

There is a moment in every performance when the house lights go down and the audience holds its breath. The performer is not yet on stage, but everyone knows something is about to happen. That pause, right before the curtain rises, is where the real decision is made, not what you will perform. Who you will be when you step into the light.

I have spent more than twenty years in that pause.

I have been the person in the room translating between a UN delegation and local leaders in post-tsunami Indonesia, trying to get a coordination effort unstuck before more people suffered from the gap between good intentions and cultural misunderstanding. I have been the person redesigning leadership development programs for a Ministry of Education in a civil conflict zone, training teachers who would go back to classrooms where some of their students had become soldiers in a fight for freedom. I have been the person sitting across from Fortune 100 executives in Silicon Valley, helping them understand why their AI transformation was technically flawless and culturally failing.

Subscribe now

In every one of those rooms, I was doing the same work: helping leaders see what they could not see on their own. I was seeing the cultural blind spots, the unspoken dynamics, and the gap between the strategy on the whiteboard and the reality of how people actually communicate, decide, and trust each other across difference.

I just never had a name for it.

Now I do. It is called Brava Global Advisory.

Why now

People have asked me this. The honest answer is that I ran out of reasons to wait.

I have six languages. I have lived on three continents, and worked across six. I have coordinated disaster relief, built train-the-trainer programs in high-security conflict zones, deployed AI-enabled coaching to more than 2,000 employees at a Fortune 100 company, and hosted a podcast that has reached 153,000 downloads in over 100 countries. I have advised organizations through restructurings, cultural transformations, and the kind of messy, human, complicated change that no slide deck can capture.

I kept waiting for the “right time” to build my own firm. The right time was always later, after one more role, after one more credential, after one more proof point.

Then I looked at my resume and realized I was waiting for permission that nobody was going to give me. I had to give it to myself.

Brava is a Spanish and Italian exclamation. It is what an audience shouts when a woman delivers a performance so powerful that silence is not an option. It means bold. It means fierce. It means “she showed up and she did not hold back.” It means that anger at what is broken, what is being missed, at a system that is failing fuels her to lead the change to improve is. It is leadership is brave, bold and boundless.

That is what this firm is.

Subscribe now

What Brava does

Brava Global Advisory partners with senior leaders and organizations navigating transformation across cultures, complexity, and AI. We work at the intersection that most advisory firms avoid: the place where human dynamics, cultural context, and technological change all collide.

Most transformation efforts fail, not because the strategy is wrong, but because the culture underneath the strategy was never addressed. The incentives did not change. The communication patterns did not change. The way people make decisions and build trust across difference did not change. I have seen this pattern on every continent I have worked on, and most starkly in global enterprise headquartered in corporate America.

That is why I developed the VOICE Framework™: Vision and Values Alignment, Openness to Difference, Iterative Innovation Through Psychological Safety, Culturally Fluent Courageous Communication, and Embodied Leadership. Every letter represents a human capability that AI cannot replicate and that most organizational restructuring ignores entirely. Human-centeredness looks different across the languages, countries and industries where I’ve worked. One thing is foundational, however, human-centered leadership is the global edge that separates organizations that grow and those that miss out.

Brava brings that framework to the leaders who need it most: the ones in the middle of transformation who can feel that something is off but cannot name what it is. It is usually not the strategy. It is the culture.

Subscribe now

The backstory nobody expected

I built Brava’s first website at an AI hackathon on International Women’s Day.

Yes, really.

I walked into a room full of developers and founders, some of them who were born and raised in Silicon Valley, and I built a fully functioning website for a global advisory firm in a single day using AI tools I had never touched before that morning. I did not write a single line of code. (Thank you Lovable, Anthropic and Stripe for making this day free for women to vibe code on this day.)

I tell this story not because the technology was remarkable (it was), but because of what it revealed. The technology did not know what Brava should say. It did not know who I was building it for. It did not know why cultural fluency matters more than a polished org chart. I did.

That is the future of leadership in the age of AI. It is not about mastering every tool. It is about knowing what only you can bring, then using every tool available (preferably those who prioritize guardrails and ethics- I’ve been team Claude for months now because of this) to amplify it. That is what I call AI fluency, and it is the skill that separates leaders who thrive in this era from leaders who get left behind.

What this means for you

If you lead an organization navigating global complexity, AI adoption, or cultural transformation, Brava was built for you, not to hand you a framework from outside your reality, but to sit inside the complexity with you and help you see what you cannot see on your own.

If you are a woman in leadership who has been told, subtly or overtly, that your directness needs softening, that your global perspective is “too much” for the room, that your ambition should be performed more quietly, Brava was built as proof that none of that is true.

If you are a man or a woman who believes that the most competitive advantage any organization has is its people, not its technology, not its strategy deck, but the humans inside the system and the culture that either empowers or constrains them, then you are already part of what we are building.

The curtain is up. Brava is live at https://bravaglobaladvisorycom.lovable.app (soon to be moving to bravaglobaladvisory.com).

I would love to hear from you.

What is the transformation challenge keeping you up at night? Reply to this email or leave a comment. I read every one.

Leave a comment

Where bold leadership meets global intelligence.

Lori

Subscribe now

Lori Adams-Brown is the founder of Brava Global Advisory, a global leadership and organizational transformation advisory firm. She advises senior leaders navigating AI adoption, cultural complexity, and organizational change. She hosts “A World of Difference,” a leadership podcast with 153,000+ downloads reaching 100+ countries, and has served on the advisory board of the Center for Creative Leadership, and the boards of How Women Lead and Justice Revival. She holds an M.A. in Intercultural Studies and speaks six languages.

Share A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

The servers are crashing. The contracts are being canceled, and I’ve never been more confident in my AI tool of choice.

Claude went down this morning. Not because of a technical failure, but because too many people flooded in at once, and an App Store surge that pushed it past ChatGPT.

All of it happened in the same week that Anthropic’s CEO looked the Pentagon in the eye and said he wouldn’t move.

I want to talk about why that matters, not just as a tech story, but as a leadership story, a global one.

Subscribe now

The Red Lines

I’ve been using Claude as my preferred AI LLM for a long time. I made the choice deliberately, and I’ve made it again every day since. It’s not because it’s the flashiest option. It’s because it’s the most principled one.

Anthropic built two non-negotiable limits into their contracts with the U.S. military:

🛑 No mass surveillance of Americans.

🛑 No fully autonomous weapons.

Their reasoning wasn’t ideological performance. It was grounded and practical: AI systems today are not reliable enough to make life-and-death targeting decisions without human oversight. Remove the human from that loop, and you’re not just taking a risk, you’re transferring a moral responsibility that technology cannot yet bear.

The Pentagon wanted those limits removed. They wanted access to Claude for “any lawful purpose” language that Anthropic argued was deliberately vague enough to allow exactly what they were trying to prevent. They threatened to cancel a $200 million contract. They called Amodei a liar with a “God complex.” (I’m seeing some projection here. Is it just me?) They invoked a Cold War-era law. They labeled Anthropic, a San Francisco startup, a U.S. based company, a “supply chain risk,” a designation previously reserved for foreign adversaries.

Amodei still didn’t move.

In his CBS News interview just after the contract was cut, Amodei said: “Everything we have done has been for the sake of this country.” Then, his mic drop moment we’ve been longing for Silicon Valley tech CEOs to utter: “Disagreeing with the government is the most American thing in the world.”

I’ve been sitting with that sentence since Amodei said it on Saturday, as I too, have been one of the executive leaders working in AI here in Silicon Valley longing to hear one of our CEOs stand up, speak up, and do the right thing at the right time, instead of capitulate to authoritarianism.

Good leaders welcome push back, and even build a personal board of advisors with different perspectives because global leadership requires it. No one has all the knowledge they need to lead at such a high level with the fate of the human race in their hands. All leaders have blindspots, and great leaders cultivate psychological safety to have their plans, their ideas, and their strategies questioned, especially by those who are closest to the problem being solved.

Insecure leaders shut down pushback and build an unquestionable armor around them to protect their ego. The world suffers at the hands of these leaders across industries from government to Silicon Valley tech.

However, the opposite is also true. Global enterprise, Silicon Valley AI startups and government institutions flourish when leaders understand that a variety of perspectives build robust decisions that stand the test of time.

What I Know About Pressure and Principle

I grew up in Venezuela in the 1980s and 90s. I watched what happens when institutions prioritize short-term survival over long-term integrity under the leadership of Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Maduro. I later coordinated disaster relief after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, worked alongside the Ministry of Education of Indonesia in civil conflict zones, and spent years helping organizations from the UN to global NGOs in crisis figure out what to hold onto and what to let go. In Singapore, advised leaders across industries from Fortune 50 companies to legal and corporate board governance in values-driven leadership where listening to a variety of perspectives around the table leads to robust decisions that affect the bottom line of business.

The leaders who came out of those moments with their credibility intact, and not all did, shared one thing. They decided in advance what they would not trade. When the moment came, they already knew the answer. It had already been decided with the values they kept front and center, like the ones I keep on my desk to remind me every day of who I am and what I stand for.

That’s what Anthropic’s public statement reveals. These red lines weren’t invented under pressure. They were embedded from the beginning. That’s not stubbornness. That’s architectural integrity.

Subscribe now

The Global Stage Is Watching

Here’s what I don’t think enough American executives understand right now: this story is being watched from Amsterdam to Singapore to Bogotá.

Global leaders, in government, in enterprise, in civil society, are in the middle of making consequential decisions about which AI tools to trust, which companies to partner with, and which frameworks to build their own AI policies around. They are watching not just what these companies build, but how they behave when it costs them something to hold the line.

This is what I call the global edge: it doesn’t go to the company with the biggest valuation or the most impressive demo. It goes to the one that demonstrated, at the moment of maximum pressure, that their values weren’t negotiable.

Subscribe now

The Market Already Knows

I predicted this surge would come, not because I’m a tech analyst, but because I’ve spent two decades watching how trust operates across cultures and organizations.

People vote with their feet, their paid subscriptions, and where they shop in stores and online. Customers do. Talent does. Partners do. Investors do.

When a company demonstrates that it will absorb a serious financial and reputational hit rather than compromise on a protection it believes is essential to human safety, people notice. They migrate toward it because in a world where so many institutions are folding under pressure, that kind of steadiness becomes rare.

Rare things become valuable.

Read more

There are moments in conversation when you can feel the weight of history pressing in. These are moments when the stories we’ve been told about “how things are” start to crack, and what’s underneath is both painful and liberating. We want to look away, but courage calls us to look deep within and process the shame and the pain. Leaders who have courage look within lead with integrity and authenticity.

This episode of A World of Difference, now the most downloaded episode of 2025, is one of those moments.

In my conversation last year with historian, author and beloved Baylor professor , we talked about something that goes far beyond church walls: how unpaid labor, silenced voices, and distorted ideas of “service” quietly shape power structures in every workplace, from faith communities to corporations, nonprofits, and global institutions.

We talked about the hidden things no one says out loud, and why that matters deeply for anyone who claims to lead with values.

Subscribe now

When “Service” Becomes Exploitation

Dr. Barr’s research focuses on the role of the pastor’s wife, but don’t be fooled. This conversation is not niche. It’s a case study in how systems normalize exploitation by wrapping it in moral language.

“Women were expected to provide enormous amounts of labor for free, and to believe that resisting it was sinful.” - Dr. Beth Allison Barr

If you replace church with organization and pastor’s wife with emotional labor carrier, the pattern becomes uncomfortably familiar.

In workplaces around the world, women, and especially women from marginalized identities, are still expected to:

• Hold emotional space for teams

• Smooth conflict without authority

• Protect leaders from consequences

• Perform “unpromotable work” quietly and consistently

All while being told this is what good team players do.

That’s not leadership.
That’s exploitation.

Subscribe now

The Human Cost of Self-Erasure

One of the most powerful threads in this episode is the psychological toll of being told, explicitly or implicitly, that your role is to disappear for the sake of harmony.

Dr. Barr describes living under constant pressure, knowing that her voice, her actions, even her presence could jeopardize her husband’s position as a pastor. That kind of stress doesn’t stay contained. It rewires people.

“Women learn to walk on eggshells, believing that their humanity itself is a liability.” - Dr. Beth Allison Barr

If you’re a leader who cares about psychological safety, this should stop you in your tracks.

Because a workplace that requires people to self-mute in order to survive is not safe, no matter how polished the values statement looks.

Share

The Patriarchal Bargain (and Why It Still Shows Up at Work)

One of the most uncomfortable, but necessary, truths Dr. Barr names is what scholars call the patriarchal bargain:

“If you support the system, you may be allowed a platform, but only if you don’t challenge the hierarchy itself.” - Dr. Beth Allison Barr

Share

Sound familiar?

We see this everywhere:

• Women promoted for reinforcing harmful norms

• Leaders rewarded for “staying in their lane”

• Diversity used as optics rather than power redistribution

This is how systems protect themselves, not through brute force, but through selective permission.

Here’s the hard part for values-based leaders: sometimes the system is upheld not just by those at the top, but by those trying to survive inside it.

That doesn’t make people bad.
It makes the system dangerous.

Subscribe now

Why This Is a Human Rights Issue

When people hear “human rights,” they often think of extreme cases such as war zones, political prisoners, global crises.

However, human rights begin much closer to home.

The right to dignity.
The right to bodily autonomy.
The right to meaningful work without exploitation.
The right to speak without fear of retaliation.

When organizations rely on unpaid labor, coerced silence, or moral pressure to extract more than they give, they are violating those rights, whether they use religious language, corporate jargon, or “family culture” to justify it.

“What if we let people do what they are actually called, and gifted, to do?”

That question isn’t theological.
It’s ethical.

Share

The Power of Human Connection (and Solidarity)

One of the most hopeful moments in this conversation is Dr. Barr’s vision of togetherness, not competition, not crumbs, not scarcity.

She names how systems pit women against one another, forcing them to fight vertically for approval instead of building power horizontally through connection.

“We were never meant to compete for scraps. We were meant to work together.” - Dr. Beth Allison Barr

This is where authentic leadership lives:

• In curiosity instead of control

• In shared power instead of hierarchy

• In honoring difference instead of managing it away

Human connection isn’t soft.
It’s strategic.
It’s deeply transformative.

Share A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

A Question for Values-Based Leaders

If you lead people, formally or informally, I want to leave you with this:

Where in your organization is silence being rewarded as virtue?
Who is paying the price for that “peace”?

Because leadership that costs people their voice, their health, or their dignity is too expensive, no matter how effective it looks on paper.

This episode isn’t just a re-listen.
It’s a mirror.

🎧 Listen to the episode: “Unpaid, Unseen, and Expected: How the Pastor’s Wife Role Replaced Women’s Ordination with Beth Allison Barr (Best of 2025)”

If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear where you’re seeing these patterns, and how you’re choosing to lead differently.

Your voice matters.
When you use it, just at Dr. Barr does, you make space for others to do the same.

Dr. Barr’s book Becoming the Pastor’s Wife became a New York Times bestseller soon after release (which was no surprise to me and many others who had read advanced copies). She is a brilliant writer and researcher with deep conviction about calling us to look with our own eyes at what history is shouting for us to hear. Her voice is making a difference.

Let’s listen, learn and lead differently.

I stayed up until 3 a.m. on January 2nd, watching the land of my childhood be bombed.

The notification came through our family text thread first- my brother’s link to a shaky video showing streaks of light over Caracas, the unmistakable sound of military aircraft, explosions illuminating the night sky. Then came footage from Maracay, practically next door to Valencia, the city where I spent my childhood in the 1980s and 90s, where I learned to dance merengue, where the air still smells like arepas being made in our kitchen in my memory.

I knew immediately what I was witnessing: US military intervention in Venezuela.

After weeks of watching American forces bomb vessels off Venezuela’s coast, officially targeting drug and oil trafficking, this escalation felt inevitable. However, nothing prepared me for the sickening vertigo of watching bombs fall on streets I once walked.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Venezuela’s Wealth

Let’s talk about what’s really at stake here.

Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, larger than Saudi Arabia’s, larger than any nation on Earth. OPEC itself was founded by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, Venezuela's Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons, who was the key figure and driving force behind the creation of OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) in 1960. Beyond petroleum, the country sits on massive deposits of gold, diamonds, and rare minerals that power the very Silicon Valley where I now live and work.

Subscribe now

President Trump, a man convicted on 34 felony counts, who has bragged about sexual assault and has had his assault of children detailed in the Epstein files, has made no secret of his transactional worldview. There’s nothing he won’t try to grab for personal gain. When he announced this intervention surrounded by identical blue-suited men at Mar-a-Lago (not a single woman present), his excitement about “getting all that money” revealed everything you need to know about American motives.

This isn’t about liberating Venezuela. It’s about exploitation.

My Impossible Contradiction

Here’s what makes this moment so excruciating: I and the majority of my Venezuelan friends and loved ones have wanted Nicolás Maduro removed from power for years.

After Hugo Chávez died of cancer and anointed Maduro as his successor, elections became increasingly fraudulent. His regime has been harsh, cruel, and absolutely corrupt, causing incalculable suffering for the Venezuelan people. The mass exodus to Colombia, Peru, Chile and throughout South America, into the United States, and Spain tells the story of a nation in crisis.

Venezuelans have been forced to make impossible choices. Families have walked through the dangerous Darién Gap, where most don’t survive and over 90% of men and women report sexual assault, simply for the hope of rebuilding their lives. Venezuelans have tried everything: voting, street protests banging pots and pans, coup attempts, organized resistance. They are completely, utterly exhausted.

Subscribe now

When María Corina Machado received the Nobel Peace Prize this year, it felt like the world was finally noticing the decades-long plight of Venezuelans. Though Machado remains in hiding, her life constantly at risk, that recognition was huge for those who have fought tirelessly for years, holding on to the last glimmer of hope.

So yes, I am dancing and I’m elated that Maduro has been removed. We have longed for this, and my friends who have stayed in Venezuela have born the brunt of this regime in ways I will never fully understand. Many, especially those in exile, are celebrating with immense hope, and that matters and deserves it’s own moment all by itself. The bully has been brought down. When you are drowning, you will welcome whatever hand comes to rescue you, and you will be so so grateful that someone finally came.

Simultaneously, though, I am also trembling in fear at what comes next. This hand that came to rescue has transformed into a hand that is grabbing what doesn’t belong to him.

Regime change is more than just a snatch in the night. It is the long, arduous work of nation building, revamping collapsed systems, and co-creating in an environment where trust takes time and cultural intelligence to build. This is where my fear lies. I have no hope in a US that pulled funding for USAID to be the savior of anyone, no matter how difficult the military feat of the nighttime raid to capture Maduro was.

How You Break International Law in One Night

The operation was textbook military execution with months of CIA infiltration and yet was executed in an ways no one expected. The U.S. capture of Nicolás Maduro, codenamed "Operation Absolute Resolve," primarily involved the Army's Delta Force and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Night Stalkers), with support from other branches like the Marines, Air Force, and Navy for air support and logistics, but Delta Force executed the ground raid, not Navy SEALs. Reports indicate Delta Force, America's premier counterterrorism unit, used advanced tactics and equipment to breach Maduro's compound and extract him and his wife, Cilia Flores, under heavy opposition. It was perfect coordination, in ways only the US military with all it’s funding can pull off. Maduro and his wife were captured just after they fled from their bed as they tried to close the door to their safe room in a scene that feels straight out of Homeland with precision, efficiency and overwhelming force. This wasn’t Hollywood. It was real life. Real lives hung in the balance, and real lives were lost.

It was also a clear violation of international law.

Congress wasn’t consulted. The UN Security Council wasn’t informed. The Geneva Convention was broken. This was a unilateral decision, Trump announcing it like the finale of a reality TV show, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praising “all the brave men” (notably, not “men and women”).

Subscribe now

All the planning went into perfect military execution. Zero planning went into the actual hard work: cultivating an environment where Venezuelans can self-govern, rebuild their economy, restore healthcare and food supply, meet basic human needs.

Instead, Trump announced the US will run Venezuela’s government. The irony is not lost on me. We have hungry children in our own nation. Pointing fingers elsewhere has long been our specialty here.

It was notable that Trump didn’t mention Maria Corina Machado, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, in his press conference until asked by a reporter. She was barred from running for President previously, but was instrumental in helping get Edmundo González elected, and although Edmundo won by a landslide, Maduro never stepped down. The US had recognized Edmundo as the legitimate President previously, but now Trump is indicating that the US is “running” Venezuela. Trump stated that Machado didn’t have enough support, which is also ironic, considering Trump’s own approval rating was recently only 36% and has been as low as 29%.

The Venezuela I Carry in My Bones

Let me tell you about the country being “liberated.”

Venezuela is a place of impossible beauty. When I close my eyes and imagine my happy place, I’m at Playuelita beach on my favorite side Playuela island off the coast near Puerto Cabello, where my family would drive to from Valencia during my childhood and well into adulthood, until safety made it impossible.

This is a land of extremes: Morrocoy national park of islands in the Caribbean, desert dunes and high Andes mountains, the world’s longest cable car ride (where I got altitude sickness as a child in the snow on the peak of Pico Bolívar), and Angel Falls, the world’s tallest waterfall, plunging through the Amazon rainforest.

What I carry deepest in my fond memories are the people: the culture, the food, the laughter, the dancing, the shared responsibility for one another, the bone-deep sense that we belong to each other. Living in Venezuela remains the greatest privilege of my life, and the place where my values were formed.

Which is why watching this unfold breaks something fundamental inside me.

Subscribe now

When the Devil Removes the Devil

Here’s what terrifies me most: When a narcissistic leader is forcefully removed by another narcissist from within the same corrupt system, the next leader can be even worse. It’s often worse because you never see it coming. You believe that you are being saved because narcissistic leaders excel at making you think they are the hero as they prey on vulnerable people.

Trump’s timing seems suspiciously connected to the recent Citgo case. He has consistently shown he only lines his own pockets, making deals that benefit his associates in crypto, AI, and other ventures. The man has no history of acting in others’ best interests. Why would Venezuela be different?

Although I know many who do, I don’t believe the ends justify the means. When people make deals with the devil, everyone gets burned. The devil makes the “art of the deal” with strings attached, and in the end, it is not art anyone would hang in the Louvre. It’s not pretty. Some say “the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.” The problem is, we know how Maduro operates, and we know how Trump operates. Neither are fit to lead.

Subscribe now

If this were really about drug trafficking, if that were the genuine concern, we wouldn’t be targeting Venezuela. The biggest drug threat to the US isn’t coming from Caracas. Notably, Maduro wasn’t even charged with fentanyl trafficking. It’s cocaine. The official story doesn’t hold water. The spin is part of the game, and we are all being played.

What Venezuela Actually Needs

The Venezuelan people deserve aid, counsel, and leadership that serves their interests. They need:

• Self-governance support, not American occupation

• Economic reconstruction that benefits Venezuelans, not foreign corporations

• Healthcare system rebuilding from the ground up

• Food security and infrastructure repair

• International cooperation, not unilateral intervention

• Freedom to speak, and release of political prisoners

The world needs to get involved properly, legally, collaboratively. The UN, the Organization of American States, Latin American partners who understand the region’s complexity, humanitarian organizations with decades of crisis response experience. The US has no business “running” Venezuela when our own leadership is failing.

What Venezuela doesn’t need is what it’s getting: another strongman who sees the country as a resource to extract rather than a people to serve.

Venezuelans taught me to hold space for celebration, for dancing for hope in the midst of the most inhumane, vile moments humans could ever experience. In the midst of hunger, my friends have fed their neighbors, stood in the long 15-hour lines at the supermarket for the older ones who couldn’t, and made pots of soup every week for the whole neighborhood. They taught me to laugh, to dance, to share. They taught me that even though there is every reason to fear and worry, that sometimes, you take a moment to dance in the rain.

Venezuelans are resilient, yes, but that resilience has come with exhaustion and unspeakable trauma. Their bodies keep the score. I’m so happy to see them dance, and shake off some of what has resided deep inside them for decades of watching family members and loved ones die without medicine, be apprehended for speaking out, and have their souls and bodies crushed by a regime that profited off their resources while sharing none of them with the people they were intended to govern.

Subscribe now

My Hope for Venezuela

I hope, with everything I have, that my beloved childhood home receives the future it deserves.

I hope the international community steps up where US leadership has failed. I hope Venezuelan voices lead Venezuela’s recovery. I hope the oil wealth that has been both blessing and curse finally serves the people who live with it.

I hope that when my children ask me about this moment years from now, I can tell them that despite everything, despite the violations and the violence and the rampant greed, Venezuela found its way to genuine freedom and flourishing for all Venezuelans.

Because the Venezuela I carry in my bones, the one that taught me to dance, to laugh, to believe we belong to each other, deserves nothing less.

Subscribe now

What are your thoughts on intervention versus self-determination? How do we support nations in crisis without exploitation? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments below.

Subscribe to “A World of Difference” for more reflections on global leadership, cross-cultural understanding, and the complex choices we face in an interconnected world.

Related Reading:

• The UN Charter on Use of Force

• Understanding Venezuela’s Oil Reserves

• The Humanitarian Crisis in the Darién Gap

• Angel Falls and Venezuela’s Natural Wonders

Lori hosts “A World of Difference,” a podcast exploring authentic leadership across cultures. She works with leaders and organizations navigating complexity, building cross-cultural competence, and creating more human-centered workplaces across industries and across the world.

As this year comes to a close, many leaders are asking the same quiet question: What actually endures when everything around us keeps changing? Roles shift. Organizations restructure. Technologies accelerate. Yet, amid AI disruption, economic uncertainty, and constant reinvention, leadership is still revealed in the most human moments. Who we are at our core, as leaders, shows up so clearly in times of stress, change, disruption, and the curveballs life throws our way.

I’ve spent this year in conversation with leaders across industries, cultures, and continents. One truth keeps resurfacing: jobs come and go, but who we are as leaders remains. Our values, our presence, our courage, the way we treat people when the pressure is on, that is what lasts.

As we move toward 2026, the leaders organizations will need most are not simply technically fluent or strategically sharp. They are leaders who can hold complexity without losing their humanity, and who will not shove their stress down by blaming those who report to them. They are leaders who understand that culture is not a soft issue to be disregarded or minimized. It is a performance issue, and that leaders who truly see those they lead, reward them for their hard work and celebrate the wins as a team cultivate work cultures where the best in the industry long to work there. That in an AI-driven era, human-centered leadership is not optional. It is the differentiator.

Leadership Beyond the Title

Leadership does not begin or end with a job description.

It shows up in how we treat our direct reports when timelines are tight and expectations are high. In whether we listen to understand, or listen to respond. In whether we speak up when something feels off, or stay silent to protect our own position.

This year reminded me that leadership is revealed not in certainty, but in moments of moral choice. It’s choosing values over convenience. It’s choosing clarity over comfort. Sometimes, choosing to step away when alignment is gone, not as an act of defeat, but as an act of integrity. Sometimes choosing to cancel or postpone an event if our staff will be unsafe is required to be a good leader.

For organizations building for the future, this matters more than ever because no strategy survives a culture that erodes trust. Trust is built in small moments, as Brene Brown’s research shows.

Have you ever worked for a leader who panicked, always obsessed about how they looked on stage in a way that they treated the behind-the-scenes staff like garbage? I have, and I watched that production staff, those executive assistants and those who worked hard to make everything go perfectly for that leader look like zombies- dead inside but somehow going through the motions. The stress that the leader placed onto their staff did the opposite of lead to innovation, motivation and bring out the creative ideas that lead to business and organizational success either on or off stage. Instead, I watched brilliant, hard-working staff have hollow eyes, joyless souls, and fear of the next shoe that would drop with hypervigilance and fawning from the power by fear. That is not leadership. That is control, and control doesn’t bring out teamwork. It crushes innovation and destroys creativity.

On the other hand, if you have ever worked for a leader that knew that there is a genius in every one of their staff, and that by cultivating an environment of psychological safety, where feelings are welcome and your differentiator is drawn out, you know how innovation thrives with these leaders. Choosing staff because of their differences and letting those differences be expressed on stage with welcome and reward is a game changer.

Subscribe now

Instead of backup dancers that all look the same, dance the same and have coordinated dances like North Korean soldiers never stepping out of line as they point to their Supreme Leader, Taylor Swift is one example of a leader who has chosen a different way to lead. Swift stands out as a leader in the music industry for leading differently, with how she chose her backup dancers and more. If you don’t know who Eras Tour dancer Kam Saunders is, you’re really missing out. He had some iconic moments on the Eras Tour, including getting to speak on mic in multiple languages throughout the tour, including in Singlish at the National Stadium in Singapore.

Rather than surrounding herself with backup dancers who all look the same, move the same, and stay rigidly in formation, Taylor Swift chooses collaborators who bring distinct styles, voices, and presence. They don’t disappear behind her. They co-create the moment. That choice says everything about why she stands out as a leader in the music industry: she builds community, not conformity, and makes space for everyone to shine.

I saw Taylor Swift perform at the Eras Tour in Rio 2 years ago, after she did something she almost never does- postpone a show, the one where Ana, a fan tragically died in the Estadio Nilton Santos two nights before. Swift’s message where she announced the show would not go on, 2 hours before, said, “The safety and well-being of my fans, fellow performers and crew has to and always will come first.”

I had no idea how attuned Swift was to her staff of dancers, choreographers, stage designers, even the truck drivers until I recently watched the second episode of her new docuseries “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour | The End of an Era.”

Swift called it “bonus day,” when she hand delivered crew members handwritten letters with wax she personally sealed and very large bonuses for their months of hard work around the world. She is shown throughout the episodes celebrating the wins together, cultivating a workplace of joy but also feeling safe to express feelings, and choosing dancers who all bring their own genius that she allows to be showcased on stage.

Subscribe now

Instead of uniformity that focuses just on her, she wants her dancers, her staff, to be highlighted and celebrated. In other words, she is not trying to steal the show and just have her “backup dancers,” make her look good. She wants them to look good and she finds joy in them getting to shine. I won’t get into whether there is such as thing as an ethical billionaire, but I will give her credit for this. She is generous to her staff in a way that the music industry has not seen. Truck drivers for tours are not used to getting $100,000 bonuses (plus handwritten notes.)

That is the kind of business leader that we need more of in Silicon Valley, in corporate America, in global enterprise and in a time of unprecedented corporate greed. Instead of Scrooges who oust or layoff caregivers just before the holidays, we need more leaders who know that what they are building requires human-centered leaders who show gratitude to those who work hard to help them build their dream.

Leaders are wondering why top talent walks out the back door. It is often because they felt like a cog in a wheel instead of a human being with aspirations, feelings and needs that were unnoticed. Good leaders know their people, and one thing that struck me watching The End of an Era, was that Taylor knows her people, and she creates a community instead of minions. That makes a world of difference.

Subscribe now

Much has been written about Swift’s business strategy and the way she has a knack for that blue ocean strategy, or that blank space where she can create what is an untapped business opportunity. However, it seems her real genius in business is how she treats her staff, and cultivates a great place to work where people want to show up because they feel seen, celebrated and safe to feel. Classes at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, NYU, and Stanford University analyze her music, lyrics, business acumen, and cultural impact. What is all boils down to is her human-centered leadership. She knows people, she centers her staff, the Swifties, and creates a work, a musical and concert experience that cultivates joy and feeling seen.

Listening as a Strategic Leadership Skill

Listening is often described as a soft skill. It isn’t.

In polarized environments and matrixed organizations, listening is a strategic capability. It creates psychological safety. It surfaces risk earlier. It builds alignment across difference. It allows leaders to make better decisions with fuller context.

Throughout this year, I have enjoyed co-creating and leading global leadership summits from Taipei to the UK to Silicon Valley at an AI hardware, Fortune 100 subsidiary. My global team brought their brilliance every day to put these together, and I could not have done it without them. Thanks to those who invited me to speak (such as my friend ) who invited me to moderate and speak on panels on with Women X AI, Ladies Get Paid, and How Women Lead. I met some outstanding leaders when I spoke on stage at a Marcus Evans Talent Management conference in San Diego, and in intimate leadership spaces like the retreat I co-led in San Miguel. I made great friends at our How Women Lead board retreat I spoke at in Napa, and I was reminded that the most effective leaders are not the loudest in the room. They are the most attuned.

Listening is how leaders earn trust. Trust is what allows transformation to stick. How we are off the stage is as important as who we are on the stage. If your behind the curtain reality is one of belittling, blaming and bullying, and your in front of the curtain stage presence is charming, caring and charismatic, trust is eroding and your incongruence is the cause.

Roots, Resilience, and Moral Courage

My understanding of leadership was shaped early, growing up in Venezuela, where community, resilience, and collective care were not abstract concepts, but daily practices.

Share

Christmas was about togetherness. Long meals, music, stories, aguinaldos and hallacas. It was marked with shared responsibility for one another. Those traditions taught me that leadership is never individual. It is relational.

This year, watching Maria Corina Machado receive the Nobel Peace Prize was deeply meaningful. It was a reminder that moral courage matters. That leadership rooted in conviction can carry hope even in the face of risk. That speaking truth, especially when it is costly, has a ripple effect far beyond one moment or one country.

What This Year Clarified for Me

Across every conversation, keynote, and leadership gathering this year, one message was consistent:

How we treat each other as human beings is priceless.

I am no longer interested in transactional relationships or performative leadership. I am deeply committed to authenticity, kindness, respect, and mutual accountability, backed by action, not just language.

Share

As AI continues to reshape work at scale, leaders still have a choice. We can optimize for speed and output alone, or we can build organizations where innovation and humanity coexist. We can keep humans not just in the loop, but as the loop, as Allison Shapira, Harvard instructor and author recently told me in my podcast interview with her.

Human-centered leadership is not anti-technology. It is pro-sustainability.

Lessons from Denmark: Simplicity, Equality, and Presence

Read more

Indonesia, 2005.

I’m standing in one of the few houses in Banda Aceh that the tsunami didn’t destroy. Around me, volunteers cycle in and out, jetlagged, making loud noises at odd hours, here for their two-week rotation before flying home to their own cozy beds.

Meanwhile, the staff actually living in Northern Sumatra, the ones who call this place home, keep working at the same relentless pace. We’re translating for volunteers, helping them navigate culture shock, being jolted awake by the same aftershock earthquakes. We’re seeing the crushed schools, the bodies, the desperate daughters searching for their mothers, their brothers, their babies.

The secondary trauma is enormous. Sleep is elusive. The nightmares are our daily reality. We carry the pain of secondary trauma, of survivors’ guilt, knowing we do not come even close to carrying the suffering, the pain, the loss, the grief and the trauma that so many of us will for years to come.

You can live on adrenaline for two weeks, but not four months.

By April, nonprofits that weren’t used to disaster relief protocols, two weeks on, forced R&R outside the tsunami zone, started seeing their leaders burn out. Those leaders? They got swiftly replaced.

The organization I was working with didn’t respond by creating stronger protocols. They didn’t provide trauma-informed care outside the disaster zone. They didn’t mandate time off.

Instead, they replaced the burned-out leader and expected the next one to be superhuman.

The problem is, superhumans don’t exist.

Fast Forward to Silicon Valley

Nearly twenty years later, I’m advising C-suite executives at a Fortune 100 tech company. And I’m watching the exact same pattern unfold, just with worse coffee and better air conditioning. (Sumatra is known for it’s coffee after all, especially our favorite coffee called luak. Ask me later about the free ranging civets, and no I don’t know who the first person was to decide to roast the beans these rodents pooped out.)

Back here in Silicon Valley in the office, I see two women in the C-suite, both brilliant, both burning out in real time.

One is reading spreadsheets with a glass of wine at 5pm on a Friday night. Another is taking meetings from doctor’s offices because burnout has become a badge of honor, time off is for the weak and we all just need to learn “resilience.”

People speak of one of them as empathetic, even motherly. But that version of her seems to have been sucked away by the hypervigilance of keeping a large global enterprise together, a workforce that never sleeps, so neither can she.

Her empathy is gone, and everyone can feel it.

This is what happens when we build systems that demand superhuman performance.

Subscribe now

The Grandiose Plan Problem

Here’s the pattern I see everywhere, from disaster zones to boardrooms:

Leaders at the top make sweeping, grandiose plans. The vision might even be right. It might be necessary. It might be inspiring when announced at the all-hands meeting.

However, they never asked the people who will have to execute it:

• “How much is already on your plate?”

• “What would have to stop to make room for this?”

• “What are we missing?”

When someone tries to raise these questions, the response is predictable:

• “We need people who are excited about this vision.”

• “This is just how it is at a fast-paced company.”

• “If you can’t handle it, maybe this isn’t the right fit.”

Plans change on a dime. Teams scramble to keep up. Direct reports try to bring concerns to their managers, but 1:1s get canceled because everyone is too burned out to listen.

When people do speak up, they’re dismissed as “complainers.” Their very real observations about unsustainable workload get reframed as a personal problem or a lack of “resilience,” a failure to be a team player.

Meanwhile, the executives making these decisions have no visibility into what it actually takes to execute their vision. And worse, they don’t take the time to look or listen.

This isn’t leadership. This is abdication.

Subscribe now

The Moment I Knew I Had to Walk Away

There’s a decision point that comes for all of us.

Mine came when I realized the values on the wall, the ones I’d believed in, the ones that brought me to the organization, had become as fake as a bootlegged DVD in Bangkok’s weekend market (which is a fun place with great food and souvenirs, by the way.)

A big, global decision was made. One that would impact hundreds of employees. Maybe more than a thousand.

When I asked why, the answers I got made everything clear: This was about coddling underperforming men and ousting our top-performing moms. Really, moms. The moms who were our top performers, who get sh*t done, who work cross-functionally with relationship building skills that elevate boardrooms, and who bear the emotional load of the workplace, which we don’t pay them nor promote them for, but which would be critical to the culture change we were about to implement with only 3 weeks’ notice. Moms had become expendable, “replaceable,” invaluable.

At that point, I began to look elsewhere. I couldn’t stay around and watch it play out.

I couldn’t watch moms be ousted, walk out the back door, and the company have to spend 2 or 3 x’s their salary to replace them. It was bad for moms, and it was very, very bad for business.

Here’s what I learned in those crushed schools in Banda Aceh, and in those burnt-out C-suite offices in Silicon Valley:

When you see a crumbling foundation, you have three choices.

Subscribe now

The Three Paths Forward

Path 1: Stay and Drive Change

If there’s even a sliver of psychological safety, if your leader occasionally listens, if you have allies, if speaking up won’t immediately get you fired, you just might be able to create change from within.

This requires strategic courage. Not complaining, but framing concerns as business risks. Documenting everything. Building coalitions. Speaking up at the right time, with words that express the risk and the cost.

Sometimes it works. I’ve architected programs that contributed to billion-dollar revenue because someone finally got through to leadership about what the team actually needed.

But it only works IF leaders are willing to listen.

Path 2: Walk Out and Build Your Own Table

Sometimes the foundation is too rotten. No amount of polishing will fix it.

If they cancel your 1:1s. If they gaslight you when you raise legitimate concerns. If women keep getting pushed out while underperforming men get protected. If the CEO makes unilateral decisions and expects everyone to fall in line without question.

Then it’s time to take your talents elsewhere.

Employment as we knew it is dead anyway, according to my friend in her book entitled (you guessed it) Employment is Dead by Harvard Business Review Press. The future is moving toward a gig economy, portfolio careers, board seats, consulting, speaking, building on your terms.

Women get less than 2% of venture capital funding, but women-led companies are more profitable (the data from Hypatia Capital’s WCEO fund and How Women Invest proves this.)

So if the table won’t make room for you? Build your own.

Path 3: Lead the Rebuild

If you’re a leader reading this, realizing you might be part of the problem?

There’s a redemption path.

It starts with admitting: “I’ve been making grandiose plans without listening. I’ve been expecting superhuman performance. I’ve been canceling 1:1s because I’m too burned out to hear what my team is trying to tell me.” It’s not easy to be the change.

However, it continues with actually changing. Creating psychological safety. Co-creating instead of commanding. Listening to understand, not just to respond.

Because the leaders who survive, who actually make lasting change, are the ones who admit their human limits.

The Crumbling Foundation Diagnostic

So how do you know which path is yours?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Can I speak up about unsustainable workload without being labeled “difficult” or “not a team player”?

2. Does leadership cancel 1:1s regularly because they’re too busy or burned out to listen?

3. Are major decisions made unilaterally, or are they co-created with the people who will be most affected?

4. When someone raises a legitimate concern, is it investigated or dismissed as complaining?

5. Are women and marginalized voices disproportionately being pushed out or laid off?

6. Is there actual psychological safety, or just a poster on the wall about company values?

If you answered “no” to question 1 and “yes” to most of the others?

The foundation might be crumbling or rotten to begin with.

Subscribe now

We Can’t Rebuild Alone

I’m considering writing more articles and potentially a book about this, about when to take a jackhammer to broken systems and rebuild, either within your organization or by building your own table. (Let me know your thoughts, and I’d love to hear if you have a story to share.)

I’m also building a movement. We need space to share our stories and co-create a better way forward in our workplaces.

Because the workplace isn’t working, and it’s not women who broke it, in spite of what a recent New York Times article suggested, even after they changed the title from “women” to feminism in response to well deserved backlash. It’s not working for women who get gaslit and ousted when they speak up. It’s not working for burned-out employees executing impossible plans. It’s not working for leaders trapped in systems that demand superhuman performance. It’s not working for CEOs who are frustrated that their staff isn’t implementing fast enough when their expectations are unrealistic, and they don’t even realize it.

I learned in disaster relief, standing in that house in Banda Aceh, watching aid workers come and go while local staff collapsed from exhaustion:

We can’t rebuild alone. We need each other.

The leaders who survived to actually help people weren’t the ones who thought they were superhuman. They were the ones whose organizations required they took time off, away from the disaster zone, who set boundaries, who admitted their human limits, who asked for help.

The same is true in every workplace, every boardroom, every organization trying to do meaningful work.

There are no superhumans. There never were.

The moment we stop pretending otherwise is the moment we can start building something that actually works.

Because enough is enough.

Share

What’s Next?

I’m gathering stories from leaders who walked away from toxic workplaces and built their own tables. From CEOs who realized they were the problem and chose to rebuild. From women who said “enough is enough” and changed everything.

If that’s you, I want to hear from you.

Join the movement. Sign up below to follow along with us in the journey. Let’s build something better together.

Subscribe now

Lori Adams-Brown is a strategic transformation executive, board director, and host of the top 3% podcast “A World of Difference.” She has spent 20+ years advising global leaders and Fortune 100 CEOs across six continents, and has learned that the most powerful leaders are the ones who admit they’re human.

There’s a particular quality to November darkness in California that catches me off guard every year, especially after living on islands near the equator for most of my life where 12 hours of sunshine a day was the norm and our clocks never changed with any seasons, as we only had rainy and dry ones.

Here in Northern California, Daylight Saving Time ends, and suddenly the light disappears before I’m ready. The sun sets at 5 p.m., and I find myself disoriented, not just by the clock change, but by the weight of everything else pressing in.

This year feels heavier than most.

As I write this, I’m watching the news cycle churn through another day of policy whiplash. Brené Brown recently told Fortune that “people are not okay,”and she’s right. Workers are “emotionally dysregulated, distrustful, and disconnected,” she said, noting that unstable geopolitics, changing markets, and AI are wreaking havoc on our collective mental health.

Brown emphasized something that resonates deeply with me: “We are wired for certainty, and we’re wired to get to certainty as soon as possible. And the more uncertainty that we’re in, the more really hard feedback we get from our bodies.” (Read the full article here)

In other words, our nervous systems are screaming, and for many of us, there’s no end to the alarm in sight.

Subscribe now

The Particular Darkness of Now

I spend my days advising CEOs, Presidents, Executive Directors and global leaders from Fortune 100s to NGOs on organizational effectiveness. I sit in boardrooms where leaders talk about “change management” and “workforce resilience” while privately admitting they’re burned out, their teams are burned out, and nobody knows what comes next.

I watch certain Silicon Valley companies and even corporate America-style megachurches squeeze every ounce of productivity from employees, then discard them when they’re used up. I see the same pattern in nonprofits, in government agencies, in organizations that claim to “care about people” while their actions say otherwise.

I watch as fascism creeps further into American institutions, not as a metaphor, but as a reality we’re living through. The guardrails we thought would hold are bending. The leaders we hoped would stand up are staying silent. The systems we trusted to protect democracy are showing their fragility.

It’s a lot, and pretending it isn’t doesn’t make it less true.

Last Year’s Election Night in the Redwoods

I remember exactly where I was when hope slipped away last November. I was in Mill Valley, in a mansion nestled in the redwoods, surrounded by my How Women Lead friends. Julie Castro Abrams was there, cooking a delicious dinner for us. We’d gathered to watch what we thought would be a historic night, the election of America’s first woman president.

Instead, we watched the darkness roll in like San Francisco fog over the Golden Gate Bridge. Heavy. Inevitable. Suffocating. There was wine, whiskey and weariness.

Subscribe now

The next morning, I woke up knowing I needed something to get me through the winter ahead, not a distraction, not denial, but a practice, a way to walk through darkness without losing myself in it.

That’s when I fell into a hygge obsession.

Learning to Walk in the Dark

I first read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark back in 2019 when I was living in Singapore. At the time, I was navigating my own season of uncertainty with questions about vocation, about where I belonged, about what came next.

Taylor’s book taught me something crucial: Darkness isn’t the absence of God, or meaning, or hope. It’s a different kind of presence.

She writes about learning to see in the dark, not with your eyes, but with your other senses. She writes about trusting that the ground will hold you even when you can’t see where you’re stepping. She invites us to be open to discovering that there’s wisdom in darkness that you can’t access in the light.

Subscribe now

My own spiritual directors and mentors have shown me this truth again and again over the years. They’ve walked with me through job losses, through being ousted for asking a question as a woman in spaces where we are expected to capitulate, through grief, through seasons when I couldn’t see two feet in front of me.

My first spiritual director that walked with me through the aftermath of tsunami relief when I lived in Indonesia and saw so much death firsthand, and carried secondary trauma from translating for a trauma therapist with a specialty in trauma among children. I heard story after story from these little ones who lost everyone and everything they knew and loved. I heard my friend Nana and her husband Ayah describe their little baby girl being ripped from their arms, and I had no words. My friend Nana had no tears. I sat in such darkness with them and carried their pain in a way that wasn’t my own where I listened again and again to the horrors no parent should ever face. It was during my times with my spiritual director that she encouraged me to light a candle every morning in my daily meditation time to remind me of the presence of the Light. It was my reminder that in darkness, all it takes is one candle to bring light and warmth in the darkest and coldest of times.

My spiritual directors taught me something I’m learning again now:

Hygge as Resistance

In March of this year, I went to Denmark. I needed to see if hygge, the Danish art of coziness, warmth, and presence, lived up to the hype.

It did.

I sat in candlelit cafes drinking coffee so good it felt like a sacrament. I walked through quaint neighborhoods where every window glowed with warm light against the cold darkness outside. I watched Danish people practice the art of being present with each other with no phones at the table, no rushing through conversation, just the simple act of being together. I noticed the smiles, the happiness, the hygge.

Subscribe now

What struck me most wasn’t the aesthetics of hygge (though the candles and soft blankets certainly help). It was the philosophy underneath it: In a world that demands productivity and performance, hygge is the practice of being human.

It’s permission to slow down. To need rest. To find joy in small, quiet things. To acknowledge that winter is hard, and the appropriate response isn’t to push through. It’s to light a candle and sit with someone you love.

Since Denmark, I’ve woven hygge into my life in ways that feel less like a trend and more like survival:

• Morning coffee on my patio, listening to birds, feeling the California sun on my face before the day’s demands begin

• Tuesday night book club in my living room, where we sit around talking about ideas that matter sometimes over wine and baked goodies

• Walks in nature, hiking the trails around the Bay Area, letting my nervous system remember it’s part of something larger than the news cycle

• In-person gatherings with friends: coffees, lunches, dinners where we talk about real things, not just what we’re working on

• Lighting candles at my desk, in the living room, next to the fireplace to remind me that light is always there, and glimmers are waiting for us to see them.

Last Tuesday, I got to meet in person for the first time. After having interviewed her for the podcast and reading every word of her incredible new book, I was excited to meet her near the airport to have lunch just after she flew in from Washington DC to San Francisco. We spent a couple of hours talking about our childhoods, mutual missionary kid connections, and the way the religion we grew up with was now in bed with politics in a way that we just can’t stomach. We laughed, rolled our eyes, and dined al fresco on fresh California cuisine and some French coffee and pastries on a sunny Bay Area day. It was warmth. It was light. It was the kind of thing that helps me see a way forward in uncharted waters. Holly’s way of bridging history with today’s reality gives me hope. She is using her voice and her pen to speak up after being raised in a religious environment that often trained us as girls to sit down and shut up.

Sometimes, a word of truth spoken from behind a curtain of lies brings clarity in a way that makes others want to stand up and leave the theater for the freedom of living in what is vibrant, real and true.

On Thursday, I went to Holly’s book launch event at Stanford. Her talk, along with Stanford history professor Dr. Joel Cabrita and UC Berkeley professor Dr. David A. Hollinger tickled my brain and ignited my soul in ways I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Hearing these two scholars interact with her book, after having read it and discussed it myself with other missionary kids and former missionaries, brought a whole new curiosity and intrigue around the history that she wrote about that intersects with my own story in such a personal way.

Afterward, we had dinner in Palo Alto with a group of brilliant scholars- Stanford history professors Dr. Joel Cabrita and Dr. James Campbell, sociology professor Dr. Katie Gaddini, UC Berkeley professor Dr. David A. Hollinger and others.

Over a vegan dinner we talked about history, about social movements, about how change actually happens. But we also just... talked…about our lives, our hopes, our fears, our beliefs, our religious upbringings. The conversation moved between intellectual rigor and soul-deep vulnerability in a way that felt both nourishing and rare. I left that talk with Holly on her new book The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism, and that dinner thinking that I will be meditating on this night for a long time because it was a Venn Diagram of that deep human connection where intellectual conversation, heartfelt vulnerability and soul-searching pondering together over dinner and wine activated a spark in a time when the world seems to be falling apart. (Check out my podcast interview with Dr. Holly Berkley Fletcher here.)

That’s what I’m learning hygge actually is: Creating spaces where humans can be fully human, even when the world is trying to reduce us to productivity metrics.

Recognizing Human Limits

Brené Brown’s warning about workers not being okay lands differently when you’re sitting in boardrooms watching it play out in real time.

She’s right that “we’re not wired” for the kind of changes we are experiencing right now. We’re certainly not wired for the pace of change we’re experiencing.

Here’s what I’m learning: Acknowledging my human limits isn’t weakness. It’s the only way I thrive with my humanity intact.

I can’t fix American democracy. I can’t single-handedly stop corporations nor megachurches from burning out or ousting their employees who question. I can’t control the news cycle, the market volatility, or the AI disruption that’s transforming work faster than anyone can adapt to.

But I can:

• Take walks in my neighborhood and notice the light through the trees

• Sit with friends around my dining table and remember what connection feels like

• Light candles when the sun sets too early and create my own warmth

• Say no to projects that would drain me beyond recovery (self-awareness and my Working Genius assessment tells me that Tenacity and Enablement burn me out)

• Sleep enough, even when it feels “unproductive”

• Let myself grieve when grief is the appropriate response

• Keep showing up for the work that matters, but at a pace my nervous system can sustain

Brown noted that leaders need “deep, complex understanding of systems theory” to navigate this moment, understanding that “if you move one Lego piece an inch over here, you’ve got fallout over here.” (Once again, the full article is here.)

I think that’s true, however, I’ll also add this: We also need a deep, complex understanding of our own humanity. We need to know when we’re reaching our limits. We need to recognize when our bodies are giving us really hard feedback and actually listen to it. I was raised in a world that built my resilience, and often at the expense of my own inner voice, of trusting my gut, of listening to my body, of knowing how I feel.

If we burn out, we can’t lead. If we lose ourselves to the darkness, we can’t be the light others need.

Light can be found in rooms of those who are shining theirs. I went to another book launch this past week in San Francisco. It was also with another author who has been on the podcast recently, . Her book The Price of Nice is a breath of fresh air in an era of capitulation. She not only shared some wild stories on the podcast about sitting in a congressional office while a culture of not speaking up had led to the loss of a lot of money, she also had some fun, sunny stories of growing up without shoes and swimming on the island of Guam. Check out the podcast episode with her here. It was a night full of warm connections meeting so many of Amira’s spectacular friends who are light bringers themselves. I drove home with such gratitude to have been around people who are making the world a better place. Fun fact: Amira’s parents were also missionaries. I went to two book launches in the same week, both by missionary kid authors, which made me feel belonging as a missionary kid myself. If you are a missionary kid yourself, you know how important belonging is.

Walking Through, Not Around

I won’t pretend I have this figured out. There are days when the darkness feels overwhelming. There are nights when the news makes me want to crawl into bed and hide. There are afternoons when I wonder if anything I do actually matters.

Then I remember: I’ve walked through darkness before, and I’ve learned that the only way out is through.

Not around it. Not over it. Not by pretending it isn’t dark.

Through it.

With candles lit. With friends beside me. With practices that remind my nervous system I’m still here, still human, still capable of joy even in hard seasons.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes that darkness teaches us things light never could. It teaches us to trust what we can’t see. It teaches us that we’re stronger than we think. It teaches us that the light within us doesn’t go out just because the world gets dark.

I’m learning that lesson again now.

(I highly recommend subscribing to on Substack.)

Subscribe now

What Helps Me Walk Through

If you’re also walking through darkness right now, and I suspect many of you are, here’s what’s helping me:

Nature. Daily walks. Sunshine on my face. Hummingbirds at my patio flowers. Reminders that the world is bigger than human chaos.

Connection. Real conversations with real people. Not networking. Not “catching up.” But actual presence with people I trust.

Rituals. Morning coffee on the patio. Tuesday night book club. Weekend hikes. Small rhythms that anchor me when everything else feels unstable.

Boundaries. Saying no to demands that would push me past sustainable. Protecting my rest like it’s sacred (because it is).

Creating warmth. Candles. Soft blankets. Music. The Danish practice of making spaces that feel like refuge. #hygge

Doing work that matters. I still show up to advise CEOs. I still sit on nonprofit boards. I still write. But I am learning (and often failing) do it at a pace that lets me stay whole.

Remembering the light within. On the hardest days, I remind myself: There is something in me that refuses to be extinguished. Some part of me that knows how to hope even when hope feels impossible.

That light is real. It’s in you too.

An Invitation

If you’re reading this and feeling the weight of these times, know this: You’re not alone. And you’re not broken for struggling.

Brené Brown is right, ”people are not okay.” The pace of change is unsustainable. The uncertainty is neurologically overwhelming. The darkness is real.

But so is the light within you.

So here’s what I’m practicing, and what I’m inviting you into:

Walk through the darkness, not around it.
Create warmth where you can.
Connect with people who see you.
Protect your humanity like it’s precious (because it is).
Remember that you’ve survived dark seasons before.
Trust that you’ll find your way through this one too.

The glimmers are there. Even on the darkest nights. Even now.

We just have to learn how to see them.

Share

What practices are helping you walk through darkness right now? I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Let’s learn from each other how to keep our lights burning, even when the world feels heavy.

🌏 Join the Conversation & Stay Connected! 🌍

If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my Substack so you never miss a post. Together, we’re building a community that challenges the status quo, embraces different perspectives, and makes a real impact in our workplaces and beyond.

🎧 Listen & share A World of Difference podcast for more conversations that matter.

💬 Join the discussion. Drop a comment, share your thoughts, and pass this along to someone who needs it!

Let’s keep making a difference…together. 🌎

This newsletter reflects the personal views and independent thought leadership of Lori Adams-Brown. The content shared here does not represent the views of any company or any board or advisory organization with which Lori is affiliated. All content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and is not endorsed by any employer or client organization.

I’ve spent 15 years building talent systems across three continents, and I’ll tell you what most organizations get wrong: they’re designing talent development programs for the company they were, not the company they’re becoming.

The Transformation Gap

Last week, I sat across from a Silicon Valley VP who told me their leadership development program was lackluster, and most people were too busy to take any of the trainings except for the compliance trainings that were required. It’s typical, right? Except when I asked about succession planning and retention of top talent in the company, the room went quiet. High need, zero transformation.

This is the paradox I’ve spent my career solving, and it’s why I believe we need to fundamentally reimagine how we approach talent development in 2025 and beyond.

Subscribe now

What Makes Transformation Actually Stick

Here’s what I’ve learned from scaling teams 600% in 18 months, transitioning 2,000+ leaders across continents, and advising Fortune 100 executives on organizational strategy:

1. Strategy Must Drive Design, Not the Other Way Around

Too many talent leaders ask, “What programs should we build?” The better question: “What organizational capability gaps are preventing us from executing our strategy?”

When I architected Hyve Solutions’ executive succession framework, I didn’t start with a curriculum. I started by doing a listening tour with hundreds of our global executives, managers and ICs, and I dug into our Glint survey data, zoning in on our biggest growth opportunity: communication. I began mapping decision-making authority across the enterprise and identifying where capability mismatches created bottlenecks. The programs followed the strategy- not the reverse.

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, I was reminded of why succession planning and talent development look ahead and develop leadership skills in global talent over time with just-in-time learning and also with a long-term strategic planning for the future of work. “Start development early. Foundational skills are difficult to build once someone is already struggling. Prioritize early-career training that sharpens communication, teamwork, and learning agility. These abilities compound over time and prepare employees to navigate change—not just perform in the present.” (You can read the article here.)

2. Data Without Context Is Just Noise

Everyone talks about “data-driven” talent decisions. However, data doesn’t make decisions. Leaders do. The magic happens when you integrate HRIS data, market benchmarking, and real-time operational insights into frameworks executives can actually use.

I’ve built AI-enabled service delivery models and data visualization dashboards across seven global cities. The insight? Executives don’t need more data. They need the right data, presented in ways that drive immediate action. A CEO needs an insightful CPO and Chief Learning Officer who connects talent development to business outcomes because when top talent walks out the back door, it is more than just a financial loss, it’s a future loss.

Subscribe now

3. Global Doesn’t Mean “One-Size-Fits-All”

Speaking six languages and living on three continents taught me this: cultural adaptation isn’t a nice-to-have in global enterprise. It’s the difference between adoption and resistance.

Cultural intelligence along with emotional intelligence are skills that top global talent have in spades. In an era when technical skills are quickly becoming obsolete, durable skills are key. The World Economic Forum report from earlier this year stated that, “workers can expect that two-fifths (39%) of their existing skill sets will be transformed or become outdated over the 2025-2030 period.”

When we launched our Key Leadership program across seven cities in three languages, we didn’t just translate content. We rebuilt it for each context. I hired leadership development trainers with native fluency and cultural competence in their respective global cities. The result? A 1,900% increase in engagement. Not because the content was “better,” but because it was relevant.

Learning is becoming more personalized with AI, and it’s also becoming more adaptive. Your work culture must be one of learning, with learning agility becoming a top skill in your global talent to future-proof your business for the future of work.

McKinsey & Company‘s recent article put it this way, “Put the learner in the driver’s seat. Build a culture of learning and ownership. Help employees understand their roles in upskilling and integrate learning into day-to-day work to develop an always-on approach, enabling them to take charge of their journeys rather than waiting for formal training from the organization.”

Subscribe now

4. Speed and Structure Aren’t Enemies

I always say one of the hardest parts of leadership is self-leadership. Self-awareness is a key leadership core competency, and one of the Fundamental Four future of work leadership skills identified by the Center for Creative Leadership. I have spent a considerable amount of time and money to increase my own self-awareness because I want to be the best leader I can be and believe that leadership is both a responsibility and a gift. Leadership inherently requires that we look out not just for our own interests, but also for the interests of others as we guide and care for those we lead. That means learning what we are good at and what we must delegate to those who are better at it. It means learning from those we lead, and it means showing up as a non-anxious presence to bring others upward as we climb together.

My Birkman profile shows I organize work systematically, yet I’ve led disaster relief teams that deployed solutions in under 24 hours. My ESTP/Enneagram 8w7 combination drives me to act decisively while building sustainable systems.

The secret? Designing operating models that are both agile and scalable. When I grew Echo Compassion to 150 team members during the pandemic, we achieved rapid deployment not through chaos, but through clear decision-rights frameworks and cross-functional collaboration. When the stakes are high, and the pace is fast, getting clear on what’s a priority matters a great deal.

The VP Talent Development Role Is Evolving

Here’s what I’m seeing in the market right now: Companies need talent leaders who can operate at the intersection of strategy, operations, and transformation. The role is no longer about running programs. It’s about architecting organizational capability.

The leaders winning in this space bring:

• Strategic Architecture Thinking: Designing job families, competency models, and succession frameworks that align with enterprise goals

• Operational Excellence: Translating vision into executable roadmaps with measurable business impact

• Data Fluency: Leveraging analytics not just to report, but to drive executive decision-making

• Global Perspective: Building culturally-adapted solutions that work across markets

• Change Leadership: Navigating resistance and building buy-in across distributed, complex organizations

  Subscribe now

What This Means for Organizations Hiring Now

If you’re building a talent function for transformation (not just administration), here are the questions worth asking:

1. Can your talent leader speak the language of your board and translate it into action for your frontline?

2. Does your strategy architect understand both job architecture and how to deploy it across seven time zones?

3. Can they move from a compelling PowerPoint to a functioning system in 90 days?

The Competitive Advantage

Companies that win in the next decade won’t just have great talent strategies. They’ll have talent leaders who can architect organizational systems, execute with speed, and drive measurable transformation.

They’ll have leaders who’ve built organizations from scratch, advised CEOs through crisis, and scaled teams across continents. Leaders who combine transformational vision with operational rigor. Leaders who don’t just design programs. They redesign how organizations build capability.

This is the global edge.

What’s your experience with talent transformation? Are you seeing the same gaps I am? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.

Share

I’m open to strategic advisory opportunities and Executive Talent Development roles where I can drive enterprise transformation. Let’s connect if you’re building the future of organizational capability.

We don’t talk enough about the ache of leadership.

Behind every polished LinkedIn headline, every quarterly report, every strategy deck, there’s a leader who has carried the weight of decisions that impact people’s livelihoods. That weight can be heavy.

As a leader, I have had to make hard choices too. I have had to make a decision to step away from a workplace that I loved due to a sudden values misalignment. I’ve experienced retaliation for speaking up against discrimination. I’ve seen capitulation and purging. It’s brutal.

I’ve spoken to so many leaders this year who confess, quietly, that they’re tired. They’re overwhelmed. Women leaders are particularly exhausted. Women of color, even more so. The moms? They are often afraid to even mention at work that they have kids, not because they don’t love what they do but because motherhood is framed as laziness or incompetence in the societal shifts that affect workplaces where burnout has left leaders unwilling to listen and making quick assumptions without curiosity or empathy.

Leading humans in an era of uncertainty requires a depth of resilience and compassion that few were ever trained for. It requires listening to understand, making decisions that affect a global workforce by getting different perspectives first (something Dr. Erin Meyer points out in her HBR article Being the Boss in Brussels, Boston, and Beijing that US leaders aren’t necessarily culturally trained to do.)

Subscribe now

Here’s the paradox: the very thing that makes leadership painful is the same thing that makes it profoundly meaningful.

It’s the tension of knowing your choices ripple out into people’s lives and the lives of their families.
It’s the vulnerability of admitting you don’t have all the answers when your team is looking for certainty.
It’s the courage of staying human when it would be easier to retreat behind process, metrics, or a mask of invulnerability.

Yet, this is where leadership becomes not just a role, but a responsibility.

Subscribe now

When we choose to lead with humanity, we model for others that it’s possible to thrive in the ambiguity. We demonstrate that psychological safety isn’t a buzzword but the soil from which innovation, trust, and collaboration grow. We show that performance and compassion don’t compete. They amplify each other.

One leader I spoke with recently told me: “I realized my team didn’t need me to be perfect. They needed me to listen.”

That, to me, is the heart of leadership in today’s world. Not flawless execution, but meaningful connection. Not a flawless image, but a trustworthy presence.

Read more

Ever feel like you’re living in between worlds, like you see things others just don’t?

Growing up between worlds changes more than you think. As a missionary kid, I often was an insider and also an outsider.

In reading ’s latest book The Missionary Kids: Unmasking the Myths of White Evangelicalism, I realized how nuanced all of this upbringing that I share with other adult missionary kids truly was.

This week’s episode of A World of Difference podcast is for anyone who’s wrestled with identity, belonging, or the bigger story behind what shapes our culture and politics.

I had the chance to sit down with Holly for this week’s podcast, and we bonded over being MK’s, TCKs (Third Culture Kids) and having mutual friends. Holly’s journey is fascinating and filled with the insider/outsider experience she writes about. She grew up as a missionary kid (Southern Baptist, International Mission Board MK) in Kenya, went on to earn her PhD in American Studies, taught in universities, and even worked with the CIA as an analyst focused on Africa. So although her perspective is anything but ordinary, in the world of adult MKs, especially those who have taken time to reflect deeply and practice self-compassion in a journey of self-awareness, I found familiar touchpoints in her perspective and her story.

Read more

Hey Difference Makers,

This week I had the honor of speaking on a timely and high-energy panel discussion titled “Is AI Coming for Your Job?” with some incredible thought leaders shaping the future of work, including my good friend, fellow Silicon Valley Executive board member of How Women Lead and founder of Women X AI, Jenny Kay Pollock and founder of Ladies Get Paid, Claire Wasserman.

Subscribe

Incidentally, both of these outstanding women are also podcast hosts. Please go subscribe to all the light they are putting out into the world as difference makers and support women podcasters. It’s an act of activism and a way to increase your knowledge by including more perspectives into your own worldview. It’s a win-win.

We went deep on:

🤖 How much of the AI panic is real vs. media hype

🌍 Why global talent strategies must include a cross-cultural, human-centered approach

🧠 The essential leadership skills that will never be replaced by machines

💼 What executives, L&D leaders, and people managers should be doing right now to navigate the AI transformation with clarity

The conversation was energizing, honest, and filled with insights I know will resonate with this community, especially those of you thinking deeply about workforce transformation, leadership development, and inclusive innovation.

I shared at vulnerably one point about how in the past couple of months I have had meetings with two different men who are great leaders and a couple of the good guys who strive to treat women as equals with dignity and respect.

However, in their excitement to express all they are beginning to learn about AI tools, they made the assumption that I knew little to nothing about AI and showed zero curiosity about what they could learn from me about the many AI tools I have been using for quite some time, nor about the AI agent I have created myself.

Competence questioning is something I face frequently as a woman, and statistically speaking, if you are a woman you have likely faced it many times too.

I mentioned how mansplaining is one thing, but nobody likes a Know-It-All.

I’m a self-proclaimed Learn-It-All.

If you want to be in my Learn-It-All club, let’s be founding members together. Shall we?

Subscribe

🎥 The recording will available soon.

If you missed it live and want to catch the replay, just comment below or send me a quick message and I’ll drop the link directly to you when Claire’s team posts it on Hire Ground.

Message me

Meanwhile, check out this recap post by Jenny on LinkedIn.

Your support here on Substack fuels the work I do every day, from public panels like this one, to podcast interviews, thought leadership, and the consulting I bring into organizations globally. So thank you. Your support for the work I do to bring light into the world and shine a spotlight on voices who need to be heard truly makes a difference. Whether you are a paid subscriber, you comment to increase engagement, you share to increase visibility or you just read and take in this perspective to heart, I appreciate you. Keep making a difference wherever you are. 💛

Subscribe

Let’s keep having the real conversations that shape a more equitable, AI-augmented future of work that is human-centered a courageously kind.

Keep making a difference at work, in your communities, in how you live, travel and show up in all the places and spaces you enjoy of this beautiful world we all call “home.”

Share

Subscribe

Comment

🌏 Join the Conversation & Stay Connected! 🌍

If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my Substack so you never miss a post. Together, we’re building a community that challenges the status quo, embraces different perspectives, and makes a real impact in our workplaces and beyond.

💡 Subscribe now to get fresh insights straight to your inbox:

A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

As a tech executive, podcast host, a polyglot I'm here to share my perspective, and also here to hear yours. When we bring different brains around the table and deeply listen, we can do outstanding things together that make the world better.

🎧 Listen & share A World of Difference podcast for more conversations that matter.

💬 Join the discussion—drop a comment, share your thoughts, and pass this along to someone who needs it!

Let’s keep making a difference—together. 🌎

Subscribe

We are in a global leadership reckoning.

From alleged coverups in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation reaching the highest levels of government, to the viral exposure of a CEO and Chief People Officer caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert, the message is clear: integrity is either your foundation, or your downfall.

As a Talent Development executive working with C-suites and boards globally, I’ve seen what happens when trust is broken at the top. The impact isn’t isolated. It cascades through teams, erodes culture, damages employer brand, and leaves your people questioning: “If they’ll hide that, what else are they hiding?”

I see it in teams. I see it in politics. I see it in families.

Leadership is leadership, and people are people.

Everywhere.

In 2025, integrity isn’t just about morality. It’s about risk mitigation, talent strategy, and long-term business resilience.

Listen to the Podcast Episode

🚨 Leadership Failures We Can’t Ignore

1. The Epstein Files and the Cost of Complicity

Recent public concern surrounding possible coverups in the Epstein investigation has shaken faith by many in the MAGA camp, when many of the rest of us had already viewed DJT as a wealthy elite who abused his power and got away with crimes by being given a pass by our most powerful institutions. Despite public records, survivor testimonies, and years of investigations, key figures are still shielded, and justice still feels optional. Donald has not drained that swamp, he has been swimming in it.

When power protects itself, trust collapses, and survivors stay silent. It’s power by fear, and the cultivation of that fear means the voices that could otherwise warn will protect themselves and inadvertently shield the one abusing power from consequences. That same dynamic plays out in corporate environments every day when leaders look away from toxicity or protect unethical top performers in the name of “strategy.”

“You are the standard. Your silence becomes consent.”
— Brené Brown, research professor and bestselling author on courage and leadership

2. The Coldplay Concert and C-Suite Credibility

When a CEO and the Chief People Officer, the very people responsible for building culture, are caught in a public affair, it’s not just a personal failing. It’s a crisis of credibility. What happens behind closed doors doesn’t stay there. In today’s digital world, it becomes part of your employer brand.

The CEO has already resigned.

Leaders who undermine trust in their personal behavior are unlikely to uphold it in their professional decision-making, and when the people function is compromised, your culture collapses from the inside out.

How is it we can see it so clearly in a CEO and fail to demand that the President of the United States step down? How is he still allowed to remain in office when he has ruined our global reputation and his personal behavior from his alleged sexual assault of 13-year-old Katie Johnson and the 34 felonies of which he has been found guilty, along with multiple incidents of sexual assault have left our entire nation’s reputation compromised and trust in our government has been eroded to a level of distrust our younger selves could never have imagined?

🧠 The Science: Why Integrity Falters Under Stress

We have to talk about burnout.

Research from the World Health Organization defines burnout as a workplace syndrome caused by chronic stress. When leaders are burned out, empathy decreases, decision-making falters, and the brain defaults to in-group thinking, a breeding ground for groupthink and ethical lapses.

“People in high-stress environments often miss red flags not because they don’t care—but because they’ve stopped noticing.”
— Harvard Business Review, The Neuroscience of Ethical Leadership

This is how coverups happen. This is why so many leaders say, “I didn’t know” when what they really mean is, “I stopped paying attention.”

📊 The Data: Why Integrity Drives Business Performance

Let’s be clear—integrity isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s a competitive advantage.

• Publicly traded ethical companies outperformed peers by 366% since 2007. See how integrity drives long-term investment returns.
  (Source: Ethisphere)

• 63% of employees trust “my employer” more than government, media, or NGOs
  (Source: Edelman Trust Barometer 2024)

• Organizations with strong ethical cultures outperform their competition by 40%
  (Source: Gartner)

In an era of talent scarcity and reputational risk, integrity is no longer optional. It’s essential infrastructure.

Subscribe now

🔎 A Framework for Executive Integrity

As part of my advisory work, I use this proprietary tool with executive teams and boards:

The I.N.T.E.G.R.I.T.Y.™ Framework

1. Invest in character-based executive hiring

2. Normalize ethical feedback in 360 reviews

3. Train for psychologically safe leadership and empathy under pressure

4. Establish board-level accountability systems

5. Get radically transparent with communications and culture audits

6. Respond publicly and swiftly when breaches occur

7. Integrate values into performance and incentive metrics

8. Track trust via anonymous pulse checks

9. Yield power when necessary to protect culture

This framework supports both business resilience and people wellbeing, with built-in flexibility for global, cross-cultural environments.

Subscribe now

📣 A Different Kind of Power

As former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wrote in her powerful memoir, A Different Kind of Power:

“You can be strong and you can be kind. You can lead with compassion and still expect results. But we must have the courage to show up truthfully.”

That’s the model of leadership the world needs more of, and it’s what I help build in executive rooms every day.

Share

✅ Call to Action

If you’re a CEO, CHRO, board director, or leadership team ready to operationalize integrity into your business strategy, let’s talk.

🔹 I offer:

• CEO Advisory

• High-trust culture diagnostics

• Keynotes and strategic offsite sessions

• Talent systems aligned with authenticity and accountability

📩 DM me on LinkedIn or reach out at loriadamsbrown.com.

Integrity isn’t just about doing what’s right.
It’s how we build trust, retain talent, and lead into the future.

It’s how we make a world of difference.

Share

🌏 Join the Conversation & Stay Connected! 🌍

If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my Substack so you never miss a post. Together, we’re building a community that challenges the status quo, embraces different perspectives, and makes a real impact in our workplaces and beyond.

💡 Subscribe now to get fresh insights straight to your inbox:

A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

As a tech executive, podcast host, a polyglot I'm here to share my perspective, and also here to hear yours. When we bring different brains around the table and deeply listen, we can do outstanding things together that make the world better.

🎧 Listen & share A World of Difference podcast for more conversations that matter.

💬 Join the discussion—drop a comment, share your thoughts, and pass this along to someone who needs it!

Let’s keep making a difference—together. 🌎

As the political heat rises globally, across the U.S., France, Israel, and beyond, our organizations are feeling the tremors. Talent is anxious. Teams are divided. Culture is fragile.

And yet, these times call for a deeper kind of leadership.

A trauma-informed one.

One that is grounded in neuroscience, shaped by cross-cultural fluency, and driven by human dignity.

When the World Collapsed, I Learned to Listen

In 2004, after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh, Indonesia, I was called to serve in a role I never expected: translator for a world-renowned trauma therapist supporting medical teams, grieving families, and orphaned children.

What began as translating language quickly became translating pain into understanding and despair into dignity.

It was there, in the ashes of unspeakable loss, that I learned the first principle of trauma-informed leadership:

“Safety isn’t a soft skill. It’s the foundation for healing.”
— Lori Adams-Brown

It shaped everything I do now as a global talent development leader.

Trauma Lives in the Workplace and So Does Healing.

You don’t need a tsunami to witness trauma in action.

It shows up in silence during meetings, in microaggressions that go unaddressed, in a high-performing employee who suddenly stops turning on their camera and in exit interviews that echo the same word: “unsafe.”

As trauma expert Gabor Maté reminds us:

“Trauma is not what happens to you. It’s what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.”

If we’re not trained to recognize it, we will misinterpret it, and miss the chance to lead through it.

What Neuroscience Is Telling Us (That Leadership Manuals Don’t)

According to Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score:

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health.”

Neuroscience now confirms: unresolved trauma rewires the brain’s threat response. When workplace stress, bias, or exclusion go unaddressed, the nervous system gets stuck in fight-flight-freeze-fawn.

If your team isn’t thriving, it’s not just a motivation issue. It could be a neurobiological one.

Subscribe now

What This Looks Like in Practice: From Indonesia to Silicon Valley

Over the past two decades, I’ve led talent development in Singapore, Indonesia, and Silicon Valley. Across cultures, one truth rises:

Read more

If you’re a regular listener to A World of Difference Podcast, you know our new episodes normally drop every Wednesday. Many of you are asking where this week’s episode is, and I appreciate your patience and your engagment in this podcast community.

Here’s the situation:
There is currently a Google Cloud outage affecting metadata services across platforms that rely on it—including Spotify’s Megaphone, our podcast hosting and distribution service. This means our episode is temporarily delayed in publishing.

💡 Why this matters:

• Megaphone is used by many podcasters to schedule and release episodes.

• Metadata and catalog processing are key parts of how episodes go live.

• Google Cloud disruptions ripple through the entire content ecosystem.

Rest assured, the Megaphone team is in close communication with us and working diligently to resolve this. We don’t have a precise timeline yet, but we’re hopeful this issue will be sorted soon.

Subscribe now

In the meantime, I invite you to revisit some of our past conversations—particularly on topics like workplace culture, belonging, and the strength of kind leadership as we gear up for more powerful episodes ahead. This week’s episode with former CEO of WD-40, Garry Ridge will release as soon as this is resolved. I know many of you know his writing from his co-writing with Ken Blanchard, and from his newly releasing book Any Dumbass Can Do It. I’ve been forward to releasing this interview with a former CEO of a large, global company who gets it. He’s an Australian-Californian, and yet his leadership has been formed from listening to tribal leaders in Fiji and his own employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay tuned for it’s release as soon as this technical handup is resolved by the Megaphone and Spotify teams.

🎧 Stay subscribed, stay curious, and thank you for continuing to make a world of difference with me. I appreciate you, and you matter to me. Keep being you, and keep making a difference.

Warmly,
Lori

🌏 Join the Conversation & Stay Connected! 🌍

If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my Substack so you never miss a post. Together, we’re building a community that challenges the status quo, embraces different perspectives, and makes a real impact in our workplaces and beyond.

💡 Subscribe now to get fresh insights straight to your inbox:

A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

As a tech executive, podcast host, a polyglot I'm here to share my perspective, and also here to hear yours. When we bring different brains around the table and deeply listen, we can do outstanding things together that make the world better.

🎧 Listen & share A World of Difference podcast for more conversations that matter.

💬 Join the discussion—drop a comment, share your thoughts, and pass this along to someone who needs it!

Let’s keep making a difference—together. 🌎

#Podcasting #GoogleCloudOutage #Megaphone #SpotifyPodcasts #DigitalResilience #TechOutage #LeadershipPodcast #AWorldOfDifference #LoriAdamsBrown #DifferenceMakers #WorkCulture #Belonging #TalentDevelopment #WomenInLeadership

It’s called:
Predapastors Posing as Pro-Woman Protectors and Labeling Women as the Problem
Toxic Masculinity, Saddleback, and the Southern Baptist Convention

This is not a post for the faint of heart.
It’s for those who are ready to confront what’s really happening behind the scenes in certain Southern Baptist church leadership spaces—where image often matters more than integrity, and where too often women are scapegoated while the wolves wear shepherd’s clothing.

If you’ve ever wondered:

• Why women leaders keep getting pushed out while “protectors” rise unchecked

• How toxic masculinity disguises itself as biblical manhood

• What Saddleback’s removal and Rick Warren’s legacy really reveal about the SBC’s direction

...this is the post that connects the dots.

🔓 Free to read until this Friday only—then it goes back behind the paywall.
👉 Read it here before it locks

Please share with anyone who needs the courage to name what they’ve seen, but maybe didn’t have the words for.

We need each other.
And we need the truth.

Lori

Subscribe now

🌏 Join the Conversation & Stay Connected! 🌍

If this resonated with you, I’d love for you to subscribe to my Substack so you never miss a post. Together, we’re building a community that challenges the status quo, embraces different perspectives, and makes a real impact in our workplaces and beyond.

💡 Subscribe now to get fresh insights straight to your inbox:

A World of Difference by Lori Adams-Brown

As a tech executive, podcast host, a polyglot I'm here to share my perspective, and also here to hear yours. When we bring different brains around the table and deeply listen, we can do outstanding things together that make the world better.

🎧 Listen & share A World of Difference podcast for more conversations that matter.

💬 Join the discussion—drop a comment, share your thoughts, and pass this along to someone who needs it!

Let’s keep making a difference—together. 🌎