I've spent 20+ years in marketing and commercial growth strategy, from Big Four global marketing holding companies to executive leadership and entrepreneurship, and I've always been fascinated by why organizations behave the way they do. I've seen great growth strategies fail because the organization wasn't designed to execute them. I've watched competence lose to politics, founders confuse loyalty with business value, and talented people quietly compensate for broken systems. I believe employees shouldn't need extraordinary resilience to survive organizational dysfunction. That belief, and a fascination with how ant colonies coordinate millions without a boss, led me to write Built to Hold.
I wrote...
Built to Hold: What Ant Colonies Reveal About Building Effective Organizations
This book named a problem I've watched sink brilliant founders: a company full of smart people that still can't make a smart decision without the person at the top.
I loved its argument that hiring intelligent people doesn't automatically create an intelligent organization, because I've seen it play out again and again in my work in commercial growth strategy. Exceptional talent, ambitious plans, impressive resources, and still poor decisions.
It made me realize the problem usually isn't a lack of intelligence. It's an organization that can't use the intelligence it already has because everything has to pass through one person. That's an uncomfortable read for any founder, and I mean that as a compliment.
Collective Intelligence: How to Build a Business That's Smarter Than You
"Sundberg and Begg have produced an essential guide to help leaders tap their organization's full potential by creating the conditions for critical thinking, clear communication, and nimble execution."
Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Power of Regret, Drive, and To Sell is Human
Enduringly successful companies don't rely on a genius CEO. They build collective intelligence, systematically empowering everyone, from the boardroom to the shop floor, to use their brains and apply them to the problems and opportunities that matter most.
The iPhone wasn't the brainchild of Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet didn't…
I've sat in executive meetings where everyone understood the problem and the entire conversation was carefully built to avoid it. This book finally explained why.
I was fascinated by how intelligent, well-intentioned people create defensive routines to protect themselves from embarrassment and conflict, and how often those routines form around a founder whose decisions have become too risky to question. I've watched leaders get so invested in defending a choice that challenging it felt more dangerous than letting it fail.
What I value most is that it doesn't stop at diagnosis. Spotting dysfunction is easy; creating the conditions for people to confront it is the hard part, and this book helped me get better at it.
Discussing the Undiscussable: A Guide to Overcoming Defensive Routines in the Workplace
Since his 1990 landmark book Overcoming Organizational Defenses, Chris Argyris has extensively researched and written about how well-meaning, smart people create vicious cycles of defensive behavior to protect themselves from embarrassment and threat. In Discussing the Undiscussable, Bill Noonan enlivens the scholarly work of Chris Argyris through the use of reflective exercises and easy-to-read chapters that illuminate the basic human experience endemic to the creation of defensive routines. This book offers hope for altering organizational defensive routines by leveraging the greatest opportunity for change-the way we think and act.
Discussing the Undiscussable provides a set of practical "how to do"…
The Smart Mission brings together NASA’s most important lessons on how people, knowledge, and systems shape complex projects.
Drawing on decades of experience at NASA—including my time as the agency’s first Chief Knowledge Officer—this book explains why mission success depends less on process and more on culture, learning, and collaboration.…
This book confirmed something I'd suspected for years: a harmonious leadership team isn't necessarily a healthy one.
Sometimes everyone agrees because the idea is excellent. Sometimes everyone agrees because the founder is in the room and disagreeing has consequences. Edmondson gave me the language to tell the difference. I loved her distinction between making it safe to speak up and letting performance expectations slide, because I've seen leaders get both wrong.
From a growth perspective, a team that won't admit mistakes or challenge assumptions is a serious competitive disadvantage. I come back to this book whenever a room goes suspiciously quiet.
Conquer the most essential adaptation to the knowledge economy
The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth offers practical guidance for teams and organizations who are serious about success in the modern economy. With so much riding on innovation, creativity, and spark, it is essential to attract and retain quality talent-but what good does this talent do if no one is able to speak their mind? The traditional culture of "fitting in" and "going along" spells doom in the knowledge economy. Success requires a continuous influx of new ideas, new challenges, and critical…
This book gave a name to the work I've always found most valuable and least rewarded: bringing people together across boundaries so they can actually solve problems.
I've spent my career moving between marketing, sales, operations, and the executive team, and I've learned that performance usually breaks down between functions, not within them. In founder-led companies, the founder often becomes the only bridge, which is exactly how they become the bottleneck.
I loved that the authors treat convening as real leadership, not a soft skill. The people who connect the gaps are often indispensable, yet they rarely fit neatly on an org chart. This book made me want to build organizations that create more of them.
Systems Convening: A Crucial Form of Leadership for the 21st Century
The book shines a light on the important work that many people are doing around the world. You may not have heard about them; what they do is rarely in their job description. You may not even be aware of what they do; they tend to act as enablers rather than taking credit or seeking the spotlight. But they are here—working to make a difference in complex social landscapes. We call them systems conveners.
Systems conveners enable learning across boundaries, connect people across silos, and convene them to work on what they see can be achieved if a broader range…
To create innovative, collaborative, and high-performing organizations, we need a new leadership model.
Speaker, consultant, and former Silicon Valley executive Minette Norman is committed to inspiring leaders by sharing some of the most important things she learned over the decades she spent in the corporate world, such as: every human…
I've never believed toxic workplaces can be explained by a few difficult personalities, and this book backed up that instinct.
What gripped me was how it shows toxicity developing over time, through pressure, leadership habits, and behaviors that slowly become normal. I've watched organizations reward loyalty over competence, excuse destructive behavior from influential people, and then act surprised when their best people leave.
In founder-led companies, when only one person can say no to bad behavior, toxicity becomes a bottleneck problem too. Replacing an individual rarely fixes the conditions that created the problem. This book reminded me that culture isn't what leaders say they value. It's what they consistently reward, excuse, and allow.
Shortlisted in the 2024 Business Book Awards (People, Culture & Management category)
Toxic organizational cultures and leadership have led to major reputational failures, with the greatest impact felt by the people who dedicate their careers to working for these organizations. And yet organizations do not become toxic overnight. They do not consciously set out to break rules and regulations, nor do they actively seek wrongdoing. This book defines toxic culture, explains how toxic cultures emerge over time, and provides practical approaches supported by in-depth research for overcoming a toxic culture at the individual, team, and organizational level.
Built to Hold is a practical guide for founders, business owners, and executives who want organizations that can grow, withstand pressure, and function without constant intervention. Drawing unexpected lessons from ant colonies, it challenges familiar assumptions about leadership, hierarchy, accountability, and culture, and exposes the dysfunction we've learned to accept as normal: endless meetings, unclear ownership, heroic employees compensating for broken systems, and leaders who confuse control with effectiveness.
Part organizational design manual, part reality check, Built to Hold introduces structural intelligence, a practical framework for building organizational resilience. It's for anyone who has ever worked in corporate America and wondered, "Why on earth do we do things this way?" Because sometimes the problem isn't the people. It's the way the organization was built.
