I have spent years helping organizations become more open, more transparent, more willing to trust the people who do the work. It is consulting, yes, but it is also something more personal than that word usually implies. When I sit with a leadership team and try to help them understand why their engineers are disengaged, or why their transformation initiative has stalled, the conversation almost always comes back to the same place: culture. Not culture as a slogan on a wall, but culture as the sum of what an organization actually rewards, tolerates, and punishes. Changing that is slow, difficult, deeply human work.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that the work I was doing inside organizations and the things I cared about outside of them were not separate pursuits. They were the same struggle, playing out in different arenas. In a company, I fight for transparency — for the idea that information should flow freely, that decisions should be made by the people closest to the problem, that dissent should be welcomed rather than suppressed. In society, I fight for the same things, but the language is different. There it is called free speech, public discourse, the right to read and think without interference. The underlying conviction is identical: that human systems work better when they are open.
This is why co-founding a bookshop specializing in banned literature does not feel like a detour from my professional life. It feels like its natural extension. The person who helps organizations dismantle bureaucratic silos and the person who puts censored books on shelves is the same person, motivated by the same belief. Closed systems — whether they are corporate hierarchies that hoard information or societies that suppress ideas — produce worse outcomes for everyone. Openness is not a luxury or an ideal. It is a practical necessity for any group of people trying to accomplish something meaningful together.
The same conviction
What I find most interesting is how the resistance looks the same in both arenas. In organizations, the objection to transparency is almost always framed in terms of risk. People are not ready. The information will be misunderstood. We need to control the narrative. In society, the objection to free expression follows the same pattern. Certain ideas are dangerous. People cannot be trusted to evaluate them on their own. We need to protect them from harmful content. In both cases, the underlying assumption is the same: that ordinary people, left to their own judgment, will make bad decisions. I have never found that assumption to be true. Not in organizations, and not in society.
This does not mean that openness is easy or without friction. A company that suddenly makes all its data visible will go through a painful period of adjustment. A society that protects speech it finds repugnant will have to tolerate discomfort. But the alternative — controlled information, curated ideas, managed discourse — produces something worse than discomfort. It produces stagnation. Organizations that cannot hear honest feedback from their own people eventually lose touch with reality. Societies that cannot tolerate dissent eventually lose the capacity for self-correction. The discomfort of openness is the price of staying alive, in the fullest sense of the word.
I write this not as a manifesto, but as a reflection on how the different parts of my life fit together. The consulting work, the bookshop, the public conversations about education and free thought — they are all expressions of a single, simple idea. People deserve access to information, the freedom to think about it, and the trust that they will use both responsibly. When I help an organization become more transparent, I am doing the same thing as when I place a once-banned novel on a shelf and invite someone to read it. I am saying: here is the world as it actually is. What you do with it is up to you.