Prologue: Mirror, Mirror (But Distorted as Hell)
We don’t see the world as it is - we see it as we are. Through cracked lenses, Instagram filters, Fox News dopamine hits, and NPR tote bags of self-satisfaction. We’re walking kaleidoscopes pretending we’ve got 20/20 vision, all while judging everyone else’s prescription.
We’re the species that stares into the abyss and then asks it for a LinkedIn endorsement. We see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and then blame “the algorithm” for confirming our every bias. Our brains are not search engines—they’re reality-bending PR firms working overtime to make us the misunderstood hero of every story.
Take a look around. Everyone’s got their own custom lens now—designer-made by trauma, tribalism, and ten thousand podcast episodes. Reality? That’s just the stuff we agree to edit out so our version of the story feels less... problematic.
You think your neighbor’s a jerk because he doesn’t wave? Maybe he thinks you’re a lunatic who waters your succulents with kombucha. You think France hates America because of our foreign policy? They think we’re a nation of toddlers with nukes and ranch dressing.
Context. Is. A. Bitch.
We celebrate “perspective” like it’s some enlightened virtue, but in truth it’s the world’s most unstable currency—traded wildly between outrage, ignorance, and a dash of secondhand TEDx wisdom. One person’s “cultural appreciation” is another’s “why are you wearing that headdress to Coachella?” And don’t even get me started on what the Swiss think of us. (Spoiler: nothing. They’re too busy being rich, smug, and neutral.)
This piece is about the lenses—yours, mine, and that of the country that thinks it's your moral superior while secretly copying your Netflix password and drone policy.
It’s a guided tour through perception—the warped funhouse mirrors of identity, upbringing, culture, politics, media, nationalism, and that one ex who still insists you “ghosted” them when all you did was move on with your life (and block them on six platforms).
It’s about how we see each other, how we blur each other, and how, if we’re brave enough, we can maybe, maybe adjust our focus before the next civilizational pile-up.
So buckle up, wipe your lenses, and drop the smug.
Because this time, the problem isn’t fake news - It’s your eyes.
Chapter I: Childhood Optometry – Where Your Lens First Got Blurred
You didn’t choose your worldview. It was assigned to you—early, loudly, and often by people who thought they were doing you a favor. From the moment you emerged into the world and someone declared you boy, girl, gifted, weird, allergic to peanuts, allergic to honesty, or just a “handful,” your lens was installed like bloatware on a used corporate laptop—barely functional, impossible to delete, and somehow still controlling everything you see.
Obedience earned you gold stars. Curiosity earned you a behavioral aide. Sarcasm? That got you a warning—unless your parents had the right insurance or you had the charm to pass it off as “precocious.” By kindergarten, you’d already learned that truth was negotiable, context was subjective, and appearances mattered most when your grandmother was visiting or a school evaluator was in the hallway.
This was your first lens fitting. You didn’t opt in. It was bestowed upon you by a long line of emotionally sun-damaged ancestors doing their best with their own cracked frames.
Your Boomer father believed Vietnam built character and that emotions were best handled by a stiff drink and a weekend project involving power tools. Your Gen X mother—blessed with sarcasm and a Chardonnay habit—told you to be yourself while simultaneously editing your Halloween costume for political correctness and quietly scrolling Zillow for houses far from your soccer league. Your Millennial babysitter taught you TikTok dances and gluten avoidance and how to cry without ruining your eyeliner. Your Gen Z sibling identifies as a sentient anxiety spiral with decent Wi-Fi—and frankly, they're not wrong.
Public school didn’t offer much of a reset. If anything, it made the prescription stronger.
There was the Color Wheel of Oppression wheeled in during fifth grade, left unexplained and unsettling, as if diversity could be sorted by Pantone codes:
By middle school, you understood the hierarchy: who mattered, who didn’t, and how far you could go before drawing the wrong kind of attention. “Critical thinking” was encouraged, but only if it aligned with the rubric, the budget, and the unspoken rule that Kyle was allowed to vape in the bathroom but you got detention for asking how babies were made.
By then, your lens was no longer just fitted. It was fused. And not because you wanted it that way. But because survival demanded it. Conformity became a kind of social camouflage. And clarity? That was dangerous. That made you visible.
By high school, the playground had matured into a social stock exchange. Cliques became cliques with branding. The bullies wore varsity jackets or future law school hoodies. The class clown would one day pitch startups; the class president would eventually vote against your healthcare. It all looked new, but the rules hadn’t changed. You didn’t graduate out of the game. You just stopped getting recess.
The comparisons between the playground and the boardroom aren’t metaphors—they’re barely exaggerations. Cliques still run everything. The loudest still win. Bullies still rise. Popularity still trumps competence, except now there are quarterly earnings calls and shareholder lawsuits to keep score. In childhood, the kid who brought snacks was the hero. In the corporate world, the exec who brings donuts still gets laid off during a merger.
You never really left the jungle gym. The slides got steeper, the stakes got higher, and the swings? They’re IPOs now.
Same lens. Same rules. Same warped funhouse.
The only difference? Now you’re the one deciding who gets a turn.
Chapter II: America the Blur-tiful
We like to think of ourselves as the moral compass of the modern world. A shining city on a hill. The adult in the room.
But lately? That compass seems to be spinning like a knocked-over Roomba in a Crate & Barrel. The battery’s corroded, the needle is tipsy, and the instruction manual was misplaced somewhere between Desert Storm and Despacito.
To ourselves, we’re still the brave, the free, the exceptional—waving foam fingers at the rest of the world like we just invented democracy and denim.
To everyone else, we’re that loud guy at Starbucks screaming “I PAY YOUR SALARY” at the barista who dared to offer oat milk.
Ask France, Nigeria, or Canada what they think of “American context,” and you’ll get the polite international version of an eye-roll. The French believe we’re emotionally constipated, perpetually over-caffeinated, and spiritually allergic to nuance. Nigerians think we’re overprotected, overmedicated, and wildly underdressed. Canadians? They view us like a chaotic ex—loud, unpredictable, addicted to fireworks, and always one IPA away from declaring martial law.
We still see ourselves as the protagonists of civilization’s great narrative - The rest of the world sees us as a bloated, overfunded Netflix series that should’ve been canceled after Season 2 but keeps getting renewed because the advertisers are afraid of backlash.
Our national lens is cracked—badly—but instead of fixing it, we’ve slapped some patriotic duct tape over it, layered on a sepia Instagram filter called 1945, and declared ourselves “back, baby!”
We think we’re storming the beaches of Normandy - The rest of the world sees us storming the Capitol in buffalo hats and tactical yoga pants.
We export American culture like it’s a BOGO coupon for chaos.
Freedom! Capitalism! Cancel culture! Gun violence! Endless reboots of Friends!
Meanwhile, we import judgment:
Even our allies have grown tired of our Greatest Hits album - Exceptionalism. Freedom Fries. The illusion of meritocracy.
We’re the friend who shows up late, talks the loudest, spills wine on your carpet, and then gives a TED Talk about resilience.
We like to think of ourselves as the world’s therapist—wise, principled, and always ready with advice.
But everyone else sees us as the one who needs a 90-day hold and a media detox.
And the hypocrisy? Oh, we bake it into everything:
America sees itself as the flashlight in the global darkness.
But more often, we’re just the glare—blinding, uninvited, and hard to ignore.
Chapter III: Cancel, Cultivate, or Cry – The Media’s Lens Rental Program
Once upon a time, the news told us what happened - Now it tells us who to cancel, who to pity, and what facial expression to wear while pretending to care.
We don’t consume information anymore - We accessorize with it.
CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NPR, Bloomberg, BBC, Al Jazeera—every outlet now offers a carefully curated lens. Want to feel betrayed? Enraged? Smug? There’s a package for that. Your news is no longer a mirror—it’s a mood board. A personalized playlist of confirmation bias, outrage highs, and that slow, bitter burn of superiority.
The algorithm doesn’t show us the world. It shows us ourselves—reflected back with better lighting, higher saturation, and fewer contradictions. It’s not a feed. It’s a dopamine drip. And we are junkies. Every single one of us.
And let’s not pretend we’re just “staying informed.”
We’re chasing our heroin hit of 24/7 political vomit.
Russia versus Ukraine. Iran versus Israel. Israel versus the world.
A nuclear standoff in one tab, a TikTok dance breakdown of Gaza in another.
Cable news doesn’t report—it cycles through geopolitical catastrophes like a DJ spinning war crimes to a room full of glazed-eyed subscribers.
We don’t read the news anymore. We mainline it.
We rage-scroll between Amazon purchases. We cry for civilians in one browser window and compare airfare in another. We watch buildings crumble in real time, nod grimly, and then move on to a meme about “Late-Stage Capitalism.”
There’s no arc to the narrative anymore. No resolution. No context.
Just a continuous stream of shouting, death tolls, hashtags, and commentary from people who still think Ukraine is a city and Gaza is a Starbucks blend.
And if you think you’re immune—because you read The Atlantic and not the algorithm—you’re just a higher-class addict. You wear your media like a tailored suit, but it’s still a costume.
The truth is, journalism has become reality TV in a trench coat - Every story is a crisis. Every crisis is a franchise. And every franchise comes with merch, op-eds, and a trending hashtag by noon.
Cancel, cultivate, or cry—those are your choices.
Cancel what offends you. Cultivate what flatters you. Cry at whatever goes viral:
And somewhere beneath the headlines and the outrage and the clicks, the world continues to burn.
But you’re too busy debating whether your lens is “woke” or “based” to notice that the fire is real—and it’s at your feet.
Chapter IV: The Global Rearview Mirror
If perception is reality, then America has long mistaken its own reflection for a global endorsement.
Once, we fancied ourselves the grown-up at the table. The architect of liberty. The savior of democracies. We wore the crown of moral leadership, often uninvited, and occasionally upside down.
But the mirror has shifted—and the world is no longer applauding.
From abroad, the image of America is less Franklin Delano Roosevelt and more Franklin from Peanuts—anxious, erratic, and always shouting from the corner of the frame. What was once a superpower now often resembles a viral clip—chaotic, incoherent, and impossible to look away from.
We used to bomb countries for “freedom” - Now we ban books about it.
We exported democracy like it was Coca-Cola—heavily marketed, highly addictive, and guaranteed to erode foundational structures over time. And then, as if on cue, we stormed our own Capitol like it was a Walmart Black Friday doorbuster sale.
From the global balcony, the verdict is increasingly unanimous: America isn’t leading the free world anymore. It’s performing for it.
And the world? Oh, it’s watching.
To Japan: we’re the aging action star still doing his own stunts. There’s admiration, sure—but it’s tinged with quiet disbelief that we’ve managed to pair Silicon Valley innovation with school shootings and partisan gridlock.
To South Korea: we’re the flashy exchange student who peaked in the ‘90s but still walks around like he invented charisma. They revere our culture, stream our music, even admire our startups—but recoil when we lecture them on resilience while tripping over our own social contracts.
To India: we are both aspiration and cautionary tale. A country where genius scales, yes—but also where traffic halts for arguments about Dr. Seuss. They want our ingenuity, not our chaos. Our iPhones, not our identity crises.
To the UAE: we are a business opportunity gift-wrapped in hypocrisy. A nation that talks peace while selling weapons, moralizes on Monday and monetizes on Tuesday, and holds press conferences on ethics from luxury hotels.
To Thailand: we’re that rich, unpredictable uncle—extravagant, generous, often absurd. We tip well, vacation hard, and occasionally preach about democracy between tequila shots and pharmaceutical commercials.
To Canada: we’re the fireworks-obsessed neighbor who keeps the music too loud and the lawn too dry. They love us, mostly, but they’ve deadbolted the door and are quietly Googling dual citizenship for their pets.
To Mexico: we are the totalitarian guest who eats all the food, breaks the dishes, builds a wall between the kitchen and the dining room, and then wonders why the host isn’t smiling.
To Russia: we’re a decadent, declining empire—a bloated parody of ourselves, half reality show, half cautionary tale. They sneer at our virtue while bingeing our culture and quietly betting on our collapse.
To China: we’re the over-leveraged headliner refusing to leave the stage. The past-his-prime rock star still clinging to the mic while the next act waits in the wings, quietly buying the venue, the sound system, and the tour rights.
And to the rest of the world?:
Of course, we still believe everyone wants to be us. That buried deep in every global citizen is a yearning for a green card and a selfie in front of Cinderella’s Castle.
But the truth? More and more countries are treating American exceptionalism the way they treat gluten: fine for some, deeply irritating for others, and often best avoided at dinner parties.
And yet—for all the fatigue, all the eye-rolling, all the international cringe—they still can’t quit us:
Because here’s the rub: they don’t admire us the way they used to - But they don’t ignore us either.
We’re no longer the world’s moral compass. We’re the magnet that disrupts everyone else’s:
Still loud. Still unfiltered. Still—somehow—on stage.
Because the truth is, they’re bigger junkies than we are.
Just as hooked on us - as we are on ourselves.
Chapter V: Clients, Colleagues, and C-Suite Kaleidoscopes
After four decades in the boardroom—watching CEOs rise, fall, flame out, reinvent, and occasionally transcend—I’ve come to a simple conclusion: the most valuable asset in any company isn’t strategy, product, or culture. It’s perception.
In the corporate world, perception doesn’t just shape reality. It becomes the business model.
Everyone involved in the executive ecosystem is looking at the same person—the same title, same résumé, same aggressively lit headshot—but depending on their vantage point, they see a different creature entirely. A savior. A tyrant. A spreadsheet. A TED Talk in loafers.
The CEO, as it turns out, is less a person than a prism.
To the board, the CEO is a rare specimen
Not just a leader, but an organism so unique, so irreplaceable, that even a whisper of dissatisfaction must be met with equity grants and contractual poetry. If the share price falls, it’s the market’s fault. If morale tanks, it’s due to “necessary cultural evolution.” If the CEO uses the company jet to attend a silent wellness retreat in the Maldives during a hiring freeze, it’s rebranded as “executive recovery optimization.”
I’ve watched boards rationalize pay packages that would make oil sheikhs blush. I’ve seen them defend leadership that misses every financial target but nails the brand refresh. Why? Because the CEO is their hire, their bet, and in many cases, their shield. They’re not wearing rose-colored glasses. They’re wearing the ones they polished themselves.
To shareholders, the lens is far less romantic
The CEO is a variable expense with legs. A line item in a quarterly fantasy league. If the stock is up, all sins are forgiven. If the stock is down, it’s time to circulate names and dial the activist fund. Shareholders don't care how many employees hugged the CEO at the last all-hands—they care about EPS, ROIC, and whatever acronym Bloomberg just pushed through their feed.
“Leadership” is great. But they’d trade it for a half-point bump in margins and a buyback plan announced before lunch.
To activist investors, the lens narrows further—precision-tuned and merciless
They don’t see a CEO. They see a bloated asset in need of restructuring. A glorified spokesperson standing between them and a higher multiple. These investors don’t ask, “What’s your long-term vision?” They ask, “What can we sell by next quarter?”
They arrive not with questions but with decks. PowerPoint sabers laced with phrases like “unlocking value,” “strategic disaggregation,” and “right-sizing leadership.” If the CEO doesn’t pivot fast enough, they’ll be replaced by someone who can—ideally a spreadsheet that knows how to cut headcount by sunrise.
To employees, the CEO is a celestial being: distant, powerful, occasionally visible, and frequently misunderstood
They appear on Town Hall Zooms in branded fleece, speaking in vague but inspiring verbs—“accelerate,” “transform,” “reimagine”—before disappearing back into their bi-coastal calendar of innovation summits and tax-deductible Davos panels.
From the cubicles and Slack channels below, the CEO can seem like a well-meaning deity who blesses some and smites others with reorgs and org charts no one understands. One week, they’re touting the people as “our greatest asset.” The next, half the workforce is invited to “explore new opportunities.”
Employees don’t see leadership. They see tone-deaf memos.
They see coffee bars replacing pensions.
They see stock awards just out of reach and job descriptions that include “must thrive in ambiguity.”
And to the public, the CEO is a symbol
They are no longer just businesspeople—they are cultural proxies, lightning rods, Rorschach tests. To some, they are superheroes—bold, disruptive, genius. To others, they are Bond villains in Allbirds. They are capitalism made flesh, with bonus clauses.
The public doesn’t analyze performance—they track headlines. A CEO crying on CNBC? Empathy. A CEO dancing at a product launch? Tone-deaf. A CEO testifying before Congress with dry mouth and legal counsel? Must be guilty.
And still, somehow, after being filtered through all these lenses, warped and magnified and memed, the CEO opens their compensation summary and lands on the same reaction:
“Is that all?”
You could hand them $40 million in total comp, and if the benchmarking says their peer made $41 million, you’ll get the same wounded look you’d expect from someone handed a plastic trophy at the Oscars.
That’s the final, fatal lens in this kaleidoscope—the CEO’s own. And it’s always a little cracked. They don’t see their package in context. They see it in comparison. And comparison, as we know, is the thief of satisfaction. And apparently also of gratitude.
I've watched this movie play out more times than I can count.
The table is long. The documents are thick. The legal disclaimers are read aloud.
And then the CEO leans back and says—just barely audible—
“So… are we saying I’m below market?”
It’s never enough:
And that, right there, is the dirty little secret of corporate compensation: it’s not really about money. It’s about ego, equity, narrative, and status—all wrapped in a glossy PDF and pitched as governance.
It’s not about performance - It’s about performance art:
After forty years of watching it all, I can say this:
The C-suite doesn’t just run on strategy or execution - It runs on mirrors. On stories told through fogged-up lenses, refracted through layers of power, pressure, and prestige.
And if no one wipes those lenses clean—if no one stops to ask what they’re actually seeing—it’s not leadership.
It’s just a very expensive illusion.
Chapter VI: The Family Funhouse
If you’ve ever felt misunderstood at work, just wait until you go home.
Corporate misperception is amateur hour compared to what awaits you at the family dinner table, where the people who claim to know you best... absolutely do not. Not now. Not ever. Not even a little.
I’ve spent over four decades advising CEOs, chairing rooms full of power, whispering into the ears of board directors worth more than most countries—and yet, every Thanksgiving, I am magically transported back to being the kid who once wore corduroy to gym class and overcooked microwave popcorn so badly the fire department had to get involved.
That’s the family lens. It’s not just distorted—it’s deliberately stuck in 1986.
You can explain your accolades, your clients, your strategic insight, your ability to restructure the entire C-suite incentive architecture of a Fortune 100 company in a single slide deck—and they will still introduce you to new in-laws as, “This is Frank. He used to collect rubber bands.”
It doesn’t matter that you manage crises bigger than the GDP of Slovenia. They remember that you failed driver’s ed. Once.
Their perception of you is ambered in time, usually right around the moment you disappointed their dream of you becoming a dentist.
You’ve built a well-known consulting firm, a legacy, a reputation on Wall Street and in boardrooms across the globe. You’ve been on TV, in the papers, on stage doing TED talks, and inside more compensation committee meetings than most people have holiday dinners. But all that vanishes the moment your aunt asks you to refill the ice and not touch the good plates.
Try explaining what you actually do.
Me: “I’m an executive pay consultant and strategy advisor to some of the most powerful CEOs and board directors on the planet.”
Them: “So… how long have you worked for the CIA?”
(True story Sports Fans - And no, they’re still not convinced I’m not covertly surveilling the cranberry sauce).
The family funhouse isn’t built on logic. It’s built on stories. Mostly old ones. Mostly wrong ones. And completely immutable. You were once shy? You are forever shy. You once wore a fedora unironically? It will be mentioned. You once dated someone who liked crystals? That is now your entire romantic history.
You could be flying in on a Gulfstream G700, disembarking with your speech from the World Economic Forum still in your coat pocket—and they’d still ask why you never finished that garage band demo tape from high school.
And if you dare to push back? To clarify? To explain?
They nod. They smile. They pass the gravy. And five minutes later, someone is telling your cousin’s new boyfriend that you “do something with pensions and conspiracy.”
Because in this house, you don’t grow up. You grow down.
You evolve, sure. But your file has already been archived under: Didn’t eat vegetables until college and Once cried during The Sound of Music.
It’s not just you. It’s all of us.
The neurosurgeon is still “the one who can’t cook rice.”
The federal judge is still “the picky eater.”
And the startup CEO? Still remembered for peeing in a ball pit at a birthday party in 1987. (He was three, but context is never invited to these dinners.)
There is something uniquely humbling—borderline medieval—about returning to the family orbit. It's a place where job titles evaporate, your LinkedIn profile doesn’t matter, and no one gives a damn about your article in Harvard Business Review because they still think you’re the one who snuck a sip of cooking sherry at age twelve.
And yet, this is what makes it real. Somehow, beneath the teasing and the time warps, there’s something oddly grounding about being seen—not as a brand, or a résumé, or a walking stock ticker—but as you. Even if that version of “you” is wildly inaccurate and insists you still need adult supervision around mashed potatoes.
The corporate world sees your edge, your polish, your acumen.
Family sees the weird mole you had removed in college.
And you know what?
That’s okay.
Because when the headlines fade, the earnings miss, and the IPO doesn’t pop the way everyone hoped, these people will still be there. Pouring boxed wine. Asking invasive questions. And yes, calling you “sport.”
So, you smile. You laugh. You refill your glass. And when your uncle corners you in the kitchen and whispers, “Be honest—are you with the CIA or not?”
You just wink.
Because at this point, it’s easier than explaining what you really do.
Chapter VII: The Great Empathy Scam
We live in an age where empathy has been rebranded.
Once a quiet act of human grace—listening, understanding, showing up—empathy is now a strategy deck. A bullet point on executive scorecards. A downloadable module in your leadership training portal. In modern culture, particularly in corporate life, empathy isn’t something you do. It’s something you signal.
Compassion used to be about presence. Now it’s about optics.
We say “walk in someone else’s shoes” right before launching a thirty-seven-part thread explaining why those shoes are problematic, culturally appropriative, and manufactured by a company whose board has insufficient gender representation. We used to help people because they were hurting. Now we help them because it enhances our personal brand.
Somewhere between the first TED Talk on “vulnerability” and the 10,000th LinkedIn post about “leading with heart,” empathy was quietly repackaged into a soft skill with sharp teeth. Not something you offer freely, but something you perform, preferably on camera, preferably with hashtags, and preferably in a branded hoodie.
It’s not empathy. It’s Empathytainment™.
It looks like caring. It sounds like compassion. But it’s been beta-tested, focus-grouped, and filtered through a well-compensated team of executive coaches. It’s the CEO who “leans into discomfort” right before greenlighting a round of layoffs. It’s the manager who talks about “creating space for difficult conversations” while silently punishing anyone who takes more than 30 minutes for lunch. It’s the board chair who opens the proxy with a letter about “stakeholder humanity,” then approves a severance package so large it needs its own zip code.
We’ve trained ourselves to sound like we care. We’ve built entire industries around the appearance of compassion. You can now hire consultants to help you “operationalize empathy.” You can license a plug-in for Slack that reminds you to check in with your team. You can even outsource your feelings to apps, bots, and AI-powered “sentiment dashboards” that quantify morale without the hassle of talking to anyone.
And all of it—every last drop—is theater.
Real empathy, the kind that costs something, the kind that requires time, energy, humility, and the risk of emotional exposure, has been quietly sidelined. It’s slow. It doesn’t scale. It doesn’t present well in quarterly reports. So, we replaced it with a cleaner version—one that’s easier to market and impossible to measure.
This is not just a business problem. It’s cultural. It’s generational. We now mistake self-disclosure for connection, and curated vulnerability for trust. Social media has taught us that authenticity is something you post, not something you earn. We cry on camera, offer “my truth,” and turn pain into personal content—all while skipping the inconvenient part of actually caring for someone else when it isn’t profitable.
Empathy has become a currency. And like all currencies, it is now subject to inflation, manipulation, and gross commodification.
We sell it in keynotes. We wear it in ad campaigns. We trade it for likes, shares, and reputation points. In the empathy economy, feelings are marketing. Suffering is a brand extension. And compassion is a thing we do just long enough to avoid litigation or go viral—whichever comes first.
This isn’t to say we’re heartless. In fact, many people desperately want to care. But we’ve so thoroughly professionalized the act of empathy that it now requires a pre-meeting, a script, and legal review. We’ve turned kindness into code-switching. And the worst part? We’ve convinced ourselves we’re good at it.
But here’s what I’ve seen, up close, over and over again in boardrooms, crisis meetings, investor calls, and “values alignment workshops”: most leaders are terrified of actual emotion. They want the language, the polish, the performance—but not the weight. Not the consequences.
I’ve sat with CEOs who’ve wept in private after cutting jobs, only to read from a sterile script the next day about “workforce agility.” I’ve watched HR leaders give stirring speeches about mental health while privately tracking how many sick days someone takes before they’re flagged as a risk. I’ve coached executives through “compassionate layoffs”—a phrase that, if we were being honest, would be classified as satire.
Empathy, real empathy, is expensive. It demands your attention. It exposes your blind spots. It threatens your efficiency. It doesn’t fit neatly into OKRs, DEI dashboards, or QBRs. It requires that you stop, listen, and sometimes, just sit with someone else’s pain and not fix it—a terrifying concept for people whose careers are built on fixing things.
And yet… real empathy is still out there.
It shows up late at night when no one’s looking. In the quiet moments when a leader calls—not to check a box, but to check on a person. When a colleague says, “I’ve got you,” and means it. When a board member decides not to spin the truth. When a CEO tells their team, “I made a mistake,” without a comms plan to soften the blow.
Those moments don’t trend. They don’t scale. They don’t make it into the annual letter to shareholders. But they’re real. They matter. And they are what separates leadership from performance.
Because the truth is this: anyone can learn to say the right words. But empathy isn’t in the words. It’s in the pause between them.
And until we remember that?
We’re just selling kindness with a margin and calling it culture.
Chapter VIII: Changing Your Lens Without Breaking Your Neck
Perspective is a fragile thing—easier to defend than dismantle, easier to preach than to change. We cling to our lenses like heirlooms, polishing them with confirmation bias and passing them down like they’re family jewels. Admitting that we might need a new one? That takes work. And possibly a helmet.
In today's culture, changing your mind is seen less as growth and more as defection. Try revising your worldview in public and watch how quickly you're labeled: flip-flopper, traitor, fake, weak, or worse—indecisive. We now conflate conviction with calcification. People want you consistent, even if you're consistently wrong.
But real change? Real change requires humility. And caffeine. And therapy. And possibly one good international incident, or at the very least, a week without Wi-Fi.
The truth is, shifting your lens isn’t some abstract act of enlightenment—it’s a full-contact sport. It requires you to interrogate your upbringing, your assumptions, and your algorithm. It means realizing that your opinions might be shaped more by your ZIP code than your IQ. It means getting comfortable with discomfort, ambiguity, and, occasionally, the horror of realizing you’ve been the villain in someone else’s story.
Fortunately, there are tools. You could travel—not in the influencer, “look at me pet this goat in Morocco” way—but in the quiet, wandering-through-a-market-with-no-Google-Translate way. You could read—books, not tweets. Things with chapters. Things that force you to sit with a thought longer than the lifespan of a TikTok trend.
Or you could do something truly radical.
You could shut up and listen.
Not performative listening. Not the kind where you nod solemnly and prepare your rebuttal while someone else is talking. But actual listening—the kind that threatens your worldview and stretches your brain like a latex balloon over a watermelon of nuance.
This is difficult. We are not trained to hear perspectives that challenge our own. We are trained to defend, to reframe, to outwit. Our political discourse is a gladiator match, not a conversation. Our media diet is a buffet of validation. We are fed a constant stream of “you’re right” with a side of “they’re evil,” until the very idea of learning something new feels like betrayal.
Which is why most of us don’t bother. We harden into our positions. We curate our friendships. We create intellectual echo chambers so cozy they might as well come with heated floors and blackout curtains. And when someone dares to open a window? We call them dangerous.
But here’s the irony: the people who change lenses the most are often the ones with the clearest vision. They’ve learned that holding tightly to certainty is a good way to go blind. They know that being right isn’t the same as being wise. They’ve learned that growth isn’t linear, and that grace is something you extend not because someone deserves it—but because you remember what it was like to be wrong.
In my four decades in the boardroom, I’ve seen billionaires blind to context, executives allergic to feedback, and high performers so calcified in their worldview that they couldn’t see their own downfall coming. I’ve also seen great leaders—rare ones—stop mid-sentence and say, “Wait. I might be wrong.” It’s not flashy. It won’t trend. But it’s the beginning of real vision.
Because changing your lens isn’t weakness.
It’s evolution.
And in a world that’s spinning faster every day—with louder pundits, tighter filters, and more curated identities than ever before—it may be the most courageous thing you can do.
So go ahead. Shift your lens. Widen the aperture. Let in some light.
Just remember to brace your neck. The truth hits hard.
Chapter IX: When the World Sees You Naked (In Not Such a Good Way)
We used to worry about being misunderstood. Now we should be terrified of being seen accurately.
We curate our image like we’re pitching a Netflix series: Here’s me being “authentic” in the right lighting. Here’s my dog, my promotion, my TED Talk clip with the auto-captions synced. We post our curated humanity and hope the algorithm gives it a hug.
But perception is not your friend. Perception is a bitch. And she’s drunk, she’s vengeful, and she screenshots.
You thought you were the protagonist. Turns out you’re just a glitch in someone else’s rage thread.
Welcome to America 2025: Red State, Blue State, Deep State, Deep Fake. No matter what you believe, someone’s got the receipts—and they’re one upload away from making you go viral for all the wrong reasons. You don’t even need to be famous to be ruined. You just need a Wi-Fi connection, a public opinion, and bad luck.
And when it hits, it hits hard. You don’t just lose your dinner reservation at The French Laundry. You lose your friends. You lose your job. You lose your spouse. You lose your life—or at least the version of it that used to be allowed to exist outside of a congressional hearing or Slack thread.
Because everyone has their lens, and no one’s is set to wide angle anymore.
One camp sees you as the resistance. Another sees you as the disease. And the third? They’re the ones taking notes for HR.
We used to fear surveillance states. Now we fund them. We wear watches that track our pulse during panic attacks and doorbells that spy on the guy next door stealing your Amazon package of elderberry supplements and guilt. Your fridge is reporting your snack patterns to a marketing firm in Helsinki. Your car is sharing your GPS shame spiral with your insurance company. You’re not off the grid—you are the grid.
And then there’s cancel culture. The morality Hunger Games for the dopamine era. One wrong word and you're no longer “misquoted.” You're digitally disemboweled. The mob won’t stop until you’re bleeding apology videos and your LinkedIn says “currently exploring new opportunities and therapy.”
But let’s be real: it’s not always unfair. Sometimes you did say the thing. Sometimes you were the jerk. Sometimes you weren’t misunderstood—you were just a walking HR violation in a Patagonia vest.
But the punishment isn’t justice. It’s performance art. An identity sacrifice to the gods of moral superiority.
And deep down, everyone knows it.
That’s why we’re all scared shitless. We live in a time when even nuance has a cancellation clause. If you change your mind, you’re a sellout. If you admit fault, you’re weak. If you ask a question, you’re problematic. Everyone’s walking on eggshells with landmines underneath.
You’re not navigating culture. You’re trying to survive a minefield in a mirror maze, wearing a t-shirt that says “Ask me about my opinion.”
And don’t even think about forgiveness. That’s for Hallmark movies and church basements. Not for the internet.
Because redemption doesn’t trend. Outrage does. And once you're labeled, you're laminated.
Still want to be “seen”?
Because these days, being seen means being misread. Misquoted. Misused. And then—misplaced.
We are not people. We are optics. And the world sees what it wants to see, usually through a cracked lens with a side of projection and last night’s unresolved trauma.
So, you do what the rest of us do.
You edit. You polish. You build a brand instead of a life. You post your curated personality and pray your past doesn’t show up wearing flip-flops and calling you out in the comments. You hire PR before you hire a therapist. You “humbly announce” your awards while privately spiraling. You turn your pain into content and your shame into strategy.
And still—still—they might come for you.
Because being naked in public used to be a nightmare.
Now? It’s just another Manic Monday…..
Chapter X: Context and Consequences – The Global ROI of Seeing Clearly
Imagine, just for a moment, that we stopped squinting through the fog of fear, projection, and partisan anesthesia. That we set down the Instagram filters, the curated outrage, and the 30-year-old baggage from our stepdad’s Reagan-era rants. What would happen if we—collectively, painfully, bravely—saw the world as it is instead of as it flatters, frightens, or financially rewards us to believe?
Would we make better decisions?
Probably. We might even elect fewer sociopaths - The bar is low. Right now, we vet presidential candidates with less scrutiny than we apply to DoorDash reviews.
If we could actually see clearly—without the echo chamber’s funhouse distortions—we might finally understand that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequence. That empathy isn’t a marketing strategy. That not every border is a wall, and not every critique is a crucifixion.
We might stop mistaking confidence for competence.
Stop rewarding charisma over character.
Stop paying Instagram “nutritionists” more than ER doctors.
We might start asking: Who benefits from my blindness?
Who profits from my panic?
Who designed this lens I’ve been peering through like it’s gospel?
And we might find that the answer, nine times out of ten, is: someone with a quarterly earnings call and a yacht named "Privacy."
Let’s talk ROI—return on insight. If corporations actually saw their employees instead of just their headcount, maybe burnout wouldn’t be a badge of honor. If teachers were valued like influencers, maybe “read a book” wouldn’t sound like an insult. If empathy were baked into global policy, maybe we’d stop treating refugees like trespassers and start treating them like survivors.
But clarity is expensive. It demands discomfort. It requires unlearning what made us feel safe, superior, or special.
It means recognizing that the “enemy” might just be someone reading a different headline. That your political opposite isn’t necessarily evil—they’re just playing chess with different rules, on a board made by a defense contractor.
And seeing clearly means we have to face the consequences of our actions—not just as individuals, but as a culture.
It means asking whether our “thoughts and prayers” should come with a refund policy.
Whether our democracy is a system or a symptom.
Whether our global leadership is earned—or just loud.
It means that if we can no longer afford blindness, then we sure as hell can’t afford arrogance either.
Seeing clearly won’t make you popular. It won’t trend. It won’t land you a book deal with a foreword by Oprah. But it might help you sleep at night. It might make you a better neighbor. A better leader. A better human.
And in the long run—the very long run—it might just be our last shot at pulling this whole spinning circus off the cliff edge, turning it around, and remembering why we climbed on the ride in the first place.
Because clarity isn’t just a virtue. It’s a survival tactic.
And the ROI?
Grace. Truth. And a shot at redemption that doesn’t require a rebrand.
But only if we can stop shouting long enough to see each other.
Chapter XI: What Would Frank Do?
Forty-plus years advising CEOs, boards, and billionaires gives you one hell of a view from the cockpit. And let me tell you: altitude doesn’t cure distortion. Some of the worst decisions I’ve witnessed came from boardrooms full of people with seven homes, five passports, and one tragically warped lens.
So, what do you do when the world looks like a kaleidoscope in a wind tunnel?
Simple. You get to work on your own damn lens.
Scrub Your Lens Weekly
Not monthly. Weekly. With books, people, pain, and joy that don’t align with your social feed or your self-image. Talk to someone who disagrees with you without trying to “win.” Read outside your genre. Listen to music you don’t understand. Let it itch a little.
Clarity doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from friction.
Audit Your Biases Like a CFO on Caffeine
If your worldview hasn’t shifted since college, I’ve got news: you’re not “loyal to your values”—you’re in ideological rigor mortis. Pull a quarterly report on what assumptions you’re operating from. Update them like firmware.
Growth isn’t a betrayal. Stagnation is.
Don’t Confuse Loud for Right
Volume is not a value. We live in a time when people believe their truth is the truth, and they yell it through ring lights and YouTube microphones like it’s gospel. But conviction without reflection is just a tantrum in a grown-up outfit.
Remember: some of the worst ideas in history were delivered with absolute certainty—and great hair.
Be Less Impressed, More Curious
The second you agree with yourself too much? Danger. The third? Narcissism. The fourth? Probably a podcast deal. Step back. Ask: Why do I believe this? What if I’m wrong? Would I respect me if I heard this from someone else?
Curiosity keeps the mind sharp. Awe dulls the blade.
Know the Difference Between Empathy and Enabling
Yes, empathy is crucial. But it’s not a blanket permission slip for bad behavior. Sometimes “understanding where someone is coming from” just means recognizing they’re coming from a place of chaos, and then choosing not to follow them there.
Set boundaries like a grown-up. Not everyone deserves access to your empathy bandwidth.
Stop Performing. Start Showing Up.
We’ve all turned into avatars. Personal brands. Strategic personalities. But people aren’t moved by polish. They’re moved by presence. Drop the pitch deck version of yourself. Show up as a human—with doubt, nuance, and, yes, humor. It’s hard to cancel someone who owns their contradictions.
Authenticity is a terrible marketing strategy, but a phenomenal leadership one.
Take Off Your Own Damn Cape
You don’t need to fix everyone. You don’t need to be the most evolved person in the room. You don’t even need to be right—just willing. Willing to listen. Willing to admit. Willing to learn. And above all: willing to change.
The best leaders I know don’t lead with ego. They lead with vision, anchored in humility.
Let others build empires on illusion. You? Build insight. And remember: no lens is ever perfect. But a lens cleaned with reflection, humor, and brutal self-awareness?
That’s the kind that sees clearly - Even in a fog of fools.
Chapter XII: The Veritas Way
At Veritas, we are not in the business of guesswork. We are not in the business of spin. We are in the business of seeing clearly—and making sure the people with power can, too.
Because executive pay and governance isn’t just a line item. It’s a message.
It tells the world what you reward. What you tolerate. What you actually value—no matter what your ESG landing page says.
Governance? That’s not a checklist. It’s the theater of judgment. Every action is weighed, recorded, and replayed at triple speed when the lights go out and the earnings drop.
And leadership? Leadership is not charisma on a stage or confidence in a press release. Leadership is the quiet, daily discipline of recognizing that you are always the last person to see your own blind spots.
So, you'd damn well better surround yourself with people who aren’t afraid to show you the mirror—and make you look into it.
That’s where we come in.
At Veritas, we help boards and executives deconstruct their narratives. We dismantle delusion. We polish away platitudes until the truth is sharp enough to cut through noise, politics, and ego.
We sit at the table—not to flatter—but to clarify.
To ask:
We believe every decision is a story. And every story is a risk.
So, we don’t fix pay plans. We fix perspective. We realign narratives so that what you say, what you do, and what you pay actually match.
We’ve walked into rooms where the air was thick with lawyers, bankers, and denial.
We’ve walked out with strategy, symmetry, and a compensation plan that doesn’t just survive scrutiny—it earns it.
Because in a world where everyone is spinning their own version of the truth, Veritas is not just a name.
It’s a warning. It’s a promise. And it’s a damn good way to govern.
Epilogue: Final Curtain, No Filter
We come into this world squinting, startled, and already shackled to a lens not of our making. Born with no manual, but plenty of baggage—cultural, generational, neurological—we inherit distortion like old silverware: unexamined, a little bent, and always in the drawer when we need it least. From the moment we first reach for language, we are taught to see—but rarely taught to question how.
And so begins the myth of objectivity.
We are told that truth is a static thing. That if you just stand still, it will reveal itself, obedient and self-evident. But truth is not a photograph. It's a moving image, edited by fear, faith, trauma, and tribe. And the difference between what’s real and what we believe is real? That’s where history is rewritten, elections are rigged, marriages disintegrate, and entire civilizations convince themselves that the other side is less human.
We build institutions on this mirage. Governments. Churches. Media empires. Multinational boards. We anoint leaders not because they see clearly, but because they reflect the distortion we’re most comfortable with. We call them visionary. Until the vision fails.
And still we double down.
We add filters. We call it branding. We curate experience until it’s digestible, palatable, profitable. We package empathy. We romanticize disruption. We praise vulnerability—until someone shows us theirs, and then we penalize it. We no longer reward clarity. We reward performance. The illusion of clarity. The marketable sheen of introspection without the actual mess of accountability.
But clarity—the real kind—isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t trend. It doesn’t flatter. It arrives like a tax audit or a late-night phone call: uninvited, inconvenient, and incapable of being spun.
So what now?
Here’s what we don’t do: we don’t rebrand the mirror. We don’t turn it into a keynote or a podcast or a TED Talk about "finding your truth." We sit down with it. We let it wreck us a little. We let it peel back the narrative, the justification, the dopamine feedback loop of our own moral certainty.
And then—slowly—we rebuild. With better questions. With less noise. With more curiosity than conclusion. With a recognition that leadership is not about who speaks first or loudest, but who is willing to be the most uncomfortable in pursuit of what is real.
At Veritas, we’ve spent decades in rooms where perception was gospel and reality was an afterthought. We’ve seen CEOs who believed their own press releases. Boards that feared truth more than failure. Organizations allergic to doubt. And we’ve helped them see—not just themselves, but each other.
This, in the end, is the work.
Not the plans. Not the policies. Not even the pay.
It’s this - Getting people who haven’t seen clearly in years to look - without flinching.
And when they do? When the distortion cracks and the image sharpens?
That’s the moment the real leadership begins.
Not with applause. Not with a LinkedIn article. But with a long silence. Followed by a longer look.
Because for once, the lens isn’t curated. It’s earned.
And for the first time, the world doesn’t just see you.
It recognizes you.
FBG
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PS: If this piece made you laugh, nod in agreement, or mutter “he’s talking about me behind my back, isn’t he?”—I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at fglassner@veritasecc.com. I personally read and reply to every message—no assistants, no AI, just me (usually with a strong espresso in hand). Whether you’re a board member, CEO, CFO, burned-out executive, investment banker, activist shareholder, client, consultant, lawyer, accountant, ex-wife, one of my beloved twin sons, AI Bot, or just a fellow traveler in the great corporate circus, I welcome the conversation.
Thanks!