For a long time, I’ve been circling something I could feel but didn’t quite have language for.
This piece is about a leadership course I created. To understand why it exists, I need to start a bit further back.
I’ve worked with entrepreneurs for decades. Smart, capable people doing real work and taking real risks. Again and again, I saw the same thing. They weren’t struggling because they lacked effort or discipline. They were struggling because the advice they had inherited simply didn’t fit the reality they were operating in.
Starting and growing a business is hard. It always will be.
But when you’re using an owner’s manual designed for large, industrial organizations, it becomes nearly impossible.
Most leadership education assumes hierarchy, positional authority, and enforcement. Entrepreneurs have very little of that. We lead almost entirely through social power, through language, trust, mood, and the futures we create with other people.
When leadership models ignore this reality, founders are left trying to apply tools that were never designed for them.
I learned a very different approach to leadership almost thirty years ago and used it to build my own company. By conventional measures, the business was successful. Over time, though, I realized I hadn’t designed it well.
I didn’t love the work we were doing for clients, and I didn’t love many of the clients themselves. I also saw how ineffective and often unethical the way many large companies treat employees and customers actually is.
That experience clarified something important.
I became committed to loving my work. I got clear about who I loved working with, entrepreneurs, and what concerns mattered most to me: business and strategy design, and leadership.
For a long time, the way I had learned this approach was difficult to teach directly. It was academic, abstract, and not especially inviting. Instead, I used it as the lens through which I helped my clients. It allowed me to make clearer assessments and design actions that worked more reliably than most conventional advice.
I always wanted to teach what truly mattered to me. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve been able to present this material in a way people actually enjoy engaging with.
Many people know my Growing a Brilliant Business work, which helps founders design businesses that fit who they are and move them toward better results. I’ve now created a GBB-style course that teaches the human-centered leadership foundations that undergird all of my work.
It’s called GBB: Art of Entrepreneurial Leadership.
It’s a peer-based course for founders who want leadership education that actually fits entrepreneurial reality. The response from those who have gone through it so far has been strong, which is what encouraged me to offer it more intentionally.
I’ve put together a short overview that explains what the course is about and why it’s different. Even if you never take the course, I think you’ll find the perspective useful.
If you’re curious or want to ask a question, you can send me a message here.