Most organizations still confuse control with efficiency. They build oversight committees, sign-off layers, and approval chains in the name of “accountability.” But every redundant checkpoint is an invisible tax on trust.
The most efficient teams I’ve studied run on freedom metrics: clarity of purpose, access to information, and psychological safety. Teams build faster when they feel safe enough to question the blueprint. While we mustn’t skip governance—leaders can strive to design it so well that it disappears into flow.
As the next economy matures, time will reward the leaders who trade surveillance for structure and compliance for coherence.
What would your org’s performance look like if “freedom” replaced “friction” as your key efficiency indicator?
You can hit every KPI, scale every quarter, and still feel the quiet echo, the hum, the silent undercurrent of an organization’s success: mission burnout. The good news is this , ‘phantom pressure’ is a common occurrence. Any leader who senses a team under strain can take a big sigh of relief in realizing sometimes burnout is beyond their immediate planning, intention, or control. What leaders should caution themselves against is simply putting it off as their problem (the employee) only. More so, leadership would be extra wise to tune in if no problems come across their plate.
Imagine you are the story of Ajax. By history’s telling Ajax was every bit as worthy and heroic as Achilles, yet when it was time for a promotion the crown passed to Odysseus. Upon first-take one perceives that Ajax was a victim of his own haughtiness, self-determination, and rejection of “playing politics”. Sophocles’ tragedy Ajax(5th century BCE). Ajax believes he should inherit Achilles’ armor (as the second-greatest warrior).
Instead, the armor goes to Odysseus, the OG-Linkedin Thought Leader:
After Achilles died, his armor (divine, forged by gods) became the prize. Ajax, strongest warrior after Achilles, assumed it was his by right. Instead, King Agamemnon gave the armor to Odysseus. Why? Not because Odysseus fought better, but because he spoke better — his speech convinced the Greeks. Ajax felt robbed, dishonored, cheated — his worth overlooked for someone else’s rhetoric. This humiliation enraged him and cracked his pride, leading toward the spiral of madness.
The humiliation of broken pride and promises haunts Ajax.
How I have spent my rage on beasts that feared no harm! … To what shame am I brought low.”
He was proven to be an Achilles-level leader who delivered results every time, praised and honored the gods, and was ultimately a beast on the battlefield known to all around. Before he became blinded by the will of his worth, he was certain of his victory. As a millennial who comes from a generation that thrives through trauma, commutes, pandemics, and headlines while death and taxes still ring their tolls the loudest. I could feel his plight.
Meanwhile Odysseus shows up, a smooth talker and system-player, the one who wins with optics. Was the tragedy the loss of the crown? Was it the madness of pursuing justice in a culture-less system that rewards visibility over inherent truths? Honors spectacle over spectacular?
Nope! It was the divine design behind the scenes. If one sits with the story long enough, you see the mechanism of a goddess, Athena, unfold.
After Achilles’ death, Ajax and Odysseus each claim the armor. The Greek leaders can’t agree, so they stage a contest.Different sources vary, but the outcome is that Odysseus wins because Athena (goddess His eloquence, was her gift, and cunning strategy, her confidence bestowed upon him, which impressed the judges. Athena herself had long favored him for the win before the game even began (she’s his divine patron). Ajax, though stronger, lacked the rhetorical and political skills Athena prized and Athena gave Odysseus the prizes she possessed to use in the game. Ajax essentially lost a rigged interview and a copy-paste-pitch.
This is a key dynamic to note within any systems-design. When optics reign as a rule, the system as a machine will reward spin over substance. When god decides optics wi the system feels rigged by default. So Ajax isn’t just bitter about a popularity contest — he’s crushed because an authority he couldn’t sway (Athena) betrayed and sanctioned his dishonor.
The tragedy clearly shows he is Ajax, The Burned-Out Champion. He gave everything, expected honor, but was betrayed.
Panopticon of Politics
Now imagine running those values through a mechanistic authority system.
Culture-less growth is expansion without repair, speed without stewardship. It’s the psychic prison Gareth Morgan warned about — where organizations become trapped in outdated myths and metrics.
Symptoms include rising turnover, disengaged talent, and wellness programs that feel like band-aids on broken bones. Baylor’s historical review of workplace wellness shows how these programs evolved from safety nets to slogans — often missing the deeper need for belonging.
It looks like growth on paper but feels like erosion to any system’s success. As Gareth Morgan’s 8 organizational metaphor’s define the lens of the mechanistic authority system:
“Culture-less growth is the psychic prison of modern organizations — expansion without essence.”
“It looks like progress on paper, but it starts to manifest:
Excellence → Efficiency. Instead of celebrating excellence of spirit, machine-culture reduces worth to output, speed, optimization.
Divine Lineage → Elitism. Instead of mythic heritage, it crowns privilege and hierarchy as “divine right” (who has access, not who has honor).
Glory Before Longevity → Burnout Before Belonging. The heroic choice becomes warped into grinding workers down for insatiable wins.
Rage + Love → Competition Without Care. Aggression is rewarded, but love and loyalty are stripped out as “unproductive.”
Apotheosis → Metrics. Immortality is flattened into numbers: awards, valuations, rankings. No spirit, just clout.
Essentially it would leave even the fiercest and most strategic leader singing:
I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar’s chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
(-Johnny Cash or NiN – your choice)
When employers, employees, and leads slog through systems that haven’t resolved its own ghosts, the middle carries the burnout weight. The greatest tragedy is that those who witness it unfold choose silence as survival, while the heroes stand in a trial of fire and insanity. Ajax woke to a pile of cattle; today’s leaders wake to a pile of pings.
What’s critical to note is Odysseus would’ve won on Law and Order too under these pretenses. Let’s recall the case from the story of Martin’s Close: The courtroom in M. R. James’ tale, where a ghost appeared not for spectacle but to demand justice.
A man on trial for murder smirks, sure of his clever defense. *cough* Odysseus *cough* But in the hush of the courtroom, the ghost of his victim appears. She does not speak. She does not need to. Her presence alone demands justice. The haunting is not the terror of a shadow. It is the silence that forces the jury to face what was buried.
In Martin’s Close, justice only came when the ghost appeared in plain sight. The courtroom is shaken (only) when the murdered woman’s ghost appears during her killer’s trial. The haunting wasn’t random; it was the reckoning for injustice that had been buried. Yet, Martin silenced Athena with by sharpening the sword of optics against the machine.
Where’s Justice At?
Meanwhile The Judge & Jury, are present as the, formal witnesses, hearing testimony and weighing evidence. The ghost’s presence forces the jury to confront what was buried. The Spectators in Court Act as communal witness — the haunting becomes public knowledge, not just a private torment. The trial becomes a ritual of silencing accountability. The courtroom hushes at the ghostly interruption and we (the reader) slip into a silent judge and jury too.
The “witness” in Martin’s Close = anyone who sees the haunting and claims it out loud and true. Instead, the reader, in both Ajax and the Close receive,
A working-warrior wakes in shame among the slaughtered cattle.
A haunted trial stalls as a ghost stares at the jury.
A middle manager scrolls LinkedIn at midnight, exhausted, unseen, yet demanded for more.
All three are the same.
So was Ajax’s haunting madness?
Or could the optics no longer hold the truth of Athena’s love of a slow-burn?
Ajax stayed the hero, then he saw the truth: that the system had robbed him of honor, blinded him, and left him wrecked among wasted battles. In our organizations, burnout is that moment. The haunting arrives when the strongest contributors wake to find their labor spent on illusions, their honor denied, and their culture absent. That is the true cost of culture-less growth.
In our organizations, burnout plays the same role. The haunting will not stop until leaders restore what was silenced: culture, belonging, joy. Because growth without culture is always a ghost story.
When culture is absent, burnout fills the vacuum. That’s the ghost in the system.
The tangible costs are clear: productivity loss, hidden rehiring expenses, brand erosion vs the intangible costs — morale, creativity, trust — harder to measure and even harder to restore.
Some systems were designed with rigid parts in mind: checks & balances, assembly-line labor, bureaucracies. The machine feels steady, but “runs,” but like an old factory engine — creaking, inefficient, built on outdated logic. Yet, when trapped into a logic of heroics and optics, the hidden haunt begins to build its case. The result is:
Tangible cost: Workers stand before systems that crown optics over honor, leaving culture absent and burnout rising.
Intangible cost: “Creativity erodes when systems encase control outdated logic and win-at-all-costs culture. Just as Martin’s ghost forced a reckoning, burnout forces leaders to confront the invisible debts of culture-less growth.
Yet, Culture isn’t perks or slogans. It’s values our embodied, rituals honored, people aligned.
Think of the parable of the three bricklayers: one sees his task as laying bricks, another as building a wall, and the third as constructing a cathedral. Same job, different culture.
Culture is the infrastructure that turns growth into sustainability. It’s the difference between a machine and an organism — between extraction and evolution.
Millennials run on haunted coffee. We don’t need more slogans; we need a séance of our systems.
👻 In every age, the haunting is the same: Ajax with cattle, Martin with silence, us with burnout. Growth without culture is always a ghost story — one that turns heroes into specters and witnesses into weary jurors. And yet, ghosts only appear because something sacred was silenced. Which means the cure is never metrics, but relief from the memory that binds us.
We often hear that competitive advantage is about doing things better than rivals. But what if that framing misses the point?
I am completing a capstone course this semester, and after reading the Harvard Business School note Creating Competitive Advantage, I realized:
Competitive advantage isn’t about being better than rivals—it’s about being valuable to customers.
The real wedge—the one that drives profit and resilience—is between customer willingness to participate and the cost to deliver them value. Rivals matter, yes. But they’re not the center of the strategy. Customers are.
This shift in perspective changes how we lead:
We stop chasing competitors and start listening to customers.
We design systems that are hard to replace, not just hard to beat.
We build value networks, not just market share.
Details matter. When you center your strategy on the humans involved, it makes the tough choices a lot clearer to see.
🔍 What’s one strategic detail you’ve rethought recently?
We are doing an exciting new challenge for our meetup group this month! Many of us are small business owners or nonprofit leaders and writing for planning, marketing, or sales is something that we will always do. So inspired by NaNoWriMo we are spending time writing an ebook, which roughly half the word count of a nonfiction novel.
Some of us are still participating in the novel challenge as well because honestly, we are a really flexible group! Write what you want as long as you write is what I say!
Why? Well, there is something very powerful about writing AND even a good rough draft it helps improve your business.
Here are some good reasons to write:
Long-term marketing tool:
Where do your customers get to delve deep into your business or organization? If you are a micro-business, like I am right now, a lot of the delving deep comes from one-on-one meetings. Imagine giving your community a review of what you do by giving them a book that explains their problem and/or how to solve it. Having a place to point clients, customers and investors so they get to know your brand better and saves hour long meetings for priority initiatives.
Long-term strategy tool:
When you write, as a focus on your purpose, you have to think it through. The act of writing allows you to actively reflect on the deeper connections that you know exist in your business. Writing allows you to realize your subconscious guide in a safe way. Have a mapped out philosophy behind the product or service you offer is a safe step towards playing out your business before taking a bigger risk.
Teach others
Sometimes people are not fully prepared to use your product or services. By organizing an ebook you give yourself and your community a logical path to the solution you provide. Use your ebook to educate others so they are prepared to work with or buy from you.
Save Time
Break down the ebook (25000 words) into 25 (1000 word articles) An article for every week for over 6 months or an article a month for two years!! While fresh content is useful, having a backup reservoir of posts in the form of a past ebook can save you a lot of content production time.
There are four good reasons, although I am sure there is plenty more! If you’ve written an ebook for your business before drop a link to it in the comment section and share how writing it has benefitted you.
Those who have been on their own success path for a while know there is a point where stopping to review, assess, and align is key to re-clearing the path that leads to your final vision.
How do you know when it is time to audit your success path?
While sometimes there may be huge red flags, like falling into deep addiction or burning out on a project you really cared about, most of the time there will only be subtle clues like debilitating procrastination, overbooking yourself with priorities, and a feeling overall stress.
Whatever the signals will be for you, the outcome will be clear you are not moving forward in ways that matter.
While there are many audits we can perform, financial, social media, productivity, etc. the one for our personal success will only take connecting with our inner selves and openly reflecting and receiving on the answers we bring out. These five questions will help you dissect what points in your success path could use some focus and where you are doing well already.
1. What are my current priorities?
2. How do they align with my larger purpose?
3. What ways am I dividing my time on a daily and weekly basis? How do that support my larger purpose?
4. How consistent am I towards working on my success?
5. What is draining my energy and how would I rather invest this energy?
While audits can be a deep exploration of your current status, you can use these questions as a way to begin to unfold what might be holding you back, which in turn gives you a place to find solutions. It is absolutely imperative that you listen to your honest answer, whatever it may be. I’m not reading your answers and no one else is, so there’s no need to be polished/pretty/etc. If you do want to discuss your answers know I’m always here 🙂
Kids definitely have their future cut out for them. I, as a young Millennial parent, still have hope for them. Sure there is strong evidence of deep flaws in our systems of civilization, there is still hope that the human spirit will overcome, create, and innovate in response to the needs of the world. The spirit of the entrepreneur lives strong.
But what happens when the entrepreneurial spirit collides with the child spirit? Suddenly the burning obsessiveness that Napoleon Hill says we need to focus on to truly transmute our thoughts into reality, is interrupted, by tiny hands that want to type like Mommy on her keyboard. Those tiny hands love to explore, to help, and to just be, and as someone who doesn’t want to suppress her inner spirit, I have to find ways to fit in time for goal work and family time. Luckily, there are some tricks of the trade to help balance nurturing her and my purpose.
Tool 1 # Baby Gates
One big tool has been using baby gates, not to wrap her up, but to wrap up our stuff. us the baby gate to place around the entertainment systems and other places where she prefers to reach and grab. This way what is freely available she is okay to play with and the glowy electronic buttons are off limits.
Tool #2 Timer
One great quality about a good entrepreneur is we could just do stuff all day. When focused, we do and do and do and the effects are amazing. Yet, balancing our time takes an accounting of our time. When feeling pressed for time, set a time limit and focus happily and completely on what you want to do. For instance, when I get home from work spending time with my daughter is a key source of happiness, but I also have signed up for responsibilities that require me to respond to people, so I set a timer for getting things done. Whether it’s 40-minute session for story time or 20-minute email crafting for my team, by setting timers I am freed from time. One of my favorites is the Pomodoro timer, which sets the time to 25 minutes.
Tool #3 YouTube
Yup, I said it, YouTube has some pretty useful educational videos for toddlers and children. One thing I like to focus on Baby Einsteins. As a double benefit, a lot of the music could double as white noise, which has a minimal distraction for a parent who needs to focus. Just check out one of the episodes below:
Of course, there are plenty of other ways to use tools to help with raising kids while living up the entrepreneurial lifestyle. What do you use? How do you balance? Like, I’d really love to know…I’ve spent 1.5 decades raising kids and have yet to find the perfect formula.
I remember the night like it was yesterday. Frustrated with being severely limited at my job, I needed a way to vent my insatiable need to create solutions to complex problems, and I found myself meeting with the coolest professional woman in the coolest building on campus at what was formerly known as the Blackstone Launchpad.
It was a semi-transparent glass box, smack dab in the middle of the student center, and having encountered her before, I curiously wondered how we could connect. When we met, she gave me the invitation to an All the CEO Ladies networking meeting later that week. It was after work so I went. It was there that the true connection was made.
It was there that the true connection was made.
We all had to pitch as a part of the membership. I came up with an idea to develop a social app that categorized and simplified who will be on the current political ballot. Everyone cheered, it was and still is a pretty crucial invention that we can’t quite get popularized.
Then it was her turn, Alicia Robinson. She sat and cheered everyone through their ideas and made friends pretty instantly. Like a cool older sister that you wonder where they get their je ne sais quoi. We all heard her stitch together her vision of a future where women accept our pain because it pushes toward a life of purpose and passion. Where we network together to build youth girls to dream, believe, and achieve without limits. An organization she would call Limitless Ambition, Inc.
An organization she would call Limitless Ambition, Inc.
Her ideas of the future were so grand and so big, it almost felt like one’s first visit to the late FAO Schwartz. She had the determination in her voice that made everyone feel like all the pitches we gave would pan out perfectly, just because we said it. We wanted her to succeed because we felt our own limitless ambition fueling us there in each others presence. A room full of young, emerging women hoping to craft a better future with our best ideas.
Start-Up Leadership Lessons
By this point, I had experience with growing and refining strategies for non-profits so I agreed to join the group and help create a strategic plan, while doing some marketing. that is where I learned that a start-up non-profit is a completely different canvas. This is when I learned that a start-up non-profit is a completely different canvas than the well-established organizations I was used to before starting college. Becuase it was a start-up, I was voted into the position of president, a role I was surprised to be offered. Yet, my initiative and understanding of the mission along with my comfort with strategic management fit for a startup. I agreed to take the position for three years, we the stipulation that we would spend time finding a president of a much higher-profile by the end of my term.
Alicia and I were still in school at the time, we both also worked full-time had tight millennial budgets, an untapped network, and starter experience to boot. Our passion wouldn’t let that stop us, and, thankfully, Blackstone Launchpad, now KSU Launchnet provided an excellent source of wisdom, connections, and support along the way. We had late nights, early emails, weekly and twice-weekly meetings; we devoted any minute of our free time, effort, and attention into making sure Limitless Ambition, Inc did everything as thoroughly as possible, to show we could match the pace of our peers. What we learned was that we had something that worked and that we had to keep serving those around us because they found value every time.
Our Start Up Nonprofit Grows Up
It is no easy journey and we still have a long road to walk. There were small successes, frustrating failures, arguments, and awkward moments of facing our truths, so we could improve and move on. Yet, all along the way, we knew the moments were moments of empowerment, which was exactly the point. Thus, we kept moving forward, ego bruises and all. Now, we are preparing to host our next summer program and we have grown our team from around 5 to over 20 in three years time. Our organization has had a reach of over 600 people face to face and we have a locally-targeted social media reach of 4000+, all while working our passions part time.
As our team grew our hectic schedules quelled, and now we face new leadership lessons beyond the ones of our early start-up days. How do we ensure our mission is reflected in every aspect of our work? How can we provide community transparency that builds trust amongst those we serve and support? How can we be better leaders, still?
This may be my last year serving as the president of Limitless Ambition, so I hope to leave my lessons here for those who will carry the torch forward. Take a moment below to watch me interview Alicia in my special podcast segment below.
Howdy! It’s another Monday and this post here is for you!
You know who you are, you are the person striving to realize your vision of success. Yet, success means much more than money to most of us. It is a reality that money is an effective measuring stick of our ability to fulfill goals, it can often be wholly inaccurate when it comes to fulfilling our core desires. You may find fulfillment in your families, friends, plentiful passions, and, most importantly, all of the above. For us, success can be applied to many areas to growth in our lives.
So many goals to be complete — followed by the insistent reminder of the fleeting nature of time. So we make deposit after deposit of our time, money, and energy into our areas of growth. Then, because we’re human, we take on an ambitious goal. The one that may disrupt our lives immensely and take a risk to build a larger vision of a day-to-day future beyond our current day-to-day grind.
How do we possibly fit it into our current lives? How do we possibly stay motivated to fit it in with our full-time jobs, families, and a host of other responsibilities?There are only so many hours in a day, and your life was full before you set about realizing your dreams of success.
There are a few scenarios we face during a substantive success journey.
You are used to managing complex change and fit this new personal risk into your schedule with ease.
Your are overall comfortable with managing complex change but find you overlooked areas beyond your limits, and thus are facing a slower growth than you first imagined.
You are not comfortable with managing complex change at all, in fact, thinking about it causes a shiver of anxiety. Typically you only think to take the risk and hardly move beyond this comfort zone.
Either of these scenarios can still result in your finding the personal success on the risk you know you must take. While the effort to get from discomfort to ease will vary there are some key points along the way.
Key Point #1 You are the core, captain, engine, leader, etc. etc.
Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy sums up the important role that the Self plays in our ability to succeed. Self-efficacy is essentially our own belief in our own abilities. Much like the story of the elephants who grow up with heavy chains around the ankles. They believe this is the most movement they can achieve when they are on and thus by the time they reach adulthood they can be controlled with nothing more than a rope. Their self-efficacy in their ability to break the chains reaches a low-point and thus they lose a deep connection to the inherent power that lies within them.-source
On a positive end, I recently encountered a touching Facebook post about the story of Edison, who learned from his mother that he was dismissed from school because he was gifted beyond all the other classmates, and then, when his mother passed, years later he later found the note that showed the teacher thought Edison was too dumb for any formal teaching. The lesson distilled is his mother’s beliefs, built his beliefs about his own genius, so, he fully tapped into as much of his potential as possible.
What’s the takeaway?
Your foundation of success comes from believing you can achieve whatever you set out to do.
Easy to spell out sure, but in action, this key point takes continuous practice. There are many conflicting images, thoughts, and experiences that will run contrary to our beliefs at times. They will attempt to break our beliefs, but the remedy is to find points of faith, whether it’s self-faith, faith in a higher power, or faith in whatever, practice touching base with the future you know will exist.
There are many conflicting images, thoughts, and experiences that will run contrary to our beliefs at times. They will attempt to break our beliefs, but the remedy is to find points of faith, whether it’s self-faith, faith in a higher power, or faith in whatever, practice touching base with the future you know will exist.
Key Point #2 Sustained success comes from systems
Whether you like it our not, systems achieve a lot for us as humans. Within our body alone we can count over 5 key systems that keep us going, then there’s the road system, the water system, the school system, etc. etc. Organizing actions and activities around shared functions and themes can give us something very, very valuable. That value is and consistency. We can be deeply grateful that a red stoplight means cars will stop or knowing all the words on a spelling test means you will pass the spelling test. Excellent systems function so well we only notice them when they stop function. Consider your computer, millions of calculations are being made and networks are connected for your pleasurable use. Yet, our level of content with the computer working can often be vastly outweighed by our level of frustration should it suddenly stop, even if the computer spent years serving your needs dutifully!
The point is when systems work, we can achieve a lot more, and when systems break down we can face anything from the minute to disastrous frustrations. The takeaway is to pay special care to the how of things: how you do things, how you want to do things, and how you will do things can be key performance indicators on your personal path to success.
Final Key Point: Shift Your Solution Mindset
You may jump at this one, but trust, I am not saying shift your solution mindset to the opposite non-solution mindset. What we are getting at here is the idea that the solutions you create to solve your current problems may not be the solutions that will help with future undertakings. In fact, the solutions you will need on your success journey may be wildly different than what you are used to doing. For instance, if you are trying to start a small business on the weekends, but are finding there is simply not enough time to do it yourself. How can you possibly do it yourself in between all the commitments? As you ask these questions for your subconscious to solve you may switch to your default solution of doing even more on your own, and staying up waking hours or missing lunches.
Ask yourself, what are other solutions beyond the one I am already thinking? Our small business owner may question other ways of securing time like: outsourcing easy tasks, scaling back on commitments, or honestly finding current time sinks in their schedule. Even if the alternative solutions you create seem impossible at the moment, finding alternatives will open you up to new possibilities for yourself.
Overview:
You can achieve your success- Find ways to remind and affirm this belief.
A system will allow you to sustain success long-term
Systems that aren’t currently serving you may need vastly different solutions. Draw outside of your normal solution lines.
Well that’s all for this post. Let me know if agree or disagree. You could always message me on Facebook.
I recently got the chance to interview with Lindsey Jo Scott from Trades of Hope. Empowerment has always been an important subject to me. How can cultivate successful communities from within? The work for my non-profit http://www.limitlessambition.org ties me closely to women’s empowerment, as it near…
Zinga Hart 
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