beyond shareholder primacy, toward shared futures
Originally published on Medium.
Photo by Amanda Kloska on Unsplash
Jerry Greenfield just resigned from Ben & Jerry’s after 47 years, stating: “It’s profoundly disappointing to conclude that that independence, the very basis of our sale to Unilever, is gone.”
(Editor's Note: This post was originally published on July 8, 2025. As I migrate my work to this new platform, I've updated it to better reflect my current frameworks and sharpened my thinking from the original piece. The core ideas remain the same.)
One of my family’s favorite stories is toddler-me on my grandmother’s lap while she played Sim Farm, yelling at the screen: “More piggies! More piggies!”
That was my first simulation game. My grandmother tended digital crops with the same attention she gave her real garden. She explained why the corn wasn’t growing, why the pigs needed better housing, how everything had to work together. It was all about care and tending, making sure things could thrive.
But not all the games I played were about that.
On designing for collective good (and why that still feels possible in a country like Canada)
(Editor's Note: This post was originally published on July 1, 2025.)
I'm writing this from the family cottage, where I've spent basically every summer of my entire life. It's the kind of place that forces you to slow down. You lose track of your laptop charger. You eat chips for dinner. You start thinking more clearly, not because you're trying, but because there's finally space to.
I don't come up here to think about work. But some things still follow me – the patterns I keep seeing, the questions that don't quite let go. And lately, one of them is this: how do we actually build toward the kind of future we say we want?
Being Canadian shaped how I think about this. It's given me a quiet belief that public good isn't something we “stand for,” it's something we structure for.
These aren't abstract principles – they're the patterns I see working in practice:
Photo: niaid
In summer 2023, large swaths of Reddit went dark. Thousands of subreddits flipped to private in one of the platform’s largest-ever protests. The spark? API pricing changes that disrupted the third-party tools moderators relied on to keep communities healthy.
It wasn’t just about dollars. It was a reminder that communities collapse when trust and safety are treated as expendable.
And Reddit isn’t an outlier.
(Editor's Note: This post was originally published on June 17, 2025. As I migrate my work to this new platform, I've updated it to better reflect my current frameworks and sharpened my thinking from the original piece. The core ideas remain the same.)
Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash
The biggest risks in any system don’t show up at the finish line. They show up in the fog at the beginning, when vision is outpacing alignment, values haven’t been pressure-tested, and everyone’s nodding, but no one’s asking the hard questions.
(Editor's Note: This post was originally published on June 10, 2025. As I migrate my work to this new platform, I've updated it to better reflect my current frameworks and sharpened my thinking from the original piece. The core ideas remain the same.)
When the crisis hits (the data breach, the community backlash, the regulatory scrutiny) the systems that hold are the ones nobody saw you building.
Every leader trying to grow without compromising what matters faces the same tension. The answer isn't to move slower. It's to build the right infrastructure from day one
Trust is not a brand asset; it is an operational system built on four distinct layers
(Editor's Note: This post was originally published on [Original Date]. As I migrate my work to this new platform, I've updated it to better reflect my current frameworks and sharpened my thinking from the original piece. The core ideas remain the same.)
Photo by Jan Canty on Unsplash
The most insidious form of failure isn’t a spectacular collapse. It’s the slow leak of purpose — the quiet erosion where integrity gets traded for convenience until the mission is just an afterthought.
Photo: Andre Furtado
Most online speech debates borrow from an American lens: a narrow, absolutist take on “free speech” that ignores the conditions people actually need to participate. Canada has the chance to chart another path.
What if, instead of importing Silicon Valley defaults, we built platforms around the values we already claim as our own? What if the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms wasn’t just a legal backstop but a design guide?
Editor's Note: This post was originally published on May 20, 2025. As I migrate my work to this new platform, I've updated it to better reflect my current frameworks and sharpened my thinking from the original piece. The core ideas remain the same.
Photo by Juan Rojas on Unsplash
A few weeks ago, I wrote about Careless People – a memoir about the slow erosion of care inside Facebook and what it revealed about the systems we build.
That piece circled the big questions. This one is about the small, quiet moments where care gets designed out. These are the patterns I've learned to watch for, in my own work and in the rooms where big decisions get made.
Here are five ways I’ve seen care get designed out, and the design principles required to build systems that hold.
Photo: Clark Van Der Beken
Every team, no matter its size or stage, hits moments where clarity slips and momentum stalls. The default response is often to tighten plans and double down on roadmaps, but that can shut down imagination when it’s needed most. Sometimes the most powerful move isn’t to push harder, but to pause and ask a different kind of question.
