Coming 2026

Burn It All Down

Work is broken—and pretending otherwise is costing us everything.
Burn It All Down is a bold, brain-based takedown of outdated work systems—and a blueprint for what comes next.

Excerpt: What’s Broken

Engagement at work has always struggled—but today, it’s in free fall.

Broadly defined as a sense of connection to one’s work, company, or leader that inspires discretionary effort, engagement is often treated as a business holy grail. Companies pour hundreds of millions into measuring and (performatively) improving it, hoping to unlock productivity, innovation, and retention.

And yet—despite decades of effort, the needle hasn’t just stalled. It’s sliding backward.

The result? Billions in lost revenue. Burnout rates through the roof. And a global workforce that’s going through the motions—clocking in, nodding along, toggling between half-care and half-escape, quietly polishing up LinkedIn profiles in search of something better.

People start out hopeful: New job. New manager. New promise.
Then all too often, they spiral: This might be the one → How do I survive this? → Get me out of here.

And truthfully, many of us aren’t surviving—at least not well.

We skip workouts for early Zoom calls.
We replace lunch with caffeine and sugar just to make it to 3 p.m.
Our minds spiral at midnight, rehashing conversations said and unsaid.
We stare into blue-lit screens, trying to focus, trying to care—pushing our prefrontal cortex to perform long past its limits.

By 10 a.m., that system gives out. Autopilot takes over. Seven hours of box-checking and inbox triage follow, with brains screaming to leave long before our bodies do.

A friend said recently: “Work is a transaction. You’re paid to be there. You’re paid to tolerate the bullshit.”
He’s not wrong. But what a profoundly sad truth.

Most of us will spend over 80,000 hours working in our lifetime.
And as humans, we’re wired for more than survival—we’re wired for meaning.

Flourishing isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters—aligned with our values, our energy, and our nervous systems.

But here’s the problem: the transaction often wins.

We’re caught between two competing realities:

• Our deep, human desire to do purposeful work

• And the very real constraints of systems that were never designed for human thriving in the first place

Most modern workplaces are relics.

They were built on manufacturing-era ideals: routine tasks, predictable output, command-and-control leadership, and productivity models based on bodies, not brains. Humans were treated as interchangeable parts in a machine optimized for efficiency.

But today’s work is different. It demands:

• Complexity thinking

• Emotional intelligence

• Real-time adaptability

• Creative problem-solving under pressure

We’re tapping cognitive capital like never before—inside environments that actively deplete it.
Brain drain is the default setting. And we’re paying for it with our health, our motivation, and our humanity.

Meanwhile, entire departments labeled People & Culture or Human Resources are tasked with fixing these fractures—using outdated frameworks, legacy metrics, and leadership models that haven’t evolved in decades.

It’s not working.
And it won’t.

Because the next disruption is already here.
AI is accelerating everything—and exposing just how unprepared our institutions, our managers, and our mental models really are.

This isn’t a tweak-it-around-the-edges moment.
It’s a burn-it-all-down moment.

What we need isn’t a better engagement survey.
We need a total rebuild—a new architecture for working and leading in a digitally overwhelmed, neurologically overtaxed, rapidly changing world.

This book is the match.