Could Lao Tzu Be the CEO?

Seventy percent of transformations fail. This book is about the thirty percent that don't — and why.

Companies rarely fail for lack of strategy. They fail because they mistake what they are, defending a fixed form long after the world has moved on. Kodak invented the digital camera yet could not stop being a film company. Fujifilm, IBM, and Nintendo survived the same shock by grasping a different truth: an enterprise is not a fixed thing to defend, but a living process that endures only by changing shape.

Could Lao Tzu Be the CEO? brings Lao Tzu, the Tao, and Zen to bear on the hardest realities of modern leadership — not as ancient wisdom dispensed as tips, but as a working theory of the living enterprise. Across sixteen chapters it moves from why transformations fail, through a new picture of the firm as a living body, to the practical work of governing one: how a board learns to see, whom to trust with a transformation, and how a culture is turned.

It is for anyone who leads, advises, or sits on the board of a company that must change to endure — and senses that lasting is less about holding on than about knowing when, and how, to let go.

Available now in ebook, paperback, and hardcover.