People Before Things. Always.
Read time: 3 minutes / Subscribe to this newsletter
Hello Friend!
A decade ago this week, I published People Before Things.
I wrote it because I’d spent years watching hard-working, well-intentioned people get crushed by change handled poorly.
Not maliciously. Just thoughtlessly.
Leaders were so focused on the project plan, they forgot there were people in it.
I wanted to give those people a voice… and their leaders a better way.
What happened next still surprises me. Over 100 weeks on the bestseller list. 300,000 people in those keynote rooms. MBA programs making it required reading.
(If you’ve never read it, grab your free digital copy here.)
I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on what I’ve learned since that book launched. Here are five things a decade of working with changemakers has taught me:
1. People don’t resist change. They resist leaders who handle it poorly.
The real problem was never the new system, the reorganization, or the strategy pivot. It was the leader who announced it like a press release and disappeared. People need two things during change: to know their leader actually cares about them, and to understand how their work connects to the mission. Love and clarity. That’s it. We keep making it harder than it needs to be.
Try this: Before your next change initiative kicks off, ask yourself: “Have I told each person on my team (not the group, but each person) why this matters and what it means for their specific role?” If not, start there.
2. You can’t treat transformation as a side hustle.
Cross-functional teams working part-time on a change initiative almost always produce part-time results. The most successful change efforts I’ve seen weren’t run by committees. They were led by small, empowered tiger teams with permission to go beyond their job descriptions and focus full-time on the work. Urgency without capacity is just noise.
Try this: Audit the people leading your most important change right now. Are they all-in, or are they squeezing this in between their “real” jobs? If it’s the latter, the initiative is already at risk.
3. Urgency culture doesn’t work. It backfires.
When you tell people the building is on fire, give them limited resources, and say it needed to be done yesterday, you’re not activating high performance. You’re activating the limbic system, the part of the brain wired for emotional reaction, not strategy. Scarcity and panic don’t produce great work. They produce exhausted people making decisions they’ll have to undo or redo later.
Try this: Replace artificial urgency with genuine clarity. Instead of “we’re already behind,” try “here’s exactly what we need to accomplish by when, and here’s what I’m removing from your plate so you can focus.” Watch what changes.
4. Leaving my day job was the scariest and best decision of my life.
Ten years ago, I walked away from my executive career to write a book and bet on myself. I won’t sugarcoat it: it was terrifying. But looking back, the decision should’ve been more obvious than it felt. That bet created an eight-figure business, and more importantly, it gave me autonomy, balance, and the freedom to work on problems I really care about. So many people have asked me how I did it. Enough times that I built a free 16-page guide that walks through the foundational steps. Get it here.
Try this: Write down the one professional bet you keep talking yourself out of. What would have to be true for it to be worth taking seriously? Start there.
5. The community this platform built is something I didn’t see coming.
I thought I was writing a business book. What I actually got was a decade of relationships with some of the most thoughtful, mission-driven people I’ve ever met. You showed up in keynote rooms, in my inbox, and on this newsletter every week. That was never part of the plan, and it’s the part I’m most grateful for.
If you’re one of those people, thank you. Genuinely.
Your Unignorable Move
Ten years from now, what do you want to say you built, launched, or finally started?
Your coach,
Chris
P.S. My next book, Unignorable: The Science of Being Taken Seriously, is coming by year-end. (I signed my publisher contract two weeks ago!) Same belief underneath it as People Before Things: people deserve to be heard. If you want early access and updates, join the waitlist here. And if you’re ready to build an expert-voice business around your ideas, let’s talk. I can help.
