Photo by Blane McMichen.
At some point, someone on the internet joked that they’d had enough of living through unprecedented times and were ready to return to the precedented ones. The quip was amusing in 2020. By 2021, it was less a joke and more a groan. By early 2026, it’s become a plea. The underlying fear that it’s all just earthquakes and aftershocks forever. And that maybe solid ground was never solid.
We are living through an overwhelming barrage of very bad shit. And we don’t need to know which passport you hold or where you are in the world to say there is very awful shit happening in the streets. If you find yourself enraged at the daily list of very famous, very wealthy people, intentionally enabling very distressing shit at home and abroad and cackling over email all the while. Please know that we are right here with you.
We’re not experts in geopolitics. We’re neither legal scholars nor academic researchers on authoritarian regimes. We’ll leave those lanes for the folks who exist within them.
We are management trainers. Please. We are so happy to get back into our lane and talk about how to run a better meeting. But when the entire fucking Wall Street Journal is end-to-end coverage in the business section about the foreseeable and foreseen downstream implications of unchecked power? Well, we’re in it now, folks.
They need you to keep making them money
Through the course of your working life, you will report to people who wield their power well or wield their power poorly. Or refuse to wield their power at all. But the vast majority of the time, there’s a backstop. A CEO. A board of directors. Civilian oversight. SEC regulations. Rule of law. Whatever.
But what happens if those backstops cease to exist? You might not live in Minneapolis, or Maine, or Los Angeles, or Tehran. You might never have been a teenage girl. But anyone paying attention is seeing a lot of missing backstops. A lot of power running amok. And a lot of people are wondering…how do you check power that’s not-presently-checked? This is precisely where you bring in the management trainers.
The thing others miss in that giant dump of emails that catalog the world’s most powerful people trying to architect the demise of democracy as retribution for #MeToo — precedented times, please! — is how mundane the work-y bits are. Meetings, and investment terms, and can you get me some time with that person because he keeps flaking on our lunches.
Hiding in there is that they have things they need, in order to keep the awfulness going. And so it’s worth remembering that even when you encounter unchecked power, you are not entirely powerless. Foreseeable and foreseen doesn’t mean inevitable. They have operational needs to keep their power unchecked.
This is where you come in. We get it. Job market is shit. Not a good time to pack up and walk away on principles. But if you are a key ingredient in the doing, you can stop.
They need you to keep solving their problems
Doing harm at scale requires infrastructure. What ICE is doing can’t happen in the same way without purpose-built surveillance and coordination tools. But it also can’t happen without booths at recruiting fairs, or warehousing and staging areas, or rental cars. Epstein had a literal private island, but he also had bank accounts and tax advisory services, and reservations at restaurants.
Bosses, if you’re running a business with lots of clients, this is us asking you to remember that you don’t have to take all of them. This isn’t an equal-rights question — asshole is not a protected class. A year ago we wrote about anticipating the threat of a knock on the door from “some government officers looking for undesirables.” We weren’t wrong. And we weren’t wrong when we said that it’s worth having a policy on whose money you’ll take, either. It’s not too late to start saying no. It’s not too late to say no to new work for these people. It’s not too late to pay the penalty clauses to break existing paper.
And if you’re not in charge, it’s still worth making a lot of noise. If fucking Palantir employees — Palantir! — are pushing back, you can, too. If employees at Goldman Sachs are calling bullshit on who they take as a client? You can, too. It will be uncomfortable, and if you do it alone it might put a target on you. That might still be worth it, but by all means gather up as many employees as you can and make noise together. At least as far back as the ’50s, psychologists have found that many people will go along with a thing they know is wrong if everyone else is. But as soon as one other person speaks up, that conformity tends to collapse.
They need you to launder their reputation
It’s a tempting flattening to imagine that the people doing vile shit don’t care about being liked. How could you, right? Want to be more likeable? Stop being a fucking monster and we’ll talk.
But in reality, they care about it a lot. The Epstein leaks are grotesque in large part for how they lay bare a sad group of small people trying to impress and endear themselves to each other, to be at cool events with interesting people building fascinating companies or doing incredible research. They have money and influence in some cases, power and weapons in others, and one of the things they use them all for is to get people to say nice things about them or do nice things for them. You don’t need to be part of that.
Who sits on your board, and where do they show up in the Epstein files? Is your CEO in there? Do you sit on other boards, and who are your colleagues there? If you’re in a non-profit, who are your major donors and how loudly are you required to celebrate their support? We work with a lot of non-profit leaders, and we know that when Jenny Rose Halperin writes about tainted money she’s telling a story that many folks can see themselves in. Maybe you can, too.
One healthy question to ask right now is where did the money come from? Another important one, though, is what is the money buying? Not in a vague, philanthropic-philosophical sense. Epstein trafficked children, and still had Joichi Ito working hard to help him get around MIT’s rules to donate to the Media Lab. Why? What was he buying? What story was he trying to tell? And how many people at the Media Lab, including Joi, could have said no, instead of helping him tell it?
They need you to look away
Bosses often ask us if there are specific words they should say to jump in if something goes off at work. Like if someone yells in a heated meeting. Or a new exec uses a slur during a competitive ping pong game. We get variations of this all the time because, in actual real life at actual real work, shit really does go off.
They aren’t generally asking about horrors or atrocities. More like, how to dissent with your mouth when you’ve already clocked that you dissent with your brain. The core of this question is beautiful. It’s basically, “How do I use my power in a situation like this? I may not be the most senior person but I’m still a leader here. And I don’t want to manage in an org where bad shit just goes unremarked, y’know?”
We do know. And the answer for them is the answer for you, too.
If yours is an org or a world where bad shit happens unremarked, the most important tool at your disposal is that you can remark.
For the ping-pong match. For the heated meeting.
We find that a loud, clear, “Nope!”
Followed by, “That’s not how we do things here.”
Will get your point across.
Because in that moment, the thing that the entire room is waiting to see is whether this is a place where bad shit happens and goes unremarked. Or if this is a place where we stop, stare at it, and say not in my fucking house.
— Melissa & Johnathan
