Something is broken in the way we do business. And you can feel it.
The systems leaders have relied on for two decades — digital marketing, algorithmic reach, technocratic optimization — are collapsing at the same time we are at 40-year lows in institutional trust across categories. The result is a world where anxiety is rides high, "attention" is game we play on addiction-style algorithms, extraction is strategy, and leaders are told the only way forward is to squeeze harder.
There is another way.
The Damn Rules is a field guide for leaders willing to play a different game. Built on seven countercultural principles, it maps the path from the Extractive economy, where winning means taking as much as possible from everyone around you, to the Expansive one, where growth is trust-made, communities compound value, and the benefits are self-reinforcing from owners to employees to customers, to local communities themselves.
Growth strategist Nick Richtsmeier has spent two decades working alongside founders, executives, and institutional leaders navigating what he calls the Trustbroken Economy: a moment when five simultaneous systems are failing at once — the digital marketplace, the open web, the neoliberal paradigm, the geopolitical order, and the very way we know what is true. We are presented with near permanent fog of unknown requiring a dramatically different way of building and leading organizations
The seven rules are the rediscovery of what leaders have always known but have been incentivized to forget: that attention is meant to be given not taken, that the problem is always the problem, that growth resistance is an inside game, and that love of the work and its benefactors — not optimization — is the only viable strategy for the long game.
If you've been choosing between the hand-wringing left and the technocratic right, this book offers a third path: the operational, human, expansive work of building something worth trusting.
The Damn Rules is for leaders done playing a game they can't win — and ready to learn the rules of one they can not only win, but rediscover the joy in playing.
