I have spent twenty years sitting across from leaders who built real companies and felt them start to drift. Not collapse. Not fail. Drift. Something would shift and they could not put their finger on what. This book is my attempt to put a finger on it.
The pattern I kept seeing had a shape to it. Leaders would invest in technology, streamline operations, cut what looked like fat, and then notice the organization performing below what it should be capable of. Revenue was fine. The dashboard looked fine. But something was off and it was getting worse, not better.
What I realized, after enough of these conversations, is that they were describing the same thing. They were hollowing out the human infrastructure of their organizations without knowing it. Institutional knowledge was walking out the door. Client relationships were personal, not organizational. The people who held the culture together were burning out or leaving. And the leaders doing this were not being careless. They were being efficient. That is what makes this trap so dangerous.
Why AI Makes This Worse
The arrival of AI has accelerated the pattern. Leaders now have a legitimate reason to replace human roles, reduce headcount, and automate judgment calls that used to require people. Some of that is genuinely smart. Much of it is not. The organizations that will win the next decade are not the ones that automate the most. They are the ones that understand exactly what cannot be automated and protect it deliberately.
Hollow By Design is organized around that distinction. The book opens with the diagnosis, moves through the real costs of organizational hollowing in concrete numbers, and then builds toward a framework for constructing what I call the Solid Core. The kind of organization that can absorb change, survive key departures, and compound performance over time rather than eroding it.
What Is In the Book
Nineteen chapters across five parts. The first two parts are diagnostic. The third is architectural. The fourth is about leadership legacy. The fifth is operational, including a Ninety-Day Calendar leaders can use to begin the work immediately after finishing the book.
There is a chapter on the aRPE metric, which is my adjusted version of revenue per employee that accounts for AI spend and technical debt. There is a chapter on artificial friction and why removing all difficulty from an organization is one of the most reliable ways to make it fragile. There is a chapter on the Hiring Reset that walks through exactly what to change in how you bring people into the organization.
The final chapter is called The Solid-Core Commitment. It is the shortest chapter in the book. By the time you get there, the argument has been made. All that is left is the decision.
Who This Book Is For
If you lead a company between twenty-five and five hundred people, this book is written for you. If you are a founder who has scaled past the point where you know every employee personally and you are not sure the culture is still intact, this book is written for you. If you have watched good people leave and replaced them with systems and are now wondering whether that was the right call, this book is written for you.
It is not a management textbook. It does not tell you to run better meetings or build better dashboards. It makes one argument about what is going wrong inside organizations right now and what to do about it. The argument is uncomfortable in places. That is intentional.
Pre-Order Today
Hollow By Design is available for pre-order on Amazon now. If the conversation on this blog has ever connected with something you are working through in your organization, I think this book will too. Pre-ordering directly supports the launch and helps get the book in front of the leaders who need it most.
Available at amazon.com/dp/B0GYFVYWQ4