?? Leaders & Culture Stewardship & Stealth Resistance

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The full version of this dispatch includes a look at the rise of "stealth resistance" and what boycotts can tell us about our cultural systems.

Hi!

I'm currently in Dubai, where I had the chance to talk with Chief Technology Officers about something that feels increasingly urgent: the quiet but profound ways that new tools shape an organization’s culture. It's fascinating—each feature a tool has, each workflow it supports, impacts not just how work gets done, but how people connect, collaborate, and ultimately, how they feel within the workplace. Technology isn’t neutral; it has a personality, a set of values, even biases embedded in its design. When we invite it into our organizations, we’re setting the stage for a new kind of workplace culture, often without realizing it.

What I’m seeing more and more is a shift across the C-suite. CIOs, CISOs, CHROs—leaders who once might have focused on discrete functions—are now facing the reality that their roles must expand. Today’s leaders aren’t just guardians of technology, data, or people. They’re also stewards of culture, responsible for understanding how each tool, each system, each change, will impact not just productivity but the less visible contours of workplace dynamics: trust, morale, community.

This is a huge transformation. It’s no longer enough for leaders to just understand the technical advantages of a new tool. They have to evaluate its cultural and psychological ripple effects too—how it will reshape workflows, alter communication patterns, or shift team dynamics. When a new tool enters the workplace, it doesn't just streamline a process; it shifts behaviors and expectations, influencing how employees relate to one another and to their work. Leaders today are being called on to bridge that gap between the practical and the human, to see not only how a tool works but how it works on people.

Invisible Heroes

A few newsletters ago, I wrote about how Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book influenced me to look more closely at whose voices and stories get preserved in the mainstream, and whose sacrifices are pushed to the margins. That idea came to life again recently when I stumbled on an incredible story from NPR. A woman browsing through old photo albums at a French brocante—one of those flea markets with endless treasure—came across an album filled with photos taken in secret during the Nazi occupation of Paris. At the time, taking pictures without permission was punishable by death. This led her on a four-year journey to identify the photographer who had risked everything to capture Paris under occupation. She discovered it was Raoul Minot, an employee of the department store Le Printemps. Betrayed by someone close, he was eventually sent to concentration camps, never to return.

Reading about Minot, I was struck by how easily his courage and sacrifice could have disappeared, unremembered. It took the curiosity of a documentarian, 84 years after the war, to bring his story to light. There was something powerful about finally seeing his photo and learning his name.

In times of oppression, there are always those who resist, often in ways unseen. Raoul Minot’s photographs defied the propaganda of his time, bearing witness to a reality others wanted to erase. He reminds us that truth can matter enough to risk everything for, even when it feels like no one is watching.

This story made me reflect on a few themes we often talk about here—community, safety, and technology.

1. Should We Be Rethinking Our Communities?

One conversation I see coming up often is the strain on communities and relationships, especially across political divides. There’s this recurring idea that we should be able to stay friends with people who hold different views or set aside our beliefs for the sake of community and connection. And while I agree in principle, Raoul’s story reminds us that trust has limits, especially when safety is at stake. Someone within his own community—a colleague—betrayed him to the Nazi authorities.

It’s not just a historical anecdote. I’ve thought about this often in my own life. During the last French elections, I paid close attention to what neighbors in my village were saying. I needed to know where people stood. How could I attend the annual block party and make small talk with someone who doesn’t think I deserve to be a French national, or worse, wants to see me deported? It’s always “don’t let politics divide you” until people are actively voting for rollbacks on human rights.

Can we really be friends with people who might put our safety, or our very sense of security, at risk? More importantly, why should we want to? It’s one thing to disagree on policy; it’s another when lives hang in the balance. In these situations, it makes sense to keep our communities close-knit and filled with people we know will stand by us, not against us. Our circles don’t need to be large—they need to be steadfast.

Reflecting on this, I think about how we’ve built our social networks over the past decade. We live in a world where everyone’s a “friend” and everything feels accessible. We’ve created sprawling networks of people we barely know—a colleague from years ago, a friend-of-a-friend from a dinner, someone we met at a conference once. And all these connections have access to parts of our lives and beliefs, especially through what we share online. What if that openness, which once felt empowering, now makes us vulnerable?

In a time when beliefs can be divisive or even dangerous to share, who in our networks is truly “safe”? How do we navigate this digital openness while balancing connection with protection? Raoul’s story reminds us that not everyone who has access to us will have our best interests at heart, especially in polarized times. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider the idea of community, building networks that aren’t just wide but intentional—filled with people we know would stand by us when things get tough.

2. Technology’s Impact on Resistance Movements

Raoul Minot’s courage also brings to mind the ways technology complicates resistance today. Could a resistance movement like Raoul’s operate as effectively now, under the constant gaze of CCTV cameras, GPS tracking, and digital footprints? Today, the fight for truth and freedom in our hyper-surveilled world is fraught with unprecedented risks. Digital footprints, surveillance tools, and data collection have created new challenges for underground movements to remain undetected.

But this struggle isn’t new. Dissidents in countries like China have long devised ways to avoid digital censorship, employing coded language to navigate the Great Firewall. In Hong Kong, activists adapted by wearing masks and face coverings to escape facial recognition, spray-painting cameras to disrupt CCTV, and flooding social media with misinformation to confuse authorities. In 2020, K-pop fans disrupted right-wing hashtags with unrelated posts, diluting their power, or overwhelmed a Dallas police tip line with irrelevant calls to protect protestors’ identities.

Yet, the state isn’t passive. In Turkey, after protestors used VPNs to coordinate, the government restricted anonymizing tools like TOR and VPNs. During the BLM protests in the U.S., helicopters equipped with Stingrays hovered overhead, recording the faces of protestors and siphoning data from their mobile devices.

This constant back-and-forth between activism and surveillance raises pressing questions about privacy, autonomy, and control in the digital age. As surveillance technologies advance, it becomes harder for people to resist quietly or privately. And yet, Raoul’s story reminds us that resistance doesn’t disappear; it adapts to the tools and constraints of its time.

Until next time,

Foush