I’ve been reflecting on the state of the world and how it’s changed over the course of my life—both personally and geopolitically—and I conclude with some recommendations for dealing with the world as we experience it today.
BULLIES IN THE SCHOOLYARD
When I was in elementary school, there was a group of boys who would taunt and bully other students in the schoolyard at recess or after school. They particularly liked to taunt kids who were different from them—like me—given that I was a recent immigrant. I usually just avoided them because even at that age, I was a pacifist and abhorred violence. One day the lead bully pushed me too far, literally. Even though I was a pacifist, I still believed in defending myself from physical harm. So, I hit back. Hard. Really hard. Then another of his friends went after me and I gave him the same treatment. It was my pent-up anger at what they’d done to me and also to all the other kids—I was doing it for me and them. I was big for my age so I did some damage. The bully and his friends were shocked, cleaned the blood off their faces, and walked away. They never bothered me—or my friends—ever again.
BULLIES IN HOCKEY
I played hockey when I was a teenager. I loved the choreography of plays, the incredible pace of the game, and the teamwork required for winning. I started later than most kids but learned quickly and earned a scholarship to a hockey camp. There, they taught and drilled us on the fundamentals—like being able to stick handle an egg down the ice, starting and stopping with incredible agility, and being able to skate at phenomenal speed. However, one NHL star who was an instructor also taught us some dirty tricks—like how to pull your stick up into your opponent player’s face when coming out of a check or trip someone when the referee wasn’t looking. While I loved honing my skills, I was appalled at the dirty tricks.
At the time, international tournaments between Canada and the Soviet Union were played on larger rinks with more graceful, skill-based rules. That style of play aligned with my pacifist character. But the NHL—especially as expansion teams emerged in the U.S.—grew rougher and more violent. Instead of retaliating with checks or fists, I channeled my frustration into fast skillful skating and fierce slapshots. I played the game the way I believed it should be played—and those slapshots won us many games.
BULLIES IN BUSINESS
When I began my career at IBM nearly four decades ago, the company stood out not only for its technological leadership but for its deeply human-centered culture. At the heart of that culture was a core value: “respect for the individual.” This wasn’t just a slogan—it was embodied in policies like the Full Employment Commitment, also known as the “No Layoff Policy.” IBM pledged not to lay off employees due to economic downturns or financial challenges. Instead, it committed to finding ways to reassign staff or support their transition into new roles. When a job became obsolete—often due to evolving technology—IBM didn’t show people the door; it invested in reskilling and retraining them for new opportunities within the company. Employees were frequently relocated to other departments or regions, and during that transition, their salaries and benefits were protected. It was a model built on loyalty, trust, and the belief that people were a company’s greatest asset.
Why did IBM have this policy? The company believed that loyalty to employees fostered loyalty in return, leading to a stronger, more committed workforce. They valued expertise and experience, so rather than firing people, they aimed to retain and retrain them. And this “family-like” culture led to employees feeling secure, valued, and passionately committed to the company. It is also credited with establishing IBM as the trend-setting and most successful computer company in the world at the time.
Five years after I started at the company, the layoffs started and, as a manager, I had to handle many of the layoff communications. The reason for letting employees go that we were told to communicate to employees was that it was their poor performance. We went through three waves of layoffs, with the third one being the most difficult. I was being asked to let my top performer go for performance reasons. I told my manager that I thought that would be unethical and that I decided to step down from my role as manager so as not to have to do something that I felt was unethical. A few years later, I was required to become a manager again given a new rule that required all technical leaders to also be managers. While I enjoyed being a manager, I still refused to do things that I considered to be unethical.
While IBM was no longer the same company I joined, it remained, for most of my career, a truly great place to work—one where I felt proud of the work I did and the people I did it with. That changed in the final year or so of my tenure—echoing the reasons that led me to step down as a manager early in my career—and now contributed to my deciding to retire earlier than I had initially planned to. In addition, one of the most disheartening signs of IBM’s departure from its long-standing culture of “respect for the individual” was a quiet but unmistakable embrace of ageism. Despite my decades of service, the last six years—my highest-earning years—were excluded from my pension calculation and I also wasn’t given extended employee health benefits because the company wants to discourage older employees from continuing to work like I did. I challenged the decision, but the company’s response made something sadly clear: the respect that once defined IBM’s culture was gone. They no longer care.
That said, I continue to value the full arc of my IBM career—the accomplishments, the relationships, and the meaningful work I was part of. I still cherish the friendships I built and maintain with former colleagues and staff, many of whom I continue to meet with regularly. But I do mourn the loss of a culture that once put people first, and I remain troubled by the leadership decisions that accelerated its decline. At the same time, I’ve found renewed purpose in co-founding and leading Habits for a Better World—a nonprofit committed to countering the damage done by the bullies of our time.
And it isn’t just IBM, all tech companies and even beyond tech now have bullies in their executive ranks who have virtually no respect for the individual—their employees—in the many ways of dealing with their staff. I think that’s unconscionable. Many people who seek me out for career coaching are casualties of this macho leadership culture. If firing a few thousand employees will improve the company’s bottom line for a quarter, these executives will do that.
The model used to be that a company’s success depended on three equally important stakeholders—employees, customers, and shareholders. I believe that that model is all but gone with most companies, especially those in the tech sector, given that they have shifted to a shareholder-first mentality often at the expense of employees and even customers. This shift is evidenced by mass layoffs despite profitability (e.g., Google, Meta, Amazon, Tesla, etc.), declining innovation and risk-taking, compromising customer satisfaction (e.g., focus on monetization through ads and disregarding data privacy concerns, and laying off designers and researchers), and the erosion of employee trust and morale.
However, if you’re in one of those companies as an employee, manager, or executive, you don’t have to act the way that the bully executives do, you can still be yourself, care for others, authentically support those around you, and be an all-around positive influence. I’ve always tried to do that throughout my career and I largely tried to shield my staff from the bullies. And after leaving IBM, I now provide career coaching to help to undo the damage to people’s careers and livelihoods that these leaders of companies are causing and provide strategies to bounce back.
BULLIES IN GOVERNMENT
Around the world, an increasing number of governments are being led by bullies and shifting from progressive to regressive policies. They’re attacking reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights, climate policy, workers’ rights, healthcare programs, DEI initiatives, women’s rights, and more. Empathy, compassion, and care for the vulnerable are being ridiculed—"woke" used as a slur.
While disarmament, detente, and nuclear disarmament used to be in vogue, countries around the world are now arming themselves like never before to protect themselves from the states led by bullies. Several brutal wars are being waged by bullies killing and injuring countless innocent people. That too is unconscionable in my view. I never thought that in 2025 we’d still be so barbaric as a species and not to have evolved at all in this regard. What’s particularly troubling is that these horrific wars, despite seeing the deeply troubling images and videos of the damage they are doing, seem to be increasingly being normalized. If you murder someone on the street in your own country, you’re arrested, charged, and dealt with in the justice system. If you murder someone in one of these wars, it’s perfectly fine because you’re in a war to take over a piece of land that the bully that heads up your government has gotten into their head to annex.
Add to that the increasing power of oligarchs, and the celebration of dictators, and emergence of new dictatorships all vying for more power, money, and, as mentioned above, even taking over sovereign countries or parts of countries.
REFLECTION
Over the course of my life I’ve lamented the influence bullies have had on my experience and the experience of others—as reflected in my time in elementary school, hockey camp, the workplace, and with regard to happenings in the world.
Many people will feel deep despair at the current state of the world. And they have reason to. I too have my moments.
However, I’m a positive person by nature and I always look for ways to improve the state of the world. As I mentioned in a previous post, I believe that people have more power than they think they have to improve the world. There are more of us—individuals—than there are bullies. So, what can we do?
INDIVIDUALS HAVE POWER
ECONOMIC POWER
Let’s explore some of the actions individuals can take starting with the economic power individuals have, at scale.
The U.S. President is currently imposing tariffs on other countries like mine—Canada—while also using insulting and belligerent language against Canada and Canadians. In response, Canada has implemented reciprocal tariffs.
Individual Canadians though have decided that they will take action themselves by boycotting U.S. products and not traveling to the U.S. I stopped buying American products, cancelled a U.S. destination holiday, and turned down paid speaking engagements in the U.S.
That’s way more powerful than a tariff—shutting down commerce entirely. Canadians traveling to the U.S. is down by a full 75% and 85% of Canadians are replacing American products with Canadian ones. That’s individual action at scale.
When the U.S. President required companies to eliminate DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, Target complied but customers let them know what they thought of that by boycotting the company and causing it to loose $12.4 billion in sales and $27.27 per share. A competitor, Costco, reaffirmed its support for DEI and was rewarded by its current and lots of new customers with a $5 billion increase in sales and 7 million additional shoppers in a four week period.
People all over the world take issue with the words and actions of Elon Musk and have been taking action selling their Tesla vehicles, boycotting Tesla dealerships, and even vandalizing anything with Tesla on it—while I don’t condone the latter, I do understand it. Current Tesla owners have also put stickers on their cars with “I bought this before we knew that Elon was crazy” trying to distance themselves from the CEO. Sales are plummeting globally—76% in Germany, 66% in Australia, 49% in China—and the stock has lost fully half of it’s value, all the while the EV market is growing and Chinese EV maker BYD is now the top EV maker in the world. All of this by individuals exercising their economic power at scale.
All of this demonstrates the economic power individuals have when they take action together.
BALLOT BOX POWER
The U.S. is currently experiencing the power of individuals at scale at the ballot box. The majority of Americans thought they had no power and didn’t vote. However, their inaction led to the election of Donald J. Trump by a very slim margin. It’s reported that many of those who didn’t vote were in fact Democrats who had some issue with their candidate and/or their party. However, the U.S. is now experiencing the consequences of their inaction, and the rest of the world is too.
Canada is currently in a federal election, and I’m hearing similar doubts from voters, talking about the Liberal government’s performance in the past despite the country having a new pretty impressive Prime Minister who is charting a new course. Failure to vote—or voting without understanding the stakes—could plunge Canada into the same MAGA-style crisis the U.S. is experiencing. Voting is individual action at scale, and it matters.
Americans are also protesting in large numbers. Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth found that peaceful protest by just 3.5% of the population can bring down a regime. With an estimated 5 million Americans already participating in anti-government protests, the U.S. is nearly halfway there. International protests amplify the message too and are happening. And if elections proceed in the future, change is definitely coming due in large part to individuals and individual action.
DESIGN, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND FILMMAKING POWER
Most people don’t realize that 77.8% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising. Why is that? Because researchers and designers creating targeted ads works in selling people stuff. It’s also often said that social media platforms have become the front lines of influence. So, if online advertising and social media platforms are so influential and impactful, it would only make sense that individuals should leverage their power to effect change in a positive direction. After all, the bullies of the world are doing that to effect change in the opposite direction.
I partnered with the World Design Organization and Design for America at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in leading the COVID-19 Design Challenge. Some 225 designers and researchers used their craft and talent to create social media campaigns and other impactful deliverables to promote such things as safe behaviors and appreciation for front-line professionals. Close to 100,000 people visited the website and many millions saw the social media campaign and were influenced by it.
Carly Williams and I launched the Habits for a Better World initiative last year to inspire individuals at scale to adopt habits that will reduce climate change, biodiversity loss, human illness, animal and human suffering, hate and polarization, and more. Not only are the 300 volunteer researchers, designers, and filmmakers working to have a huge impact on inspiring individual action at scale to improve the world, the individuals involved are improving their own worlds by working with others who are kindred spirits—all wanting to do good in a world that seems to be going in the opposite direction. I absolutely love working with my Habits for a Better World teammates and they with one another.
FINAL THOUGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Having lived a long life, I know that bullies can be defeated. Good can prevail—if we act. I mourn what the world has become, but I remain confident that if individuals take action together, we can change its course. That’s the belief that powers my work with Habits for a Better World, and it’s the call I extend to you: fight back against the bullies, for your own sake and for the sake of the world.