by brandirichardthompson | Feb 28, 2026 | Courage & Crisis, Leadership, Uncategorized
What Black History Month really celebrates — and why the world knows it even when we forget They call it magic. Hollywood built an entire trope around it — the “magical negro,” that wise, selfless Black character who appears just in time to guide the white...
by brandirichardthompson | Feb 23, 2026 | Courage & Crisis
What One Year of Mass Cuts Reveals About Who’s Leading — and Who’s Performing One year ago this month, the federal government began the largest mass layoff in modern American history. More than 300,000 federal workers — engineers, scientists, economists,...
by brandirichardthompson | Feb 16, 2026 | Courage & Crisis
In 1863, a man named William Cooper Nell walked into the Boston Custom House and sat down at a clerk’s desk. It doesn’t sound revolutionary. But Nell was Black. He was the first known Black civilian federal employee. And that quiet, unremarkable act — a...
by brandirichardthompson | Feb 9, 2026 | Courage & Crisis
600,000 Jobs Lost. A 7.5% Unemployment Peak. And a Pattern America Has Seen Before. A crisis doesn’t always announce itself with a headline. Sometimes it shows up quietly — in data tables, in unemployment duration charts, in the slow disappearance of women who...
by brandirichardthompson | Feb 2, 2026 | Courage & Crisis
A Leadership Framework for Knowing When It’s Time Sixteen thousand people woke up Tuesday morning with jobs at Amazon. By lunch, they didn’t. This was the second mass layoff in three months. In October, 14,000 employees were cut. Leadership said at the...
by brandirichardthompson | Jan 26, 2026 | Courage & Crisis
And what real crisis leadership requires when your employees need you most Sixty CEOs recently revealed their true priorities by signing an open letter. The communication addressed “de-escalating tensions” related to ICE enforcement operations affecting...
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