Corporate leadership used to operate behind walls.
Today, those walls are gone.
The modern boardroom sits in public view—subject to scrutiny, pressure, and reaction from stakeholders who behave less like audiences and more like constituents.
Employees demand voice and legitimacy.
Customers reward or punish based on values, not just value.
Activists organize faster than institutions respond.
Leadership now happens in the open.
The stakes are structural
This is not about partisan politics. It is about governance—the management of competing interests within a shared system.
In civic environments, leaders learn quickly: decisions fail not because they are wrong, but because they lack permission.
I spent over a decade in local government. In that world, there is no private rollout. Every trade-off is visible. Every constituency reacts. Alignment must be built before action, not after backlash.
Most corporate leaders are unprepared for this reality. They treat public reaction as a communications problem instead of a governance constraint.
Where the models converge
The skills required to govern a city and lead a modern organization now overlap:
Filtering signal from noise without losing direction.
Sequencing coalitions so alignment precedes execution.
Explaining unpopular decisions in terms of long-term legitimacy, not short-term comfort.
If you attempt to run a modern organization as if it were private, you will lose control of the narrative that governs it.
Permission structures determine outcomes more than arguments.
This is the context in which leadership now operates—whether acknowledged or not.