Leadership at the nexus of work, care, and change
Conversations with senior leaders about what changes when care becomes part of the operating environment.
Care is increasingly a leadership, workforce, financial, and systems issue.
Through conversations with executives, founders, researchers, operators, and other senior leaders, this ongoing series explores how care is reshaping work, leadership, decision-making, and the systems people rely on.
These are conversations about care as a system—and what becomes visible when leaders examine it from where they sit.
Care Like a Leader™ starts with recognizing leadership.
See the system. Lead with intention. DESIGN what comes next.
This series looks at leadership from where work, care, and change intersect—revealing the capabilities, decisions, and systems that shape how people lead in increasingly complex environments.
Explore the conversations
Read the growing collection of leader interviews below.
Leading through complexity—at work and at home
Managing institutional complexity while long-term caregiving unfolds at home—and what that reveals about decision load, invisible labor, and sustainability.
Beth Lesen
Vice President of Student Affairs and Enrollment
California State University, Long Beach
Dignity as a leadership discipline
Exploring how caregiving can strip leadership down to its essentials—and why clarity, emotional regulation, dignity, and the willingness to let go of outdated expectations become critical when navigating care, career decisions, and personal reinvention.
Sona Jepsen
Author, Pink Dragon™; Founder, Beacon GTM™
Former Chief Commercial Officer, Curinos; former Global Head of Corporate Key Accounts, FIS
“We’re not the Golden Girls. We’re the Breakfast Club.”
Exploring Gen X as a design pivot generation—the first cohort to fully collide with longevity and distributed caregiving—and what that reveals about the need to redesign care systems around how people actually live.
Paurvi Bhatt
CEO, ThirdEyeFocus; former leadership roles at Medtronic, Levi-Strauss, Abbott, US government agencies, and more
From black-box care to living systems
Exploring why some of the most important information about care never reaches the medical record—and how technology can connect clinical data, everyday observations, and family knowledge to help people coordinate complex care as needs change.
Uma Subramanian
Founder, Maarge
How faith, care, and legacy build leadership infrastructure
Exploring how faith, family, and service can shape leadership long before someone holds a formal title—and how those values can guide the creation of collaborative ecosystems that connect people, industries, and communities.
Sherice Forde
Founder & Chief Catalyst Officer, The Quantum Coalition Network
Building the navigation layer long-term care has never had
Exploring why families need more than information and services to navigate long-term care—and how better planning, personalized guidance, and technology can help them understand their options, make decisions, and adapt as care needs change.
Lindsay Friedman
Founder, LTCareNav and Care Bloom
Building culturally aligned care ecosystems for immigrant families
Developing culturally grounded care infrastructure where formal systems fall short—and showing how community becomes a care operating layer for immigrant families navigating fragmented systems.
Salina Shah
Founder, Desi Daughters
The leadership already shaping our future
Exploring how caregiving quietly reshapes work, families, and communities—and what leaders can learn from the informal networks of care, service, and responsibility that emerge when institutions fail to meet people's needs.
Rev. Kevin T. Taylor
Pastor, C-suite executive, turnaround leader
When caregiving becomes a business risk
Exploring why caregiving is a business continuity risk for entrepreneurs—and how designing for unpredictable demands, building leadership capacity, and creating more resilient operations can help businesses thrive alongside family care responsibilities.
Sher Downing, PhD
Founder, The Entrepreneur Sandwich®
Strategist and coach
Elder care is now a CEO-level workforce issue
Examining caregiving as a CEO-level systems constraint and how enterprise leaders redesign workforce architecture when families function as invisible care infrastructure.
Jeannette Galvanek
Two-time CHRO
Workforce strategist
Founder, CareWise Solutions
What the money reveals: Early signs of care system instability
Exploring how changes in financial behavior can provide early warning signs of care instability—and why stronger coordination among families, financial professionals, healthcare providers, and legal advisors can help identify and address emerging risks.
Donna Olah-Reiken
CEO, Olah Network
CEO, Preferred Business Management Solutions
Certified Daily Money Manager
Navigating the dementia care journey with clarity and confidence
Building a practical navigation layer for dementia caregiving— structuring complex, fragmented information into a sequenced roadmap that helps families make decisions over time, reduce cognitive load, and navigate care as an evolving system rather than a series of disconnected crises.
Nancy Treaster
Co-Founder, The Caregiver’s Journey
Former SVP & GM Strategic Operations, Verint Systems
Legacy as living infrastructure
Exploring legacy as something families must actively design—not simply leave behind—and how values, wealth, knowledge, governance, and responsibility can be intentionally transferred across generations.
Rev. Lawrence Jackson, Jr.
Chief Administrative Officer, STEM NOLA
Founder, Legacy Journey
Pastor
From hidden burden to workforce signal
Examining caregiving as a workforce reality rather than a personal issue—and how CHROs begin to recognize, measure, and respond when caregiving shows up as a hidden constraint on retention, performance, and employee well-being.
Laura Clark
Chief People Officer, News-Press & Gazette Company
EVP
BIRX Group
From behavior to root cause: Rethinking dementia care
Exploring why dementia care must look beyond challenging behaviors to understand underlying physical, emotional, sensory, and environmental factors—and how more individualized approaches can reduce distress, preserve dignity, and improve quality of life.
Eric Collett
Founder, A Mind for All Seasons
Dementia Care and Brain Health Specialist
The limits of optimization
Examining what happens when a systems-oriented operator encounters an environment that cannot be stabilized—how dementia caregiving challenges assumptions of structure, iteration, and control, and what it reveals about operating when systems degrade in real time.
Jenni Palocsik
GTM and operations executive
The workforce shift employers can no longer ignore
Tracing the enterprise arc of caregiving—from work–life balance to measurable workforce risk—and what two decades of research and corporate partnership reveal about the redesign organizations now face.
Jennifer Sabatini Fraone
Strategic Advisor
Former Executive Director, Boston College Center for Work & Family
Workforce Research Advisor, ELIXR
What caregiving reveals about the future of work
Exploring what caregiving reveals about the future of work—and why organizations must rethink how they manage performance, flexibility, and productivity when employees' capacity and availability are no longer predictable.
Brian Elliott
CEO, Work Forward
Executive in Residence, Charter
Senior Advisor, BCG
From power to presence: what caregiving teaches leaders about leadership
Exploring what happens when a former governor becomes an Alzheimer's caregiver—and why leadership in family care requires letting go of control, accepting help, adapting to change, and finding meaning in moments of connection.
Martin J. Schreiber
Former Governor of Wisconsin
Author, My Two Elaines
The missing customer in care system design
Exploring why healthcare's traditional one-patient, one-caregiver model fails to reflect how families actually live—and how research, technology, and care experiences must evolve to support multiple people, overlapping needs, and constantly changing responsibilities.
Melissa Fisher
Senior Strategic Marketing Consultant
Leading Healthcare System
Ambassador, Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration
Why dementia care needs a conductor
Exploring what Medicare GUIDE reveals about proactive care navigation—and how a coordinated team can connect fragmented providers, support family caregivers, and shift dementia care from crisis response to continuity.
Jeff Ryan
CEO of Vela Health
The real inheritance isn't money. It's agency.
Exploring why the Great Wealth Transfer is about more than money—and how families can preserve independence, navigate difficult conversations, and intentionally transfer decision-making authority alongside financial assets.
Erin Niehaus
Founder, PlanningPaths
Wealth Manager, Savvy Wealth
Former J.P. Morgan Private Bank
Designing a life with care
Applying design thinking to family care—how an executive problem solver reframed an impossible collision between work and caregiving and developed a more intentional way to navigate life’s hardest decisions.
Kristiana Corona
CEO, Worthy to Lead®
Former Head of Last Mile Delivery Design, Amazon
The interdependence of independence
Exploring the interdependence of independence—how family relationships, planning, technology, housing, healthcare, and community work together to sustain autonomy over time.
Chia-Lin Simmons
CEO, LogicMark
Healthcare leadership is becoming a system
Exploring why healthcare may need continuity planning—not just succession planning—as leadership disruption accelerates. Examining how organizations maintain stability through burnout, retirement, workforce strain, and unexpected executive turnover, and why interim leadership is increasingly becoming a strategic continuity tool.
Lee Fossey
Executive Managing Partner, U.S. Healthcare Sector Head, ISG-Americas®
The document isn't the decision
Exploring why advance care planning must go beyond legal documents—and how capturing patients' wishes in their own words, understanding the reasons behind their choices, and revisiting decisions as circumstances change can help ensure the care they receive reflects what they actually want.
Dr. Ferdinando Mirarchi
CEO & Chief Medical Officer,
MIDEO Advance Care Planning
What caregiving takes away
Exploring the often-unrecognized losses that accumulate throughout caregiving—from changing relationships and identities to abandoned plans and personal freedoms—and why acknowledging grief, setting boundaries, and seeking support are essential parts of care.
Natalie Rosemond
Director of Health Care Services and Professional Training, Alzheimer’s Los Angeles
When executive judgment collides with family care
Exploring why even accomplished executives struggle with family care decisions—and how emotional pressure, family history, incomplete information, and the absence of familiar decision-making structures can challenge professional expertise.
Alex Shenker
Transformation coach,
Alex Shenker Coaching
Knowing isn’t the same as knowing what to do
Exploring how caregiving challenges even experienced healthcare leaders to rethink what they know—and how asking better questions, understanding relationships, and navigating competing perspectives can strengthen judgment when decisions are complex and information is incomplete.
Julia Huckle
Leadership Coach
Former Healthcare Executive
Nurse
Caregiving Thought Leader
Where will the care risk sit?
Exploring care planning as risk management—and what changes when long-term care is treated as a household financial risk that families can retain, transfer, or share rather than as a separate insurance decision.
Suzanne Scheer
Long-term Care Insurance Specialist
SGS Insurance
It’s time to get comfortable with uncertainty
Exploring why caregiving challenges traditional decision models—and what continuously changing circumstances, relationships, priorities, and information reveal about judgment, adaptation, and decision-making under uncertainty.
Allison Wood
Founder, Anchor & Frame
Former CEO
Creator of the CLEAR Decisions™ Framework
No one knows how to care until they do
Exploring why families repeatedly learn caregiving the hard way—and how capturing and sharing practical knowledge, personal insights, and hard-earned experience can help the next caregiver begin with a stronger foundation.
Jennifer Fink
Professional Speaker
Host, Dementia Decoded Podcast
Healthcare is designed for visits. Families manage the episode.
Exploring why the patient experience extends far beyond individual healthcare visits—and how families become the connective tissue between specialists, treatments, and care transitions when healthcare systems fail to coordinate.
Anthony Placek
4X Healthcare COO and Advisor