Last week, Katy Perry and an all-female crew boarded Blue Origin’s latest suborbital space tourism stunt—er, “launch.” The mission was hyped as a win for women, a celebration of empowerment, and a symbol of progress. But the public reacted with anything but praise.
Space is a vacuum. And that’s exactly what this launch felt like: empty and completely disconnected from reality—especially from the real work of feminism or cultural transformation.
And let’s talk about what didn’t get headlines.
Amanda Nguyen, one of the women on that same flight, is a civil rights activist and actual former NASA intern who left science to become a lawyer after being assaulted—and discovering just how broken the justice system is for survivors. She went on to draft the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which passed unanimously in Congress. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. But you didn’t hear about her, did you? Because Katy Perry brought a daisy and sang a song in space.
That’s the vacuum. It sucks the meaning right out.
And we do the same thing in business. We throw around the word “transformation,” slap a new mission statement on a wall, add a few DEI trainings, and call it a movement. But when culture becomes spectacle—when it becomes an event, a show, a “launch”—it fails. Culture doesn’t change because you said it did on LinkedIn.
I’ve seen it firsthand: companies spend millions on culture campaigns with no humility, no follow-through, and no willingness to go inward. They want performance without the discomfort. Visibility without vulnerability. It’s a vacuum disguised as vision.
But real transformation—like real feminism—doesn’t need confetti. It needs courage. And humility. And time.
So here’s a wild idea: what if we invested even a fraction of what we spend on space tourism or corporate rebrands into exploring *inner* space? Into developing higher states of consciousness, meaningful connection, or structural justice?
Culture isn’t created in orbit. It’s created in eye contact. In difficult conversations. In humility. In truth. You don’t need to leave Earth to elevate something. You just have to be willing to go in.
Because when we go in, that’s when we finally go out—not into space, but into the kind of change that actually matters.
Elsewhere In Culture
When I read that saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI tens of millions of dollars a year, my first thought wasn’t about electricity—it was about workplace culture. There’s something kind of beautiful about that. It says a lot about what people want the culture of work to be: respectful, human, and considerate—even when there’s no one on the other side. The behavior might seem irrational, but it reflects a deep desire for dignity in our everyday interactions.
Now here’s the twist: culture is behavior, not intention. So when leaders tell me they value a culture of respect, I ask what behaviors they’re reinforcing. Because if your systems are built around speed, output, and cost-cutting—then you may be aligned with strategy but are you aligned with culture? Our research shows you need both in sync to drive transformative growth. In the meantime I’ll keep saying please to ChatGPT because hey, when they take over they might spare the ones who said “please” and “thank you.”
In my latest article for Forbes, I make the case that the key to peak performance is not more upskilling or stricter KPIs. It is mental resilience. I have seen firsthand how stress can derail even the most talented leaders. When our nervous systems are dysregulated, our capacity for innovation, strategic thinking, and effective leadership drops. That is why I spoke with Dr. Don Wood of the Inspired Performance Institute, whose work reframes trauma as a glitch in the brain’s processing system, not a character flaw or emotional weakness.
When companies treat cognitive and emotional clarity as foundational to high performance, they see results. Productivity goes up, leadership strengthens, and retention improves. But that only happens when leaders get intentional—connecting day-to-day work to purpose, encouraging honest feedback, and creating absolute clarity around what success looks like. This is not just good for people. It is good for business. And in today’s high-pressure workplaces, that is not optional. It is urgent.