I wanted a theory of the organisation with a womb, a nervous system and a fucking backbone.
Who says that?
I admire women who want the whole thing: a company with serious commercial ambition, people who are glad to work there, and a life beyond keeping it all standing. It is not too much to want. It is simply demanding to design.
I have spent nearly twenty years discovering just how demanding. As a Chief Operating Officer and Advisor for the last 10 years, I helped companies triple their revenue, sustainably increase their profit, build trust and keep great people. I also learned how easily caring about everything becomes carrying everything. I read the books, I tried the models, yet I kept turning to nature with the questions I couldn’t settle at work: to the nervous system for our meeting rhythms, to soil when another culture initiative changed very little, and to the torus to rethink career development and the hierarchical org chart. Most of the business advice I read then, and still read now, is cut from the same template: built for numbers and speed, another hack to learn by Monday. It left me excited and quietly stressed, and it never treated a company as something alive. Just another thing you could manipulate and extract from.
When my daughter started forest school, I finally had a little room in my days to give two decades of thinking and designing a form I could share. That became Phyli. Someone once told me I wasn’t good enough at art to make a living. This book is my reply: the most beautiful book you’ll own, made to sit beside your hardest business decisions. I see no reason to leave beauty outside the boardroom.
I am making it for women who recognise that appetite, who care about the numbers, the people and the texture of the life they are building. Wanting the whole thing is where we begin; the work is in how we design it.
