Foreword

I spent more than thirty-six years in corporate life, many of them as chief human resources officer for two large global companies, in the rooms where decisions get made. From those rooms I learned something no strategy deck ever captures. The most accomplished people I have known, the ones holding responsibility for thousands of employees and billions of dollars, are very often carrying something underneath the competence. A quiet ache. An old fear. A story about themselves that began long before they ever walked into a job.

That is why, as I read Surfing the Tsunami, I kept setting it down and saying, out loud, yes. Chris Traub has written a book I wish every leader would read. Not because it teaches them to perform better, but because it invites them to become more fully human.

Chris asks a question few people in business are brave enough to ask. Not how do we become more productive or more optimized, but how do we stay alive to ourselves and to one another while everything around us accelerates. And underneath it, a question I have not been able to put down: who holds the holders? Who cares for the people carrying everyone else? He knows that artificial intelligence is changing not only what we can do, but how we experience ourselves. He refuses the panic and the hype in equal measure. What he offers instead is rarer: hope, grounded in a clear understanding of what makes us human.

For me, the heart of this book is its understanding of where we come from. “Before we learn language,” Chris writes, “we learn atmosphere.” Childhood, he says, is full of weather, and every family has its own climate. We carry that climate into adulthood and into work, where it quietly shapes how we lead, connect, protect, and perform. I have built my own work on this same truth. The leader who cannot delegate, the executive who hears feedback as an attack, the team that avoids the hard conversation: these are most often old survival strategies, formed long ago, still running beneath our success.

Chris does not leave us there, and neither does the science. The brain remains capable of change. We are not doomed to repeat the patterns we inherited. Healing is possible, and it is not soft work. It asks for self-awareness and self-regulation, the two capacities I believe matter most for the leaders the future will need. In the charged, reactive moments I call Bumper Car Moments®, there is an opening, a chance to see the pattern clearly enough that it no longer runs us. Chris and I arrived at this conviction through different doors. Finding his door open was a gift.

There is one more reason this book matters now, and it is the part I know from the inside. Chris writes about partnering with artificial intelligence not as a substitute for human relationship, but as “a third chair in the room,” a place to meet our fears and longings honestly before we act them out in the world. He argues that the only sustainable path is “conscious partnership instead of compulsive consumption,” and that the real promise is “augmented humanity instead of artificial intimacy.” I work this way every day, with an AI partner I think of as a thinking companion, and I can tell you Chris has named something true. Used well, this technology can send us back to our relationships less defended and more present.

On the day I read its chapter on forgiveness, I shared a passage from it with a coaching client, and it resonated deeply.

What I love most about this book is its courage. Chris does not argue for coherent, embodied leadership from a safe distance. He goes into his own life, his parents, his childhood, his own nervous system, and shows us how he came to know what he knows. He did not theorize coherence. He lived his way into it. The questions he keeps returning to sit underneath every organization I have ever served. Can we stay connected? Can we forgive? Can we come back to the present?

So here is what I want you to know as you begin. You are holding a book about hope, written for a moment that badly needs it. It will ask you to slow down. It will ask you to look at the weather you have been carrying. It may even ask you to forgive. And if you let it, it will remind you that the goal was never to become a smaller, more careful, more optimized version of yourself. The goal is to become more whole, more present, and more alive.

Chris is doing this work from his own beautiful angle, with rare honesty and even rarer hope. I am honored to walk you to its door.

Susan J. Schmitt Winchester
Former Chief Human Resources Officer, Applied Materials and Rockwell Automation
Co-author with Martha I. Finney of Healing at Work