RETHINK WORK
THE BLUEPRINT
In the long form
Most books on the
FUTURE OF WORK
tell you what is changing. This one tells you what to build.
The insight behind Rethink Work began with a straightforward question: why do smart, well-resourced organizations with talented, motivated people keep watching those people leave — and keep being surprised by it?
Eric Termuende spent nearly a decade finding the answer. He surveyed tens of thousands of employees. He spent time inside the organizations that kept their best people and the ones that kept losing them. He looked for the variable that explained the difference. He expected to find something sophisticated. What he found was structural.
The organizations losing their best people had accumulated too much friction and built too little trust. The organizations keeping them had done the inverse. And the way they had done it was not through programmes or initiatives or culture statements. It was through architecture: the deliberate, systematic construction of the three foundations that make a team genuinely high-performing.
THAT ARCHITECTURE IS THE BLUEPRINT. AND RETHINK WORK IS WHERE IT IS FULLY LAID OUT — THE RESEARCH, THE ARGUMENT, THE DIAGNOSIS, AND THE PRESCRIPTION — FOR LEADERS WHO WANT TO UNDERSTAND IT DEEPLY ENOUGH TO BUILD IT THEMSELVES.
“This is not a book about what the future of work looks like. It is a book about what to build so your team can handle it — whatever it turns out to be. That is the only answer to the future of work that does not have an expiration date.”
WHAT THE BOOK BUILDS
THE ARCHITECTURE, SECTION BY SECTION.
1. THE MISDIAGNOSIS
The reason the programmes keep failing is not that the people running them are bad at their jobs. It is that they are solving the wrong problem.
Disengagement, burnout, and turnover are not people problems. They are design problems. Part One makes the case for this, with research and with the specific patterns Eric found across hundreds of organizations. By the end of this section, the reader cannot unsee the architectural nature of what is happening on their team.
2. BUILD TRUST
Not the inspirational kind. The operational kind. Part Two establishes what trust is in an organizational context, how it is built through specific, repeatable behaviors, what erodes it faster than anything else, and why it is the load-bearing wall that everything else in The Blueprint rests on. Leaders leave this section with a trust audit they can run on their team immediately.
3. REMOVE FRICTION
Friction is invisible until someone names it. Part Three gives leaders the language, the diagnostic tool, and the methodology to identify and eliminate the accumulated processes, ambiguities, and structural failures that drain their team’s energy before anyone gets to the actual work. This is the section most leaders report transforming how they think about their team’s problems.
4. HOW, WITH WHOM, AND WHY
The three questions that replace every generational strategy, every persona framework, and every engagement initiative that treats people as categories rather than individuals. Part Four shows how to understand what every specific person on your team needs to do their best work — and how to build a culture where that understanding is the norm, not the exception.
5. THE BLUEPRINT AS OPERATING SYSTEM
What it looks like to run The Blueprint not as a one-off initiative but as the permanent operating system of how your team works. Real examples from organizations Eric has worked with. The leading and lagging indicators that tell you whether The Blueprint is holding. And the leadership behaviors that sustain it when the next disruption arrives.
WHO THIS IS FOR
BUILT FOR LEADERS WHO ARE DONE WITH
THEORY.
CHROs and People leaders who have run the programmes, watched the scores barely move, and need a fundamentally different approach to the architecture of how their organizations work
CEOs and senior leaders who understand that engagement, retention, and team resilience are not HR metrics — they are the financial metrics that will determine whether their strategy succeeds or fails
Managers and team leads who want to build the kind of team that genuinely wants to show up — and who are willing to do the structural work to make that possible
Anyone who has ever lost a great person and thought: I should have seen that coming. And I want to make sure it never happens again.
WHAT READERS SAY
“Rethink Work gave me more usable frameworks in the first 50 pages than most leadership books give in their entirety. It changed how I think about my team’s problems. And it gave me a vocabulary for the things I had been sensing but could not name.”
VP PEOPLE & CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY SECTOR
FOR CONFERENCES & EVENTS
BRING THE BLUEPRINT INTO THE ROOM
Rethink Work is available for bulk orders for conferences, leadership programmes, and organizational initiatives. Packages are available that pair the book with a keynote engagement — so your audience leaves with both the live experience and the full written architecture to take it further.
SIGNED COPIES ARE AVAILABLE FOR EVENTS WITH ADVANCE NOTICE. CONTACT THE TEAM TO DISCUSS BULK PRICING, CUSTOMIZED INSERTS FOR YOUR CONFERENCE, AND COMBINED KEYNOTE AND BOOK PACKAGES.