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DEI Died. Leadership Lives.: 10 Commandments for Creating Workplace Equity Through Leading With Heart
Hardcover
Publisher Price: $31.99
Publisher: McCleary & Co.
Published: May 24 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 1.13
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
ABOUT THE BOOK
Bold, urgent, deeply human, and impossible to forget, DEI Died. Leadership Lives. challenges everything we have been taught about leadership and the human consequences of it.
It is an inside account of what happens behind closed doors when careers, paychecks, promotions, dignity, and futures are placed in the hands of leaders who were never truly taught how to lead human beings.
Michelle Edwards spent nearly thirty years inside corporate America watching those moments happen in real time. Not from the sidelines. From inside the rooms where decisions were made. Rooms where the wrong leader could stunt someone's growth or where the right leader could completely change the trajectory of a human life.
She saw what worked. She saw what was theater. She saw the difference between leaders who said the right things and leaders who did the right things.
And then she built something most people in her industry thought was impossible. One of the most awarded, most diverse, highest-retention workplace cultures in healthcare advertising. Not by following the traditional playbook, but by rejecting it altogether.
With unforgettable storytelling, hard truths, emotional precision, sharp humor, and ten deeply practical leadership commandments, Edwards dismantles the myths organizations still hide behind: that professionalism requires emotional distance, that caring deeply about people weakens leadership, that equity lowers standards, that humanity and high performance cannot coexist.
This is not a defense of DEI. It is not a eulogy for it either. It is something far more revealing:
An undeniable argument that leadership has always been the real work.
Because every policy, every promotion, every missed opportunity, every moment someone felt invisible, every moment someone finally felt seen, can almost always be traced back to one thing:
A leader.
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