Your Curated Morning (#231) for May 28, 2026 is Here!
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Welcome to Curated Morning. A compendium of news, information, and stories that economic development professionals, community development leaders and elected officials read every week to stay in touch with what is happening in our economy. The Main Thing:The Library Never Closes: Why the Best Leadership Books Are the Oldest Ones Every week when I was a kid, my mother would load me into the car and drive me to the library. Not as punishment but as a routine. Like grocery shopping or going to church. I'd walk out with a stack of book, read them all week, and repeat the process the following week. The habit stuck. Now, whenever I'm in a new town for work, and over 25 years in economic development, I've been in a lot of new towns, I skip the chamber of commerce tour and head straight for the local library or bookstore. You learn more about a community in twenty minutes wandering the stacks than you will in two hours of listening to someone's PowerPoint about their strategic plan. I tell you that because it provides some context for why Ryan Holiday's philosophy on reading resonates so deeply with me. Holiday is best known as a champion of Stoic thought, the author of The Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and the Virtue series, which, in my opinion, has quietly become one of the most important bodies of work in modern leadership thinking. But underneath all of that is an argument about what to read that is, in its own way, just as radical as anything the Stoics themselves taught. His argument simply stated: read old books. Read history. Read a biography. Read the ancients. The newer the book, the more skeptical you should be. This is where you will find leadership skills. Not from modern books. Focus On Green EconomyCalifornia's Green Credits Are Funding a Pollution Fight 2,000 Miles Away What happens when one state's climate solution becomes another community's environmental nightmare? In rural eastern North Carolina where pigs outnumber people roughly 40 to 1, a boom in turning hog waste into renewable natural gas is building out hundreds of miles of underground pipelines, catching locals off guard and raising serious concerns about pollution that isn't carried away in those pipes. At the center of it all is California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a well-intentioned program that pays farms to capture methane from manure lagoons. About 45 percent of the biogas credits in California's program go to 196 out-of-state farmers, including, for the first time in 2025, farms in North Carolina. The twist: the farms receiving these California subsidies already face civil rights complaints for the pollution their operations generate in communities where roughly a quarter of residents are Black, a quarter are Latino, and more than 20 percent live below the poverty line. Why This Matters: Economic developers increasingly encounter biogas and renewable natural gas projects as part of their region's energy and agricultural development portfolios. This story is a cautionary flag about what researchers are calling "pollution swapping.” Digesters may reduce methane emissions while potentially increasing releases of ammonia and making nitrogen more water-soluble, raising the risk of groundwater contamination. For communities actively recruiting agricultural-adjacent clean energy projects, there are real equity and liability dimensions to understand. Interstate carbon credit markets are quietly reshaping where energy infrastructure gets built and who bears the local costs. Economic developers who aren't paying attention to these financial flows may find major industrial projects materializing in their communities with limited public input or transparency. Take Action:
Read California Pays Farms to Make Biogas from Hog Waste in North Carolina, Where Locals Say It’s Fueling Pollution by Blanca Begert | Inside Climate News Read more about Climate and the Green Economy: Cracks are starting to form on fusion energy’s funding boom by Tim De Chant | TechCrunch -- It happens in every emerging industry: founders and investors push toward a common goal, until the money starts to roll in and that shared vision begins to diverge. Other Articles of Interest this week:Technology -- China humanoid robot half-marathon to showcase technical leaps by Laurie Chen | Reuters -- More than 300 humanoid robots to took part in the 21 km event. The robots faced more challenging terrain in the test of their technical advances. Nearly 40% of robots are expected to navigate the course autonomously. In the 2025 race, every robot was remotely controlled. AI -- OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google team up against unauthorized Chinese model copying by Maximilian Schreiner | the decoder -- OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have started working together to combat the unauthorized copying of their AI models by Chinese competitors, according to Bloomberg. Data Centers -- The Homesteading Mother of 6 Taking On Big Tec-- by Juliet Macur | New York Times -- Kassi Solberg has concerns about a proposed data center complex, the size of 3,800 football fields, near her home. Trust us, the developer says. How to Lead...Read This week we are on the theme of reading and books. Let's drive the point home... I was working with a coaching client the other day, and one of his goals is to improve his leadership skills. I had to think long and hard about what books he might read or which “thinkers” out there could be a guide for him. I started thinking about which leadership books I enjoyed or found useful in my career, and when I thought very specifically about leadership, I had a hard time coming up with a book on leadership or leadership practices. There are some out there, but I struggled to come up with a definitive book or person I thought would help him. I did come up with what I thought was a good answer, but more on that in a second. I asked my friend Claude. He knows me well. We’ve been talking with each other over the past several years, and he has a good understanding of the services and activities I have been providing my economic development clients. I asked Claude a simple question: What are the most popular current books about leadership in 2026? Here was his answer: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg — Duhigg blends neuroscience, case studies, and storytelling to show what it takes to truly connect with teams, stakeholders, and clients. It's positioned as a playbook for leading high-stakes conversations and building trust. Power to the Middle by Schaninger, Hancock & Field — Focuses on middle managers as culture carriers and change drivers — a thesis that's resonating given how much organizational execution lives at that layer. Why Leaders Fall: A Journey Through the Redwoods by Robert N. Tullar — Rather than presenting leadership as techniques or formulas, Tullar explores it through the metaphor of redwood forests, emphasizing connection, resilience, and ecosystem thinking — shifting from leader-centric to ecosystem thinking. Not a bad list, but I have not read any of them and have only heard of Duhigg. I was hoping to see some authors I have read before. Claude was helpful in that he also included some perennial best-sellers, one of which, Mindset, I have gifted often and highly recommend. Here are a few more: Dare to Lead by Brené Brown — Focuses on vulnerability-based leadership and emotional resilience. Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek — Digs into the biology and psychology of leadership, exploring how chemicals like oxytocin and cortisol influence team dynamics, and making the case that empathy and care are as crucial as strategy. Drive by Daniel Pink — Argues that motivation comes from internal outcomes like personal growth and autonomy rather than external rewards, with implications for how leaders design their organizations. coursera Mindset by Carol Dweck — Draws on decades of psychology research to show how beliefs about ability shape performance, offering practical strategies to encourage learning, resilience, and innovation within teams. I didn’t suggest any of these books to my client. I had already suggested Mindset to him and he had bought a copy. But here is what I suggested to him: I recommended he go down the path of stoicism and explore the subject matter through the reading of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius I first learned about this book through Ryan Holiday and modern thinker, author and speaker (see my blog post).. Holiday is not a ‘guru’ or influencer of the common type. Rather he is someone who has figured out that the best way to become ‘whole’ or a ‘good’ person is to read. And more specifically to read the Stoics, and even more importantly, read Meditations. But he also has a series of books he has written that address the virtues of which Aurelieus speaks to as well as the other stoics. Ryan Holiday is one of the most interesting voices in the leadership space precisely because he's not writing "leadership books" in the traditional sense, no frameworks, no five-step models, no business case studies. He's doing something older and arguably more durable: translating Stoic philosophy into modern practice. I think that leaders and up-and-coming leaders are hungry for this type of information and guidance. Let’s look at his virtue series. This is a four-book arc that forms his most cohesive leadership argument: The Obstacle is the Way (2014) is where most people find him. The core idea — that resistance and difficulty are the material you work with, not against, and is profoundly practical for anyone leading through constraints. Economic developers, small business owners, municipal leaders, nonprofit directors... everyone in those worlds is perpetually working with inadequate resources and resistant systems. Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics would have recognized it immediately. The book reframes adversity philosophically and gives you a repeatable mental discipline for converting friction into forward motion. Ego is the Enemy (2016) might be the most important one for senior leaders specifically. Holiday's argument is that ego, not incompetence, not bad luck, is the primary thing that derails talented people. It shows up in three phases: when you're aspiring (you talk instead of doing), when you're succeeding (you start believing your own press), and when you're failing (you can't accept reality). That three-part structure is ruthlessly diagnostic. Most leadership failures, when you trace them back honestly, have ego somewhere in the root system. Stillness is the Key (2019) arrives at a moment when the culture was starting to crack under the weight of busyness-as-identity. His argument is that clarity, rest, and inner quiet aren't luxuries but are the source of good judgment and creative output. For leaders operating in constant reactivity mode, this one is a genuine course correction. For example, a meditation practice can put you ahead of most people on this. Holiday essentially makes the philosophical and historical case for why that discipline matters at scale. Courage is Calling (2021) opens the virtue series proper (he later reframed the earlier books as a prelude). It tackles fear as the primary obstacle to action and not the dramatic cinematic fear, but the everyday version: the fear of being wrong, of being criticized, of choosing when the outcome is uncertain. For anyone leading organizational change or community development, that quiet fear of committing publicly is often what stalls the work. Discipline is Destiny (2022) closes the loop by arguing that self-mastery and consistent, unglamorous habits applied over time are the foundation on which everything else rests. It's the antidote to the modern obsession with motivation and inspiration as the engine of performance. Holiday keeps returning to a few interlocking ideas that feel especially relevant right now. First, that character precedes strategy. You can't lead well without first managing yourself well, and most leadership development skips straight to tactics. Second, that the external world is largely outside your control, but your response to it is entirely yours. This is both humbling and empowering. Third, that the long game almost always defeats the short game, and the practices that sustain a long career (humility, stillness, discipline, courage) are exactly the ones that modern culture makes it hardest to maintain. A lot of the isolation that senior leaders feel is a byproduct of the gap between their public persona and their inner life. Stoic practice, at its core, is about closing that gap. Holiday is one of the few writers in this space who makes the ancient material feel urgent rather than antiquarian, which gives him real shelf life. The virtue series, in particular, reads as if it were written for this exact moment of AI disruption, civic fragmentation, and institutional distrust, even though the source material is 2,000 years old. To read or obtain copies of any of these books, go here. Overheard:“A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
― Taleb Nassim Nicholas
The Rabbit Hole: I haven’t always been the healthiest guy in the world. Like many people I have had good intentions, but failed miserably. In the past four years, I have joined four different gyms and worked out at least once in all of them, then ended my membership. Lately my excuse is the osteoarthritis in my right knee but we are working on that. The good news is that I have lost nearly 100 pounds since March of last year. I have a few more to go, and the way I have done it is by changing my eating habits and paying attention to what I shove into my piehole (and it isn’t pie). That is why I love listening to podcasts that feature people like Sami Inkinen. From the Tim Ferriss podcast notes: “Sami Inkinen is a Finnish-born, Stanford-trained entrepreneur and the founder and CEO/president of Trulia and Virta Health. Virta is on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people using technology, AI, and nutrition. Previously, Sami held roles at Microsoft, Nokia, and McKinsey & Company, after starting his career at a nuclear power plant in Finland. Sami holds an MS in engineering physics from the Helsinki University of Technology and an MBA from Stanford University. A world-class endurance athlete, Sami is a triathlon age-group world champion and an 8-hour, 24-minute Ironman finisher, having completed the Hawaii Ironman World Championship seven times. Sami also founded Fat Chance Row to raise awareness of the dangers of sugar and its connection to diabetes, rowing 2,750 miles from California to Hawaii with his wife—completely unsupported—while breaking a world record in the process.” It’s long podcast with the preeminent podcast host Tim Ferriss, but if you have struggled with weight, and have metabolic issues such as Type II Diabetes, you will find this podcast very interesting. The podcast site can be found here. By the way, Ferriss’ podcast sites are the very best when it comes to connecting the listener/reader to the topics discussed. In one website page, you can explore a wide variety of topics. Check it out. And you thought Jerry Seinfeld was just a “Funny-Guy” Thanks for Subscribing and Reading If you know someone who might enjoy this newsletter, please feel free to share it with them. If someone forwarded this to you and you would like to subscribe, you can do so by clicking below. All the cool people are doing it!
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