Brené Brown told Business Insider this month that "If you are an asshole leader, you have never had more cover than you have right now to continue that behavior, because of the strong-man authoritarianism we're seeing." She made the remark in a hotel in San Francisco on the sidelines of Uplift, a leadership conference hosted by BetterUp.
Brown said she had "the behavior of a lot of tech leaders right now" in mind as she warned that the current political climate gives some executives cover to harden their approach. She accused CEOs of conducting sweeping layoffs and dressing them up as productivity gains, then ratcheting up pressure on the people who remain—cracking down on dissent, tracking workers' every keystroke, and pouring billions into AI infrastructure while scaling back investment in employees.
The audience at BetterUp's Uplift was mostly mid- to senior-level HR professionals, a crowd Brown was blunt with about the stakes. She said successful businesses were "standing atop crumbling mountains because of forces like AI, changing markets, and geopolitics," and that leaders who think a past win secures the future are mistaken: "No matter what past accomplishments they have, there's no planting a flag at the top of the mountain and saying, 'We need to maintain this win,'" she told the reporter.
Brown, whose 2009 TED talk on shame and vulnerability has nearly 100 million views over the last 16 years, now brings those ideas into the workplace through a leadership curriculum acquired by BetterUp. She serves as executive chair of the Center for Daring Leadership and is embedded inside organizations including Eaton and Lumen Technologies, work she used to sharpen the message she delivered at the conference.
That message was also a direct rebuke of a rationale some leaders are offering. "Does that bring a level of scrutiny to leaders when the president of the United States — or the president of whatever country they're operating from — predominantly has a different perspective? Yeah, it does. It really does. But zero excuses," Brown said, refusing to allow political context to justify harsher management tactics.
The reporting around the conference notes a broader corporate shift: after a couple years of nudging employees, companies have lost patience, and AI use has become mandatory in many workplaces. Brown argued that leaning into technology and cost-cutting while pulling back on human investment leaves companies exposed. She warned leaders that short-term gains built on those moves sit on unstable ground.
That instability, she said, demands a different posture from leaders. "Courageous leaders do not change who they are based on the political climate," Brown said. "Oh, empathy's not in style today, I think I'll have less of that." For her, leadership is not an elastic set of behaviors tuned to the moment; it is a practice that must hold when pressures rise.
Her prescription was forward-looking and firm. "If you want to play to win, you're going to have to look out at the next peak and make a jump," Brown said. "And not only do you have to go, you have to bring everyone with you." That end-point — leaders taking a risk to move the whole organization forward rather than using outside forces as cover to narrow it — is where she places accountability.
Brown left little room for ambiguity about consequences. Executives who hide behind authoritarian politics or the promise of AI to justify layoffs and intensified surveillance, she argued, are choosing expediency over sustainable leadership. The choice for leaders, she said plainly, is whether to double down on short-term control or to invest in the organization they will need for the next climb; there are, in her view, "zero excuses."
