Everybody Knew Nick Noland
A beloved Texas quarterback is found dead hours after sending his town to the state championship. The investigation reveals not only what happened to him, but how nearly everyone who loved him helped bury a different piece of the truth.
Eighteen-year-old Nick Noland was the kind of kid people believed they knew. Star quarterback. Devoted son. Loyal friend. The center of a small Texas town’s best story about itself.
But as investigators reconstruct the final hours of Nick’s life, the people closest to him begin protecting different truths — about Nick, about themselves, and about what they were willing not to see. What emerges isn’t one enormous secret. It’s a chain of desires, loyalties, assumptions and small acts of self-protection that turned a survivable night into a death.
And as Calder searches for someone to blame, a harder question takes shape: What happens when the story we tell ourselves about our goodness becomes more important than the truth?
Everybody Knew Nick Noland is an upmarket psychological crime novel and work of literary suspense about grief, complicity, masculinity, desire, family and the stories communities construct about the people they love.
The Baton
12 Leadership Principles for the Next Generation’s Leg of the Race
Every generation inherits institutions shaped by the leaders who came before it. Eventually, each has to decide what to preserve, what to challenge and what to build next.
The Baton explores twelve ideas for becoming the kind of leader people actually want to follow: understanding the story that made you, learning to observe what others miss, building trust, making better decisions, giving and receiving feedback, separating the urgent from the important, understanding the business of the business, communicating with impact and developing the courage to become more fully yourself.
Drawing on more than two decades working with leaders, teams and organizations in periods of growth, crisis and transformation, The Baton is less interested in leadership theater than in the conditions that allow people and institutions to perform at their best.
Refounders
How Organizations Thrive Across Generations of Leaders
Founders get origin stories. The leaders who inherit their companies usually get a much harder assignment: preserve what made the place matter while changing enough of it to keep it alive.
Refounders examines the leaders who take responsibility for organizations they did not create. They inherit somebody else’s mythology, culture, people, systems and unfinished decisions—and then have to determine what is sacred, what is merely familiar and what must change.
Drawing on business history and Joe’s own experience succeeding long-tenured leaders, Refounders explores why some organizations thrive across generations of leadership while others become trapped by the very history that once made them successful.