This episode features a conversation with leadership veteran Jim Brown, founder of OrgHealth and author of the new book The Imperfect CEO, about how executives can build high-performing organizational cultures by embracing vulnerability and human limitations. Brown discusses the "org health ascent model," explaining how breaking down internal competition and modeling accountability allows a team's collective strengths to thrive. He also shares powerful personal insights on prioritizing family over career demands and utilizing faith-driven disciplines like conversational journaling to navigate leadership challenges.
Bio: Jim Brown is the author of The Imperfect CEO and the founder of OrgHealth, a firm dedicated to helping leaders build healthy, life-giving organizational cultures. For more than 30 years, Jim has worked alongside CEOs, executive teams, boards, and faith-based leaders who carry both significant responsibility and deep concern for the people they lead.
The Imperfect CEO is not a book about flawless leadership – it’s about honest leadership. Drawing on decades of real-world experience, Jim explores why so many capable leaders feel pressure to be the hero, hide uncertainty, or carry the weight alone – and how those patterns quietly damage culture. The book has sparked what is being called the Imperfect
Leadership Movement, inviting leaders to replace performance-driven posturing with clarity, courage, and shared ownership.
Jim is widely known for his ability to cut through complexity and name what’s really happening in a room. Clients often describe him as calm, perceptive, and disarmingly direct – someone who asks the questions others avoid, and helps leaders move from insight to responsibility. His work focuses on organizational health as a moral and strategic issue: when culture is healthy, people flourish, trust grows, and mission advances.
While Jim’s first book, The Imperfect Board Member, became a trusted resource on governance, his recent work reflects a deeper conviction – that leadership and culture shape not only results, but lives. His faith quietly informs that conviction. Jim believes leadership is a form of stewardship, and that organizations can be places of dignity, truth, and renewal rather than exhaustion and fear.
Through his writing, speaking, and podcast conversations, Jim encourages leaders to let go of the myth of perfection and step into a more grounded, human, and hopeful way of leading.
Something Extra: "I think it's a love for people."
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