Steve W. Griffin · Writer & Founder
Ideas that
form
enterprise.
Essays on character, leadership, and the truths that have to be settled before anything worth building can begin.
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Essays on character, leadership, and the truths that have to be settled before anything worth building can begin.
At seventeen, I wrote something I have spent the rest of my life trying to prove: that for the most part, mankind does not disagree in philosophy — only in the interpretation of its application. We have always known what honesty, justice, and human dignity require. The failure is never in the knowing. It is in the doing.
I spent decades inside real enterprises testing that claim — watching capable leaders make catastrophic decisions not from lack of principle but from lack of formation. The conviction that emerged is simple: the crisis in enterprise is not a strategy problem. It is a character problem. The enterprise does not form the leader. It reveals them.
That conviction became the 16 Settled Truths — a compass, not a checklist. Sixteen orientations confirmed across theology, psychology, neurology, and culture that describe what a formed person actually looks like. I founded The Compass Institute to put them to work in organizations and leaders, and these essays are the public half of that work: thinking clearly about the things that matter most and get talked about least.