Employment Problems Are Management Problems.

My Chinese name, Yi Xie (易谐), has a simple meaning. Yi (易) means "easy." Xie (谐) is the same character in He Xie (和谐), which means "harmony." My parents wanted me to grow up gentle and peaceful, someone who could get along with anyone.

So imagine the irony when I grew up and went straight into litigation.

Courtroom litigation is the furthest thing from easy harmony. It is hostile and aggressive. You spend your days fighting people, attacking credibility, and using rules as weapons against the other side. I was fighting the meaning of my own name every single day.

I know what bad management feels like, because it nearly broke me.

Early in my career I worked somewhere the pressure was so heavy that I started having severe panic attacks. I woke up feeling physically sick. I felt useless, incompetent, and worthless.

Looking back, I understand what was actually going on. Nobody there had ever trained a junior before. There was no system for it, and no patience to build one. That does not undo how lonely and frightening it felt at the time. But it does explain it. It was not evil. It was a missing system.

Then I found out I was not immune either.

Later I worked somewhere with genuinely kind and generous management. The sort of place that really does treat everyone like family.

That is where I watched unregulated kindness come apart. Because nobody was ever confronted, people started taking advantage. They slacked off, skipped rules, pushed the boundaries. And here is the part I am not proud of: as litigation burned me out, I caught myself doing exactly the same thing. I took advantage of that kindness, because I knew nobody would confront me.

I saw firsthand how a leader's best quality gets turned into a weapon against them. That is when I understood that empathy without boundaries is a slow tragedy for everyone in the room.

Then I went and failed at business myself.

I chased the entrepreneurial dream, the same as you. What I got was a run of brutal failures.

I entered multiple partnerships that went nowhere, burning months arguing over direction and equity with people who did not share my vision. I opened a premium woodworking company and learned how punishing physical manufacturing is without scale. I closed it. I built a copywriting agency and had a decent client list, right up until generative AI turned the entire writing market upside down overnight. I tried to launch an AI startup to get ahead of it, and found the technology moving faster than one solo founder could follow.

I came back to law defeated. Savings gone, partnerships dissolved, businesses closed, ego thoroughly bruised.

But the failures turned out to be the qualification.

While I was away from the courtroom I consulted for a number of companies and got my hands dirty in the actual mechanics of sales, operations and scaling. And every single time a business tried to grow, it hit the same wall.

It was never a sales problem. It was never a marketing problem. Growth was paralysed by internal staff drama, communication breakdowns and messy HR that nobody had ever written down.

That was the epiphany.

Most workplace disputes are not caused by bad people. They are caused by rules that were never made clear. And harmony cannot be built on good vibes or a verbal handshake. Real harmony only exists where there is clarity, fair boundaries, and systems that hold under pressure.

So I built the firm my name was always pointing at. Not a firm that wins the fight. A firm that makes the fight unnecessary.