Joshua Whitley

Joshua D. Whitley is the founder and President of FLEXEC Advisory, LLC, a senior executive advisor with a background in technology, security, data, operations, org change management, and AI, and proof that you can make it from a double-wide to the C-suite without becoming insufferable in the process.

His writing career began with You Don't Have to Be an A-Hole to Win: How Servant Leadership Took Me from a Double-Wide to the C-Suite and Out the Other Side, a leadership memoir that argues, with evidence, that empathy and accountability are not weaknesses. Executives who disagreed were presumably not the target audience.

From there, Joshua pivoted to fiction, which is to say he changed the names and called it satire. The That Could've Been an Email! trilogy follows the IT organization at Applied Systems, Inc. (ASYS) through increasingly recognizable corporate chaos. Book one, An Average Week at a Perfectly Normal Company, covers a week that is neither average nor normal. Book two, Everything Has a Price, traces a high-pressure systems modernization through every phase of the project lifecycle, including denial. Book three, The Corporate Shuffle, arrives just in time for a private equity acquisition, a workforce reduction, and the special kind of leadership theater that follows.

The series is precise, dry, and uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a meeting that could have been an email, a Teams message, or honestly just not happened at all.

Joshua writes for the people who stay on the call, muted, camera off, wondering how this became their life. He also consults for organizations that would prefer it not come to that.