🎭 Grifted Encore: What Honest Teams Can Learn from Dishonest Ones
🕵️♂️ Grifted: Volume 7
Top of the Series: WorldCom — The Telecom Giant That Billed Us for a Fantasy
Previous: 🦹♂️🤑 Grifted: Mugshots, Memoirs, and Mergers 💣 💸
🎭 Grifted #7: Lessons from the Great Business Lies
Hook:
What honest teams can learn from dishonest ones.
The Rise: 💨 Smoke, 🪞Mirrors, and 📣 Standing Ovations
It always starts the same: a visionary founder with a gleam in their eye and a TED Talk in their back pocket. The startup surges. Revenue projections glow like neon signs in a rain-slick alley. Investors circle. Employees beam with pride at all-hands meetings. The press eats it up.
The story is too good to check. And so no one does.
This is the champagne-soaked opening act. But every con needs a cast. And the best grifters don’t work alone—they build entire organizations that believe the hype. That defend the myth. That sell the fiction as if it were truth.
The problem is never just one bad actor. It’s the system that lets the performance play to a standing ovation.
🎭 If you’re tired of watching the same show end in scandal, it's time to flip the script.
📘 My upcoming book Collaborate Better gives you the toolkit to build fraud-resistant, human-first teams—with help from AI, radical transparency, and a serious improv mindset.
🪧 Pre-sale is now live at CollaborateBetter.us
Get the tools to stop the standing ovation before the final act becomes a fall.
👏🚨👏 Spot the Standing Ovation Too Soon?
Ask yourself:
Who benefits most from the story being true?
What data is being praised—but not questioned?
Is there a culture of applause, or one of accountability?
🕵️♀️ Be the Canary, Not the Chorus
Grifted empires don’t just rely on vision—they rely on silence.
✅ Start asking the question no one else is asking.
✅ Start tracking what’s being celebrated versus what’s being measured.
💡 Build Hype-Proof Teams
If you're a team leader, founder, or coach:
Are you accidentally rewarding storytelling over substance?
🧠 Poll: “What Keeps a Culture Honest?”
Q: Which of these is the most important ingredient in a fraud-resistant team?
🛡️ Psychological safety
📊 Transparent metrics
💬 Encouraged disagreement
🤖 AI tools that help flag inconsistencies
🧩 A culture where “I don’t know” is a respected answer
The 🤥 Lie: 🏛️ Culture as 🪖 Camouflage
Behind every corporate scandal lies a culture that made it possible.
Enron had the smartest guys in the room. Theranos had the savior in the turtleneck. FTX had the boy genius who played League of Legends during pitches. In each case, charisma cloaked corruption, and company culture was weaponized to suppress doubt.
Inside the walls, psychological safety was a prop, not a practice. Questions got you labeled as disloyal. Controls were cosmetic. And transparency only appeared after federal subpoenas.
These weren’t just individual frauds. They were systemic failures in human collaboration.
🎟️💬 Is Your Culture a Camouflage or a Compass?
If your team praises “transparency” but punishes tough questions…
If the loudest voices always get the mic…
If charisma outweighs accountability…
👉 It’s time for a culture audit.
🧠🛡️ Build a Culture That Doesn’t Flinch at the Truth
Most orgs say they want feedback.
Few design for it.
🛠️ In Collaborate Better, you’ll learn how to:
Establish psychological safety without faking unity
Empower dissent without inviting chaos
Design rituals where honesty thrives (even under pressure)
📘 Pre-order now at CollaborateBetter.us
Before your culture becomes someone else’s cautionary tale.
👀💡 Performative Culture Checklist
✅ Does “transparency” only show up in all-hands slides?
✅ Do team retros feel more like PR than reflection?
✅ Are your internal controls more decorative than directive?
📄 If you checked even one, don’t panic—just prepare.
📦 Mid-Post Pop-Out
🎯 How This Applies to Your Org: 3 Red Flags of the Standing Ovation Scam
🎭 Is applause drowning out accountability?
If everyone’s clapping, but no one’s asking questions, you’re not celebrating success—you’re rubber-stamping a storyline.
Look around: Is the “visionary” always on stage, but never in the data?👏 A loud ovation can be the quietest red flag.
📉 Is your success story allergic to skepticism?
When metrics glow but methods stay fuzzy, the truth’s been photoshopped.
If dissent gets labeled as “negative energy,” your culture isn’t positive—it’s pressurized.🚫 Feedback isn’t friction. It’s fraud prevention.
🕵️♂️ Is your org producing leaders—or lead actors?
When charisma eclipses credibility, you’re not building a bench—you’re casting a show.
And when the script collapses? It’s not the actor who pays. It’s the crew.💡 Pro tip: If the star’s mic is always on, but the spotter’s headset is cut—start rehearsing for a different kind of finale.
✅ Bonus Rule: Count the claps—but question the encore.
In a culture where hype is currency, the biggest risk isn’t being wrong.
It’s being unquestioned.
The Crash: When the Curtain Falls
Eventually, the spotlight gets too hot.
A whistleblower steps forward. The numbers stop adding up. The emperor has no clothes. And the house of cards—built not primarily on bad math, but mostly suppressed doubt and unchecked bravado—comes crashing down.
Employees are stunned. “I had no idea,” they say. But the signs were there. They always are. The difference isn’t visibility. It’s voice.
The crash isn’t just financial. It’s cultural. It's the slow-motion realization that everyone was in the room when the lie took root, but no one said a word.
🛑🔥 Before the Next Curtain Falls…
The signs are always there.
The question is: who’s empowered to speak before the collapse?
🎤 If you lead a team, coach a founder, or sit in the room where stories get shaped:
Ask yourself: Would I hear the next whistleblower—or silence them?
Ask your team: Is it safe to tell the truth when the truth is inconvenient?
🎬 Poll: “Cast the Corporate Grift Movie”
Q: Who plays the visionary founder with just enough villain energy?
🕶️ Adam Driver
🧠 Cate Blanchett
😈 Oscar Isaac
💼 A hologram powered by GPT-6
🕵️♂️ You—after a leadership retreat and a mysterious funding round
The 📝 Lesson: Build Cultures That ✊Resist the 🎩 Grift
Fraud doesn’t flourish just in shadows. It thrives in silence.
So what can honest teams learn from dishonest ones?
✅ Build psychological safety without blind trust. Let your team challenge assumptions and each other. Praise the pushback.
✅ Design for internal controls that don’t kill creativity. Guardrails don’t have to be cages.
✅ Embrace radical transparency before it’s subpoenaed. If you're not willing to say it publicly, ask why.
✅ Beware of charisma as camouflage. Don’t mistake magnetism for merit. Challenge even the most compelling narratives.
And here's the twist: We don’t have to do it alone anymore.
AI—when paired with human-first values—can become the ultimate collaboration partner. It can flag inconsistencies in financials, detect patterns in behavior, and surface outliers before they become headlines. But only if we build it to serve the truth.
Synergy isn’t just a buzzword. It’s a defense mechanism. The more diverse, honest, and accountable our teams become—with AI amplifying transparency rather than obscuring it—the harder it becomes for fraud to hide.
Because if you’re not building a fraud-resistant culture…
You might already be working in one.
✅ 1. Build Psychological Safety Without Blind Trust
Let your team challenge assumptions and each other. Praise the pushback.
🧠 CTA:
Want to foster a culture where disagreement leads to insight, not fallout?
Human-first teams thrive when every voice is valued—but scale that up with AI that can surface contrarian patterns, track question silos, and flag when conversation dries up.
📥 Download the “Pushback Protocol” — a team-ready framework for safe disagreement, with AI prompts to spot what's not being said.
[🎤 Grab the Framework →]
✅ 2. Design Internal Controls Without Killing Creativity
Guardrails don’t have to be cages.
🛠️ CTA:
Your team doesn't need micromanagement—it needs smart scaffolding.
With collaborative AI tools, you can track accountability, automate compliance, and surface anomalies without bottlenecking creativity.
🧰 Get the “Freedom-with-Guardrails” Toolkit — including sample prompts and workflows for blending internal controls with idea flow.
[📊 Claim the Toolkit →]
✅ 3. Embrace Radical Transparency Before It’s Subpoenaed
If you're not willing to say it publicly, ask why.
🔎 CTA:
Secrecy breeds scandal. But transparency isn’t about surveillance—it’s about shared clarity.
Use AI as your second set of eyes: from version-tracked decisions to unbiased meeting summaries, let it help you document the “why” behind the work.
📖 Access the “Transparency Playbook” — a digital guide to building openness into every process, powered by tech that remembers without rewriting history.
[🪞 Get the Playbook →]
✅ 4. Beware of Charisma as Camouflage
Don’t mistake magnetism for merit. Challenge even the most compelling narratives.
🎭 CTA:
Charismatic leaders often shine so brightly they cast shadows.
Use structured retrospectives (with help from AI sentiment trackers and unfiltered Q&A feedback) to ensure power doesn’t mute perspective.
🎟️ Try the “Charisma Check-In” — a diagnostic tool for balancing vision with vigilance. Great leaders invite challenge. This tool makes sure they hear it.
[🎭 Take the Check-In →]
This marks the final entry in the Grifted series. To those who’ve read, shared, and questioned alongside me: thank you.
But if you missed the most absurd swan song of them all—
👉 The Fyre Festival edition is live now, FEMA tents and all.
It’s a cheese sandwich of cautionary tales, served with a side of influencer delusion. Don’t skip dessert.
It’s time to stop studying the con—and start building the cure.
📘 CollaborateBetter.us — where the antidote begins.
📬 But the show isn’t over.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be express deliver exclusive previews from my upcoming book Collaborate Better—a field guide for creating radically honest, AI-empowered, people-first teams that resist grift from the inside out.
💡 Think of it as the blueprint for fraud-resistant collaboration—backed by lessons from history, improv, and the best (and worst) of business.
🎟️ Subscribe now to Collaborate with Mark and get early access to chapters, toolkits, and behind-the-scenes insights as we co-create a better way to work.
Because the next era of leadership won’t be built on charisma—it’ll be built on trust.
And we’re just getting started.