Wrapped it up this week, all in one go. The blend of the author’s personal experiences with the 11 primal spaces worked incredibly well. The quotes and the exercise section were highlights for me. A strong, thoughtful read, wishing it all the success ahead.

harpened Tools, Fewer Candles? Not Here
“The Eleven Primal Spaces” Wants Leaders to Stop Optimizing and Start Making Room
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | July 16th, 2026

Devices have made the dashboarded executive class instrumented to the hilt and oddly homeless. A leader can summon forecasts, pulse dashboards, decks, transcripts, workflows, productivity maps, and machine summaries polished into instant certainty before lunch. Still, none of them can make a room. None can create the place teams need when the deck has ended and the risk begins: somewhere thought does not have to perform usefulness immediately, trust can be tested without turning naïve, disagreement can happen without pyrotechnics, and people can mean what they say. Marc D. Kirshbaum’s “The Eleven Primal Spaces” is most persuasive when it treats leadership not as a set of upgraded techniques, traits, or tools, but as the deliberate making of habitable spaces. Its favorite verb is not manage. It is awaken.

Early on, Kirshbaum reaches for posture as prophecy. Humanity once stood upright, looked toward the horizon, freed its hands, made tools, gathered in groups, and built civilization; now those same descendants hunch over devices, necks bent, attention splintered into alerts, connection outsourced to screens. The picture can be theatrical – “Digital Man” enters with the slightly alarming posture of speculative anthropology – but the dread beneath it is recognizable. This is not a scolding pamphlet against the phone. It is a book worried that people have built tools faster than they have preserved the rooms needed to use them wisely.

Much of “The Eleven Primal Spaces” builds outward from that worry. Kirshbaum arranges the book in three movements: Personal Spaces, Shared Spaces, and Transcendent Spaces. The first looks inward, toward awareness, belief, and resilience; the second turns to law, community, trust, and conflict; the third reaches for empathy, creativity, death, and the sublime. The climb is the point: mirror, commons, horizon. Before awe can matter, the room has to be able to hold it. For a leadership book, this is willing, almost defiantly, to be uncool. It would rather talk about awe than optimize the meeting invite.

Each chapter follows a pattern that soon becomes familiar: an evolutionary or historical frame, a contemporary pressure, a leadership case, a personal anecdote or public episode, quoted “Words to Live By,” and an exercise meant to be carried back into work. The design gives readers rooms to revisit: trust before a hard conversation, conflict before a negotiation, death before mistaking speed for seriousness. It also makes the book legible to the point of ritual. After a few chapters, one knows the furniture: the ancestral doorway, the executive table, the reflective prompt, the lamp already glowing in the corner. Sometimes the light is welcome. Sometimes one wishes for a dimmer switch.

The phrase “architectural intelligence” sounds grand until one sees how practical Kirshbaum’s best idea is. He recasts overhandled leadership virtues as made conditions rather than private ornaments. Awareness is not simply an internal quality; it requires quiet, self-observation, and shelter from the theater of constant reaction. Trust is not a word lacquered onto a values slide; it is a risky space built through repeated proof. Conflict is not a malfunction; it is a room that needs form, rules, and courage. Community is not culture copy; it is a commons. Death is not a gloomy detour; it is the room where urgency is stripped of vanity. The sublime is not decoration; it is the window work sometimes needs if it is not to become only transaction.

Read this way, the most persuasive chapters are those in which the metaphor touches wood and floor. In the chapter on awareness, Kirshbaum tells the story of a failed acquisition of Attica Software, a deal he pursued with conviction but lost after internal opposition delayed the board vote past the exclusivity window. The lesson is not the usual executive fable about grit. It is more diagnostic: he had enough belief in the deal, but not enough awareness of how colleagues were reading his ambition. Leadership, in this telling, requires more than knowing one’s values. It requires noticing how those values enter a room already crowded with fear, status, and private arithmetic.

In the chapter on trust, Gina Schaefer’s Logan Hardware gives the book a place where the metaphor earns its keep. Schaefer hires Shane, a man in addiction recovery who keeps asking for work, and the store becomes more than a retail operation. It becomes an ecology of second chances, competence, neighborhood memory, and earned continuance. Here Kirshbaum does not need to inflate the moral. The counter, the customers, the inventory, and the daily return of trust do the work. Trust is not gauze. It is someone being allowed to become useful in public, then proving worthy of the space.

Practicality returns in the chapter on conflict. Kirshbaum resists the pleasant corporate fiction that communities worth belonging to are harmonious ones. He draws on structured public dialogue, school town halls, negotiation practice, Montessori conflict rituals, and his own failure to confront a mentor before making a wrong career move. The chapter understands that conflict avoided does not become peace; it becomes residue. Leaders are not responsible for preventing disagreement. They are responsible for making disagreement less stupid, less theatrical, and more likely to produce usable truth.

As the book moves into its final section, it becomes stranger, riskier, and more revealing. Empathy and creativity have long had badges at the leadership conference. Death does not. Kirshbaum’s chapter on death ranges through ancient rituals, Pericles, Lincoln, Jewish mourning practices, October 7, career loss, and the way mortality can force value into focus. That is a lot of freight for one chapter to carry, and some of the turns are abrupt. Yet the chapter earns its place by refusing to let leadership remain untouched by grief. It insists that leadership without an account of loss is merely administration with better shoes.

Pushed to the edge of its register, the book arrives at the sublime, a subject executive prose approaches at its peril. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Tommy Lasorda’s 1988 Dodgers, purpose-driven brand promises, and the language of “yes, if” rather than “no, because” gather around Kirshbaum’s conviction that leaders must create moments in which people feel lifted beyond assignment. The sublime is dangerous territory for this register; one false note and everyone is trapped in a leadership offsite with a fog machine. Yet the claim survives the altitude. People rarely give their best to work that feels merely assigned. They give it when the work touches energy, story, pride, and shared possibility.

A toll arrives whenever Kirshbaum asks the ancestral frame to prove too much. He wants to connect evolutionary history, anthropology, brain science, spirituality, civic life, business reconstruction, memoir, public tragedy, and practical leadership into one continuous theory. That sweep distinguishes “The Eleven Primal Spaces” from toolbox-sized management books, but it also creates drift. The journey from savannah to boardroom can feel too smooth, as if human history exists to authorize a set of well-thumbed executive virtues: listen closely, define values, build trust, serve others, manage conflict, honor grief, make room for imagination.

Done as metaphor, the book’s “primal” language holds weight. It reminds readers that leadership is not only a technical function but the stewardship of conditions: time, attention, rules, rituals, permissions, thresholds. Done as proof, it is less persuasive. The evolutionary and historical material often gives the chapters atmosphere, scale, and moral weather; it does not always deepen the claim it is meant to support. The ancestral scaffolding sometimes operates like a handsome colonnade in front of a familiar building. The view improves; the foundation is not always new.

In prose, Kirshbaum favors long arcs and ceremonial cadences, sentences that move from ancient bodies to modern devices, from temples to teams, from sacred ground to shareholder value. His diction favors “purpose,” “connection,” “mission,” “trust,” “awakening,” “future,” and “legacy.” These words belong to the book’s moral climate, but they are also well-traveled guests in the leadership genre. At times they arrive with luggage.

More effective are the passages where abstraction puts a shoe on the floor. A negotiation changes because someone steps outside for a cigarette break. A company loses a deal because internal rivals read ambition as threat. A hardware-store employee earns trust one customer at a time. A leader listens long enough to discover that the supposed obstacle is the person who understands the broken system best. In these moments, Kirshbaum’s prose relaxes. The leadership lesson stops wearing a ceremonial sash and starts doing its job.

If the writing has a weakness, it is floodlight, not fog. The prose rarely confuses; it overexplains, overwarms, overlights. Institutional mistrust, remote work, employee disengagement, digital overload, polarization, grief, and artificial intelligence are pressures the book registers, but its default answer is restorative: recover the space, listen harder, reconnect to meaning, stand upright again. This is humane and often useful. It is not always sufficient. Systems are also made of budgets, titles, layoffs, compliance offices, incentives, punishments, hierarchy, money, fear, fatigue, law, and power. A beautiful room can still have a locked door, and someone usually has the key.

The nearby shelves help mainly by showing what Kirshbaum refuses to narrow. “Primal Leadership” by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis, and Annie McKee connects leadership to emotional resonance with more managerial discipline. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen R. Covey offers a more compressed architecture of inward formation and public effectiveness. “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek hovers near Kirshbaum’s chapters on belief and purpose. Kirshbaum is broader than all three and less exacting than the best parts of each. He wants not a framework alone, but a house with a chapel, a conference table, a commons, a studio, and a window facing the infinite.

Rather than a failure, that abundance is part of the book’s honor. Many business books are secretly articles in hardback clothing. “The Eleven Primal Spaces” has the opposite problem: it wants to be a leadership theory, a civilizational survey, a workbook, an executive memoir, a civic sermon, and a pocket creed for the next phase of humanity. It refuses the modern business book’s favorite trick of calling an article a universe. It also occasionally mistakes its own universe for a map. Eleven spaces may be primal; they are not all equally disciplined tenants.

On structure, though, the book earns respect. The three-part movement from self to society to transcendence gives the material an ethical sequence. A leader must know himself before he can build community; a community needs law and trust before conflict can become generative; only then can creativity, mortality, and awe be more than decorative. The design deepens the meaning more than it merely holds the material in place. Still, the chapter pattern becomes repetitive. The reader begins to anticipate the motion from origin story to business case to reflective exercise, and anticipation is not always discovery’s friend.

Proportionally, “The Eleven Primal Spaces” is honorable, humane, and overreaching in nearly equal measure. My rating is 78/100, which corresponds to 3/5 stars. That score reflects a book with a strong governing metaphor and useful architecture, but also one whose prose, evidence, and originality do not always match the altitude of its claims. This is a high three-star reading experience: serious, worthwhile, sometimes stirring, sometimes crowded with noble furniture, rarely cynical, and never mean-spirited or small.

One idea remains after the uplift has thinned. Leadership is not only what a person says from the head of the table. It is the table, the room, the light, the rules for speaking, the permission to disagree, the memory of the dead, the joke that lets people breathe, the promise that survives the meeting. Kirshbaum’s book is best read not as proof that every boardroom problem began on the savannah, but as an invitation to ask a quieter, more stubborn question: what kind of space are people being asked to become human in?

Underneath its framework, that is the book’s finest provocation. It asks leaders to consider not only what they demand from people, but what conditions they leave people inside. A team can be praised and still be starved; consulted and still unheard; gathered and still alone. Kirshbaum’s vocabulary can grow overbright, but his instinct here is exact: before people can act with purpose, they need a place where purpose is more than a word on the wall.

Looked at this way, the book is less a doctrine than a set of rooms to test. Some rooms have air; others feel furnished from a familiar executive catalog. Awareness, trust, conflict, death, and the sublime breathe most freely, while other spaces feel sturdier than they are surprising. But even the weaker rooms belong to an architecture that knows why it was built. It wants to shelter attention from noise, relationship from transaction, disagreement from performance, and ambition from its own appetite.

Other leadership books arrive with sharper tools and fewer candles. This one asks whether the people holding the tools still know how to stand near one another. That question gives “The Eleven Primal Spaces” its dignity, and also its most useful limit. It is not the final word on leadership in a technologized age, nor the most rigorous account of how human systems change. It is something warmer and less tidy: a reminder that the future may depend not only on what we invent, but on what we remember how to make room for.

Still, the image that remains is not the savannah, not the boardroom, not even the campfire Kirshbaum so clearly loves. It is a door left open after a difficult meeting – the light still on, the chairs not quite pushed in, the room waiting to see whether the people who used it have become more honest, or only better rehearsed.