Jim VandeHey was a hyperactive political reporter and editor who peppered his subjects with bullets at 5 a.m. about missed stories and low-quality headlines, a disruptor of Beltway journalism dating back to the Wild West of digital media, who preached “win in the morning” and co-founder of two media companies ( including this one), sold for hundreds of millions of dollars.

But is his real true calling a lifestyle guru?

Consider VandeHey’s weekly posts over the last couple of years at Axios, the firm he founded in 2016 and sold last year (he’s still its CEO): VandeHey wants you to choose joy. he wants you be generous. he wants you avoid insecure people. you should”purge everyone with bad values ​​and motives,” hug “beautiful clarity of true sincerity” And “always assume a positive intentionfrom the people in your life. “Love is your secret sauce“Hey, guardians.

When it comes to role models, forget Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, or any of the pompous and brutal business bosses of yesteryear. “Be like Goldilocks‘ one column stated. “Be like Zelenskyadvised another. Third advised readers to be like Mr. Rogers, the icon of children’s television, and Mike Allen, the journalist and co-founder of Axios. “We often glorify those who break, invent or build something with bravado,” he wrote. “But I learned more by studying two men of extraordinary modesty.”

As a good self-help star, VandeHey delivers good news in a way that turns it into a kind of theology. This is where readers come in.”Razor of Axios(“the easiest way to do something is usually the correct one”). There is”Doctrine Liz”, taken from a management conversation with DoorDash CEO Liz Jarvis-Sheen. And don’t forget about 10 commandments for success at work (Number eight: “Optimal performance is impossible without healthy relationships, diet and exercise, and spirituality and mindfulness beyond that.”)

By this point, readers are only familiar with VandeHey’s reputation in Washington as an aggressive and militant politician in the media, and may wonder if some mischievous hippie sprinkled peyote on his curds. What happened to SCOOP ads in all caps?

VandeHey’s new incarnation of Zen fits in nicely with the rest of the Finish Line, Axios’ daily newsletter that promises “tips and tricks for smarter thinking” and operates as a goop of sorts for aspiring executives, with nuggets of health, social science and psychology accompanied by frequent inspirational pieces of wisdom for well-being. One contribution by Allen presented Palantir CEO explains why you should run like a snail. Another one by VandeHei and Erica Pandey hand strengthening exercises promoted as the key to longevity.

“The idea behind Finish Line was that you watch Netflix with your significant other,” says Allen, whose byline also tops the news bulletins. “You pick up the phone. You can scroll through doom and read something that makes you feel bad. Or you can actually use Finish Line to give you something healthy, wholesome, reassuring.”

Perhaps this is how civilians should interact with him.

But I knew about the “run like a snail” and “work your hands” columns, not to mention the atmosphere of peace and love, because I’m a journalist in Washington, and there seems to be a whole culture around Beltway comrades. insiders are emailing, messing around and instant messaging each other excerpts from the Finish Line, often accompanied by some version of “WTF”. Who are these “zone flooding” guys to preach about choosing joy or avoiding the roll of fate? Axios wouldn’t hire a career coach or fitness expert for political coverage – maybe they’re playing tricks on us by doing the opposite?

The common denominator of most people gawking at the leader columns is that—unlike me—they at some point interacted as fellow journalists or competitors to VandeHey, whose former public image was that of a leader who favored belligerent analogies and punches in breast. football coach’s style of conversation in the locker room. As a co-founder of POLITICO, he wished to create a game-changing publication before leaving due to, to put it mildly, dissatisfaction with his leadership and headlines about financial losses and a polarized culture. Shortly thereafter, he founded Axios. Both editions have since been sold, several of my colleagues lived through it all, but I didn’t show up until six years later. My only experience with VandeHei was in a previous job as a magazine editor who covered fireworks his departure.

Still, the sight of any type of Washington suddenly falling out of its former public reputation is always interesting. Was the old image incomplete? Or has something changed, and the lord-admirer-of-people-who-breaks-things has become the lord-admirer-of-extraordinary-humility? Or is there some other dynamic going on that says something about the larger ecosystem of the capital?

“Now I am no less energetic,” VandeHey told me. “I still get up at 4:30 in the morning. I still work around the clock. I think I’m still demanding of myself and demanding of others. But I would like to think that I have evolved as a leader in terms of how I take that ambition and energy and use it in a way that brings out the best.”

This is more or less what you’ll also learn from the columns, many of which unroll a familiar foil to illustrate the moral of the story: Jim VandeHey. That is Jim VandeHey a few years ago.

According to New Jim, Old Jim constantly ruined everything because of his temperament, impulsiveness and selfishness. Old Jim’s booboos are object lessons in New Jim’s wisdom, reinforcing columns about the importance of be kind when you fire people, use of “soft power” to avoid a sweatshop, or not slipping into win-win conflicts.

This is a charming literary device. To be sure, the slip-ups that the humble New Jim attributes to young Jim tend to be petty offenses, things that are relatively easy to deal with if you’re the person who sold your startup for a mint—mostly for a small sum. – tactical misses with the ball, not high-profile shenanigans like those that focused on the excerpt from this publication.

Aside from the payback (or not) of one person with their track record, the leaderboards actually reflect something more, both about society at the moment and how people govern in 2023. high-ranking politicians and high-profile politicians—was someone who valued dues, resignation to low wages, and a low attitude to prove himself in a hyper-competitive game. Successful organizations also had high burnout rates.

For reasons ranging from generational tastes to workforce challenges in the age of Covid, this model is faltering.

“I think the young workers were asking us for something very different than what we were asking our employer when we started playing, right?” VandeHey says. “For example, let’s be honest, when we got a job after college, we wanted to get paid. And we didn’t want anyone to hit us, right? We never thought about culture.” Newcomers to journalism today, he says, tend to say, “I want more. I want goals. I want to make sure you as a company care about the things that matter to me, about diversity and inclusion.”

Of course, he is hardly the only one who made this discovery. Managerial thinking has evolved throughout the knowledge industry – it’s just that most of George Patton, who has suddenly discovered his inner Dalai Lama, seems reluctant to share it with the world. VandeHey, with his instinct for self-promotion (and a column to fill out), prefers to shout new values ​​from the rooftops, Nixon’s reinvention for China that the once political scribe might have loved to cover. In doing so, he has evolved into perhaps the most famous example of the 2023 Beltway leadership model: the assertive empath.

VandeHey says people have teased him about the wise men’s columns, so he’s not entirely devoid of self-awareness. But personally, he comes across as a true believer – and none of the employees of the company hinted to me that behind the public presentation of a good guy, there is a secret dungeon master. This is part of his style: in each of his incarnations, he has always been a zealous missionary of whatever religious religion he adhered to.

However, the other truth of today’s media is that just as worker bees have changed, so have some stars. Arianna Huffington has gone from CEO to well-known sleep promoter. Many famous media figures have associated themselves with causes, values ​​or styles without leaving their positions.

It simply means that whether you appreciate the wisdom of the speakers or not, VandeHey has many advantages, from recruitment to sales, to establish himself as a sensitive media leader of the moment. Axios reports that Finish Line is in the top five of its top 50 newsletters (which includes local newsletters). Just as a firm has taken its “smart brevity” format and monetized it as a concept (a book, a service, a TED talk, countless interviews with leading CEO chroniclers), so can VandeHey’s thoughts on leadership: the book is in the works, although he does not say when it will be released or what it will be called (other than that it will not be called finish line).

You don’t have to wait for a book to come out to see how the marketing instinct works. Consider the saga of the motto. Last March, VandeHei wrote column describing ideal Axios employees: “Killers with humility.” The idea was to find “insanely talented and ambitious people (hitmen) who put others and the company first (humility)”. So far, so good. Various comments about exaltation and grace followed.

But then the public—or at least other members of the high-ranking caste of yakker leaders— suspended. It turned out the “killers” were problematic. The word, which had no less impact than Huffington wrote, “seems like a holdover from the workplace model we are leaving behind—one where executives (and presumably everyone else in business) liked to quote Sun Tzu’s Art of War.” and only talked about success in terms of ‘kill him’, ‘crush him’, ‘have only one throat to choke’ and sleep when they’re dead.”

what to do Old Jim might have snapped at Huffington, calling her soft and sloppy. Not New Jim. He ditched the “killers”—and in the process got a whole second column built in part on how he suppressed his defensive instincts. “We have the humility to listen,” he wrote. “And we think they’re right!” The column invited readers to subscribe to the newsletter and submit suggestions for changing the motto.

Finish line in a month announced a vote at a company retreat, and the new term was “selfless superstars”. For those counting at home, the short announcement was the third piece of content from the quest motto. Humility seems to be for sale.