Essential leadership practices for the modern digital workplace
Why some workplace programs last and most don't
The intranet launch got the budget, the sponsors, and all the attention. Three years later the content is a mess, the modern look is gone, and nobody can find what they need. This book is about the years after the launch.
Successful and struggling programs usually rely on many of the same practices. The difference is a bit like a thriving reef and one that has lost the life it once supported. The structure may still be there. What keeps the system thriving is how many of ten operating habits are actually in place, and how consistently they’re maintained after go-live.
Every chapter of the book points to a working tool — a template, a guide, or a framework you can take into your own organization. Readers get the full toolkit online, with the password printed in the back of the book.
Written for the people doing and leading this work, whatever the org chart calls them.
Karen Downs has spent more than twenty years rescuing failing intranets and rebuilding the governance behind them. Across financial services, telecommunications, tax preparation, and healthcare, she kept finding the same fractures under different logos — and resolving them one consensus at a time. That diligence produced a $3M consolidation and top-10 global intranet at Sprint, and a #4 globally ranked intranet at H&R Block.
For most of her career that hard-won knowledge lived in her head, accumulating from instinct and years of pattern recognition. Digital Endurance is what happened when she finally wrote it down: the first book to treat digital workplace leadership as a discipline in its own right, for practitioners who've done the work without the credit, the community, or the credentials to show for it.
A Kansas City native, Karen raised a family while finishing college and building her career at the same time. That same determination got this book written in the margins of a full life. She wrote with urgency, convinced that AI would either magnify the strength of well-led digital workplaces or accelerate straight through the gaps left by neglected ones.
Karen is currently Head of Strategic Communications Practice, Global Markets, at Staffbase. Decades after facing that first broken intranet, she still can't walk into organizational chaos without wanting to fix it. Connect on LinkedIn.
New tools, revisions, and notes on where this field is going. Occasional, and worth opening.
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Karen writes regularly for digital workplace leaders — longer thinking than a post, shorter than a chapter.
Karen advises organizations on digital workplace strategy, governance and internal communications through Intranet Advisors.
