Reserve your place
You don’t have a leadership problem.
You have a cost you haven’t measured.
The Story Tax Index (STIx) measures what your leadership patterns cost your organization — in hours, in dollars, and in the decisions your team quietly stops bringing you.
One email. When it ships.
Most leaders believe their drag comes from their calendar, their team, or their market.
The data says otherwise.
It comes from five behavioral patterns —
each invisible from the inside, each with a measurable cost.
Are you in the room — or are you the room?
Senior leaders attend meetings where their presence changes what gets said — not what gets decided. The team performs for them. The decisions wait for them.
They believe they’re staying connected.
Their calendar tells a different story.
Did you delegate — or did you lend?
The work left your desk with a name on it.
Then came the check-in.
Then the question.
Then the message at 11:47 PM.
Delegation without release isn’t delegation.
It’s deferred ownership — and your team has calibrated to exactly what it means.
Is your meeting schedule a decision engine — or a presence ritual?
Status updates. Alignment sessions. Recurring meetings whose original problem was solved two quarters ago.
Senior leaders consistently rate a third of their meeting time as unnecessary.
The question is whether that third is yours.
What does your send time say about your system?
The midnight email isn’t a workload problem.
It’s a signal — to your team, and to your own judgment.
Organizations model what their leaders perform.
If the boundary is invisible, so is the cost.
How long do your decisions stay open after you already know the answer?
When the same topic surfaces in three consecutive meetings without a decision, it isn’t being held open by complexity.
Something else is holding it open.
That gap has a number.
That number compounds.
Your team doesn’t slow down because they lack capability.
They slow down because they’ve learned where decisions stop.
They escalate less.
They adapt more.
And over time, what looks like alignment
becomes avoidance.
The Story Tax Index puts a single score on all five.
The book tells you what to do with it.
Founding cohort: 24 of 250 claimed.
Limited by design.
No spam.
No sequence.
One email when the book ships.
Most of this cost never appears in a report.
It shows up in what never gets said,
and what never moves.