COMING
EARLY
2026!
To Be Honest…
Why we lie. Why it doesn’t work. And what to do instead.
The ability to tell the truth is central to building great businesses and creating societies where people flourish. Honesty, curiosity-fuelled scepticism, sorting fact from fiction, and constructively having hard conversations drive everything from innovation and transformation to staff engagement and wellbeing.
Yet it’s never been harder to commit to telling the truth. From well-meaning mistakes to deliberate bad faith propaganda, we are living through a plague of misinformation… and the explosion of Generative and Agentic AI and rise of algorithmic media means it risks getting worse, not better.
To Be Honest… unpacks the dawn of this disinformation age, examining its causes and effects on how we lead our teams, our organisations and our societies. It also shows how truthfeal leaders - those rare but outstanding leaders who seek, speak and hear the truth with humility and curiosity - outperform those who don’t… and how you can be one, too,
And for the managers, entrepreneurs and leaders - or just the concerned citizens! - who wish to fight back against this tidal wave of tripe, it offers a toolkit to help us restore our relationship with the truth, create cultures of truth-telling in our businesses, and improve our personal and professional results in ways that really matter.
About the Author: Dominic Thurbon
Dom is co-founder at Alchemy Labs, and has over 19 years’ experience as a senior executive, successful entrepreneur, and internationally engaged speaker, researcher and writer who helps organisations “do” behaviour change in the face of external disruption.
At just 23, he was founder and Chief Creative Officer at Karrikins Group, a consultancy he grew to over 100 staff across Australia, New Zealand and North America (acquired by EY in 2019). He was also co-founder and director at EI, an AI-enabled technology company providing on-demand wellbeing solutions (acquired by Qoria in 2022).
As a senior executive, Dom spent five years as a Partner at EY, one of the world’s largest professional services Firms. As a researcher and writer, he has co-authored and led research on best-sellers published in over 15 countries on subjects as diverse as behaviour change, strategy, leadership and the future of work and education.
Dom has been architect of multiple-award winning behaviour change programs that have reached over 500,000 people per year. Over his career, he has spoken to a combined audience numbering in the tens of thousands across Australasia, Europe and North America, with clients spanning financial and professional services, technology, FMCG, pharmaceutical and automotive industries, as well as working extensively in education, Government and not-for-profit sectors.
His publications include (as co-author) Matter: Rising Above the Competition to Become the Obvious Choice, Purpose-Driven Leadership, and Talent Magnets: Attracting Top Staff; (as lead researcher) Flip: How counter-intuitive thinking is changing everything and Game On: How video games change work.
Dom is also a previous world top-10 debater, Tottenham Hotspur tragic, and hasn’t quite given up the dream of becoming a rockstar with his band The Glorious Fourth.
Visit his personal website at www.domthurbon.com.
“But Dom, I thought the book was called The Truthful Leader?
…why the name change?”
As many of my readers and followers know, this book was originally called The Truthful Leader. The name was changed in consultation with my incredible publisher, for three reasons.
Firstly, all the publishers I spoke to - and many clients, colleagues and friends - gave the same feedback: “I feel like this book is about more than just leadership”, they said.
This is true. The book is about leadership, but it is not only about leadership. It is also not only about workplaces and companies. It’s about more than that: politics, social policy, personal relationships, and technology and its effect on society. I wanted a name that captured the broader scope of the book.
Secondly, many people asked, “so, are you The Truthful Leader?”. Of course, I am not. This is not an autobiography. But that felt like an understandable misinterpretation, and one I wanted to avoid.
Finally, people said, “you know, for someone with a pink mohawk and a bucket load of energy, honestly, The Truthful Leader just sounds a bit… well… boring.” Fair point.
All credit to the wonderful Lesley Williams at Major Street Publishing who suggested To Be Honest… as the title. I love that it can be read in two very different ways. Firstly, it can be read (rightly) as a suggestion that the book will be about what it takes, and why it is important, to be honest - to tell the truth.
But it can also be read as the colloqialism we often use to preface our moments of full honesty. “To be honest,” we might say with strained expression, as we summon the courage to say the important thing that comes next.
As a book very much written in the first-person, that unashamedly and deliberately has a lot of ‘me’ on the page, that blends explanation of the science and practicalities of truth-telling with some deeply personal stories, that expression appropriately represents how I feel in writing it.