Mind MiddlewareA Mind Middleware conversation
⚠️ Content warning: This article discusses depression, burnout, breakdown, workplace bullying, medication and alcohol. Please read with care. In Aotearoa New Zealand you can call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.
There are people you connect with in minutes, and you spend the rest of the conversation wondering why it happened so fast. Michael Friedberg is one of those people for me. When I went back through his history to prepare for this episode, the answer was sitting in plain sight: almost everything Michael does comes back to connection. He's a fifteen-year IBM veteran, a serial builder of businesses, and now the co-founder of Flux B2B — but if you ask him what he actually does, the word that keeps surfacing is people.
A cork on the ocean
Michael's preferred metaphor for his career is unglamorous and exactly right: "a cork on the ocean." He left school, travelled, fell into hospitality and ended up running a Christchurch restaurant called the Ducks Deluxe. He met his wife, a lawyer, decided he'd better grow up, did a degree, and started a marketing company in his final year — right into the dot-com boom. He sold it; the buyer got bought, and bought again, until Telecom owned it. Then came fifteen years at IBM, which he calls a defining moment for the leader he became. After that: his own ventures, Mega, Swaytech, and then, last year, being "bumped out" suddenly. Out of that ending, in January, came Flux — built, he's honest, as much from need as from courage. "There aren't a lot of jobs around. Actually, we can create something ourselves."
What strikes me about Michael is how cleanly he made the entrepreneur-to-corporate leap that breaks a lot of people. He "slotted into" IBM, he says, because of two things. First, he's a connector — "I see in systems. I can look in and see all the relationships and the way a business works together" — which is exactly the skill a giant matrixed organisation rewards. Second, he was always handed the high-growth, low-revenue, under-resourced corners: small budget, small team, "go test this, can it work?" So even inside IBM he was being entrepreneurial, which made the journey back out to his own business feel natural.
Addicted to the momentum
But I wanted to press on something, because "it was natural to me" is the kind of story we tell ourselves that can quietly edit out the stress. Michael didn't dodge it. "I got addicted to the momentum," he said. "I think I still am." IBM was relentless — email, the Slack of its day, calls, meetings, travel, constantly on. He remembers an executive coach catching him literally running between meetings in the Auckland office and telling him, "an executive will never run." Michael's defence was that he was late and needed to run — but he sees now what it really showed. "I ran inside that system, and I was addicted to it. At the cost of a young family. I was out of balance completely." He started in 2005, at 32, and he can see the imbalance clearly in the rear-view mirror.
His survival skill from that era is one of my favourite lines of the whole series: "I got good at dropping balls that would bounce." Not every ball can be dropped, he says, and knowing the difference is an art. He runs it with clients now — they insist everything must be perfect, and he tells them, gently, that it can't be. "These are the three things you must get right. The others I'm juggling with one hand. If I drop one, it'll bounce, and I might pick it up on the bounce. I know now it's not going to shatter."
Thinking differently
Where did that instinct come from? Michael's answer took an unexpected and moving turn: neurodiversity. He's doing pro bono work for an organisation called Unlock Innovation during National Dyslexia Month, his son is dyslexic, his wife and kids are ADHD — and through all of it he's come to suspect he is, too. Probably ADHD. Probably dyslexic and dysgraphic. But "compensated" — he's dealt with it his whole life without ever framing himself that way. What he's realising late is that the systems-thinking, the connection-spotting, the sensing of what matters — those are dyslexic thinking patterns, and they've quietly been his greatest professional advantage. It's a generous reframe of a thing many people carry as a deficit, and it lands all the harder coming from a seasoned executive in his fifties only now putting language to it.
The drift
The metaphor deepened as we went, until it became a whole seascape. Michael described hopping aboard ships — roles other people offer you — sailing with a crew for a while, then jumping off when the ship's heading the wrong way, and finding yourself alone in the water again, except you're never quite alone, because there are always others floating nearby. For the first time, he says, he can see a point on the horizon he actually wants to reach. When he and his co-founder Gisela built Flux, they deliberately asked: what do our sixties look like? What do we want to be in flow about? Having an answer has given his navigation an intentionality it never had when he was simply riding currents.
And then he named the thing that traps so many of us: the drift. In the ocean you bob along on a natural current — easy, undemanding, often fine. "A lot of us get stuck in the drift," he said. "I may not be challenged, but I'm in the drift and it's okay." The catch is that the drift carries you somewhere whether you choose it or not. At some point you either decide you're genuinely happy being carried — and the drift can take you to good places — or you realise you have to fight your way out of it. "Do I have enough power? Is there someone next to me heading my direction I can hold onto?" He extends it past work, to families, to who we are as people. "We get bad habits, we're in the drift. Sometimes you go, I need to stop this, because this drift is not where we want to go." His antidote is connection. "Sometimes just a cup of coffee with someone gives you enough propulsion to keep going."
The breakdown, and the bullying
Michael doesn't claim he burnt out at IBM, but he had one breakdown there, under a CEO who was out of their depth. He absorbed a lot of it, while the team delivered huge things, and it pushed him to the edge. What released him was his wife saying the quiet, radical thing: "just leave." The moment he let himself say it, the pressure broke. The lesson he took was about the limits of control — "I couldn't control that person; that's not my responsibility" — even as his humanistic instinct kept making him carry it.
The harder story came after IBM, and it's one more leaders should tell. He was bullied — by owners of companies, people he calls "numpties" — and it blindsided him completely. After decades of seniority, he was unprepared for how insidious it was: it starts small, then something big, and meanwhile it's eroding your confidence, your belief in yourself, your certainty about your own judgement. "For the first time in my life, my mindset was challenged, and I was in a really dark place — negative, introverted, lonely, full of doubt." He didn't spot it himself. His wife and friends did — "this is not you" — and then, by pure serendipity, an old friend who'd retrained as a psychotherapist asked if he could practise his coaching hours on Michael. Michael had never heard of psychotherapy. It arrived at exactly the right moment.
What helped wasn't advice. Using the Gestalt method, his friend Tom didn't tell him what to do; he dug, and took Michael to a place of different perspective, where Michael did the hard work himself and arrived at the thing he most needed: it was not my fault. The deeper lesson generalises. "There are moments in our lives where we cannot do it alone. We are not equipped. I was not equipped to come out of that myself."
I shared my own version, because it rhymes. My image is quicksand: the more you thrash to get out a certain way, the deeper you sink — and it's terribly easy to grab a helper and drag them down with you. What worked for me wasn't being pulled out; it was people standing around the edge, pointing: that's the branch. We can only show you where it is. You have to exercise, get outside, talk to people, go back to the music you stopped making. Those were branches I could reach myself. And the framework I lean on is an old Spanish idea, pulsión de vida y pulsión de muerte — the life drive and the death drive — two voices. One says you're useless, your work is rubbish, the people you love resent you. The other says: that wasn't failure, you learned from it, that's just external noise. Learning to tell which voice is speaking is most of the battle.
Change the story
Michael's framing for the same work is "change the story." You can tell yourself anything, he says — so the discipline is to be honest, and to carve out time for honest conversations with yourself about what you're actually feeling. His sharpest self-diagnosis is the tunnel: "When I'm at my worst, I'm in the tunnel. Head down, thinking the harder I work, the more I'll work my way out. And that's exactly the wrong thing to do." The cruelty of it is that the instinct — work harder — is the precise instinct that keeps you stuck. Now, with the CEOs and founders he coaches, a big part of his job is helping them lift their heads out of the slipstream and find perspective — out of the quicksand. Doing it for yourself, he admits, is the hard part.
He believes in medication, and in therapy, and in the obvious-but-easier-said baseline of exercise and good food. But the reframe I'll keep is about the word should. His coach taught him that "I should" only piles on pressure. You shouldn't do anything. "I need to," "I want to." "I shouldn't have that glass of wine" becomes "just have it, don't beat yourself up — maybe not the bottle. And in the morning, don't feel guilty; just don't make that decision today." Same energy at the end of a week: instead of "I should have done that, didn't get to that," try "I did that, that was awesome." It sounds small. He's the first to say he doesn't have it nailed. But it's the difference between a Friday that drains you and one that refills you.
The biggest realisation of his year is a distinction worth tattooing somewhere: health is not the same as fitness. Michael has always been healthy — eats well, exercises, keeps the balance. What dawned on him this year is mental fitness, which you have to build deliberately, with reps, like any other kind. His starter set is humble and doable: no phone until after his first coffee (which is not ten minutes after waking), a few small habits to get his head right before the day starts, no devices before bed, and a deliberate effort to notice one genuinely happy moment a day. He won't journal it — "I'm just not going to, and that's part of being real" — but he'll clock the sun through the windscreen on the bridge, the right song, the city opening up in front of him. Build a string of those, and they start to feed each other. The warning sign isn't a bad day. It's when the bad days stack into weeks and months.
Suck it up, Susan
On whether tech has a particular mental-health problem, Michael's answer is refreshingly un-tribal: it's all of the things at once, and it's not unique to tech — ask his lawyer wife. But he does think tech carries an unhealthy myth that to make it you have to work 80 hours a week, fuelled by LinkedIn role models and the startup-founder cult of giving everything up. And he thinks the real fix is generational. The boomers will age out; Gen X will close out their careers; millennials, far more fluent in mental health, will take the power seats. We're coming from a culture where senior leaders too often said, in his deliberately flippant words, "suck it up, Susan" — and he's careful to add that this isn't disrespect. That generation lived through real hardship; their world was simply different. But the changing of the guard is already visible, in the under-30 leaders he watches talk openly on stages in a way he never could have.
I told him about the lowest version of this stigma in my own life: the last time I was diagnosed with depression, I sat outside the pharmacy with the prescription in my hand and cried, because taking medication felt like defeat — like I'd lost a battle I was supposed to win alone. Michael got it completely. "I would never have taken medication — it's an admission of failure," he said, "yet I'd pop a painkiller for a sore hip without thinking." That double standard is the whole problem in miniature, and naming it is how it starts to dissolve.
What great leadership looks like now
Which brought us to leadership, and the line of his I'll be quoting for years: "Not being a dickhead is not enough anymore." It used to be enough to simply not be a jerk. Now you have to genuinely care — not perform it — have the vulnerable conversation, come to the table with your heart in your hand. At Flux he runs something called the CEO Table: eight CEOs around a breakfast, no slides, no presentations, just conversation, much of it about how to be healthy and whole. His exemplar is a construction-company CEO of 70 people who knows all 70 names, and whether their kids or parents are visiting. "I can't guarantee them a job, I can't predict what the world will deliver. But I can provide stability, and confidence that we'll always be good humans and have their back." He's Michael's age or older — so, as Michael notes, you can't hide behind the generational excuse. Great leadership is just great leadership.
Lean into being human
I close every episode the same way: if you could whisper one thing to everyone in tech tomorrow morning, what would it be? Michael joked first — "don't worry about AI" — and then gave the real one, simply. "You are not alone. You do not need to do this alone. We are not meant to do this alone. What that means, only you can answer. But don't be alone." For a man whose entire career is built on connection, it's the truest possible note to end on.
And he left a coda worth keeping. The reason he isn't worried about AI is that AI is forcing us back toward the human — toward the moments and the real-life connection we're all quietly craving as everything else goes digital. Treat the technology as the point and it becomes a magpie distraction: "this makes my life easier, I can get rid of these people now." Treat being human as the point, and AI becomes a tool in service of it. "Lean into being human," he said. "That's what makes us awesome and unpredictable and interesting. And it's why you shouldn't be worried — being human is what's going to make the difference."
Mind Middleware is a podcast about the invisible space between doing and being — honest conversations about mental health in tech. If this resonated, share it with someone you care about. And if you're struggling, you're not alone: in Aotearoa New Zealand, call or text 1737 any time. In an emergency, call 111.**