Hope in an Age of Disillusionment is a practical, story-rich roadmap for leaders, founders, and professionals who refuse to give up on building something better in a world that feels broken. If you sense that the old rules of success have collapsed but still feel called to lead and innovate, this book shows how to turn hope into your most powerful strategic asset.
Hope in an Age of Disillusionment traces 45 years of technological disruption – from personal computing to AI – through nine entrepreneurial journeys that mirror real strategic inflection points. From the ashes of economic collapse to the dawn of artificial intelligence, nine entrepreneurs build hope into a discipline. Their stories—and the 100 proven tools they used – show you how to transform uncertainty into competitive advantage.
Hope gives leaders a way to move from information and disruption to integrated structures, decisions, and behaviors.
Part One traces 45 years of technological disruption—from early personal computing to today’s AI-powered economy—through nine modern “fairy tale” case studies that show how real founders build structural discipline without losing humanity or purpose.
Part Two then translates their journeys into seven specialized toolkits and 100 proven tools, each with two suggested actions, so you can move from mindset to momentum in your own career, company, or community.
The Mindset to Momentum framework creates an infinite loop of resilient growth: from inner resilience (the why) to structural clarity (the what) to operational agility (the how). Build repeatable, self-correcting progress—not one-off wins or heroics.
After completing Hope in an Age of Disillusionment, Linda Holroyd realized that while the book explored why hope matters and how it works in practice, nobody had clearly defined what a Hope Economy could look like at scale, which led to the creation of Elevate Hope from Mindset to Framework to Momentum.
Choose Your Edition
Both the Regular and the Workbook Edition of Hope in an Age of Disillusionment offer a core field guide to the Hope framework, designed for leaders, founders, and professionals who want a portable, story-driven way to navigate complexity. It introduces Hope → Resilience → Clarity → Agility as a repeatable operating system for turning disruption into disciplined, sustainable growth.
Choose the format that best matches how you like to learn and implement. Order either copy through our ‘About the Author‘ link.
The 6″x9″ Regular Edition is a portable, reader‑friendly book that introduces the core Hope framework along with 100 tools, each with two suggested actions to help you move from mindset to momentum. This is ideal if you want a thought‑provoking, practical guide you can underline, share, and return to over time.
The Hope in an Age of Disillusionment Workbook contains the same stories and introductions from Part One of the Regular Edition and expands Part Two to 125 tools, each with five suggested actions and structured space to reflect, plan, and track your progress.
It is designed as a hands‑on implementation companion for coaching conversations, strategic decision‑making, personal reflection, team development, and exploring synergistic opportunities.
Ready to Build Your Hope Economy?
If the stories and frameworks in this book resonate with where you are now, let’s explore how the Hope Economy operating system can work for your team or organization. Coaching and consulting clients may choose either the Regular Edition or the Workbook Edition as part of their engagement, and are also provided with access to the Hope Toolkit web companion.
We offer three ways to partner: executive advisory, team innovation labs, and founder intensives. Learn more at fountainblue.biz/services or schedule a 15-minute conversation.
Hope Toolkits Web Companion
The Hope Toolkits featured in Part Two of Hope in an Age of Disillusionment are proven tools that help leaders transform insight into action. An interactive Hope Toolkit web companion application brings all 125 tools from the Hope in an Age of Disillusionment workbook to life so they can be applied in real time to ventures, teams, and transformations.
Speaking and Book Tour
Founders and executives driving the Hope Economy can also bring these ideas to their organizations through talks and book related events linked to Hope in an Age of Disillusionment and Elevate Hope from Mindset to Framework to Momentum.
Stay tuned for more information.
All of this thought leadership work is rooted in the Hope Economy—using stories, frameworks, and community to help leaders turn Hope → Resilience → Clarity → Agility into real authority and impact, not just more content.
In 2026, FountainBlue will be taking Hope in an Age of Disillusionment on the road, visiting the nine cities featured in the book to convene conversations with leaders, founders, and change agents. Building on the Hope Toolkits and their 100+ practical tools, book‑tour events, keynotes, and podcast or media interviews will explore a tailored mix of topics, as represented by the list below:
- From information to integration: How leaders move from “knowing” to “doing,” turning data, content, and training into integrated behaviors, processes, and measurable business outcomes.
- Hope and resilience in turbulent markets: How executives and teams can stay grounded, make clear decisions, and keep innovating when markets, technology, and expectations keep shifting.
- Guardrails for purpose: Practical business and personal “guardrails” (principles, boundaries, and practices) that keep leaders aligned with their purpose while still delivering on performance and growth.
- Innovation with integrity: How to embrace new technologies and business models in ways that align with your mission, stakeholders, and long‑term impact.
- Leading through complexity: How leaders navigate competing priorities, limited resources, and rapid change while still making clear, values‑aligned decisions.
- Culture, community, and belonging: How to design teams, ecosystems, and communities that attract talent, deepen engagement, and sustain momentum over time.
- Legacy and impact in real time: How leaders can shape a living legacy through daily choices, bias‑aware decisions, and intentional investments in people and systems.
Read Sample Chapters on Substack.
Get early access to Part One stories as we release them chapter by chapter. Each entrepreneur’s journey includes real frameworks you can apply immediately.
The Currency of Hope – A Note from the Author
As a five-year-old arriving in America from Hong Kong, the most valuable thing I owned was the banana I carried off the plane. I held it tightly, determined that this new place would be where opportunity could be built — and rebuilt — from nothing.
That small piece of fruit became my compass. I began my career as a teacher, then crossed industries as a serial entrepreneur and management consultant. Each chapter became a crucible for navigating uncertainty, mastering new markets, and confronting systemic challenges.
My Hope in an Age of Disillusionment book is my way of turning hope into something you can use—something that benefits others. My goal is to communicate that Hope is the foundation that leads to the Resilience to persevere, which in turn leads to the Clarity to understand, which in turn leads to the Agility to adapt.
Introduction: Hope in an Age of Disillusionment
The world is a living paradox. The same technologies that connect us can make us feel more alone. The same global systems that bring us products can spread chaos. Yet, this is precisely where innovation and creativity thrive. This is where leaders do the quiet, difficult work of creating something from nothing. They don’t just react to change; they become its architects, finding opportunity in the very chaos that paralyzes everyone else. This book is a challenge to all of us. It asks you to look past the noise and find the signal. It asks you to stop waiting for change and start creating it…
Introduction to Part One: Hope is Built.
The nine narratives in Part One are modern fairy tales for entrepreneurs. These immersive case studies show how hope cultivates the resilience and clarity needed to create something from nothing.
Each story spans a specific five-year period between 1980 and 2025, reflecting the social and technological landscape of that moment. While the characters are fictional composites designed to model strategic thinking, the historical settings and the tools they apply are real.
Chapter 1: The Code of Connection (1980–1985)
My parents were engineers when they arrived in Boston as refugees from Saigon in 1960. They spent decades rebuilding their savings, only to lose everything in the economic collapse of 1980, forcing them back into grueling factory jobs.
My mother wept when I dropped out of my computer science degree. To her, a computer education represented the stability they had fought so hard to regain.
But the rigid lab culture and corporate hierarchies felt like another set of broken promises. Instead, I worked double shifts in retail and hospitality technical support, where I learned to listen, triage, and solve complex coordination issues. I loved working with Mrs. Hubble, the hotel manager who introduced me to her IT team and encouraged me to explore software solutions.
Chapter 2: The Global Thaw: (1986-1990)
My father’s factory in Taiwan was fueled by meticulous execution. We moved to America in 1985 seeking operational excellence.
We chose Chicago—the epicenter of American logistics—because it seemed like the perfect place to understand the machinery of global commerce.
Our first months revealed something nobody talked about: every shipment passed through too many hands, each using different forms, different rules, and different expectations. Nothing moved the same way twice. In that complexity, one of our shipments disappeared—not lost in the city, but lost in the gaps between disconnected systems… Read more
Chapter 3: The Digital Library (1990–1995)
My Russian Jewish father was a gifted physicist who spent his early career limited by a lack of access to reliable data. When we immigrated to Washington, D.C. in 1990, we believed we were entering a city where information shaped power and policy. It did not take long to learn that even here, essential knowledge was scattered across paywalls, archives, and institutional silos.
While earning my Library and Information Science degree, I discovered how broken the system truly was. Policy documents were inconsistent, legal references conflicted with agency records, and basic data sets lived in formats no one could search. I often spent hours trying to reconcile sources that should have matched but did not. At first I thought I was doing something wrong. I assumed the problem was my inexperience. It took time, frustration, and many failed attempts before I accepted the truth. The problem was not me. It was the system.
Chapter Four: The Voice of the Community (1996-2000)
The pursuit of global clicks ignored the people right outside my door. My Israeli immigrant parents raised me with a strong sense of community and responsibility, so when I looked around Los Angeles in 1995, the disconnect bothered me deeply. The city was vibrant, sprawling, and full of cultural pockets that shaped daily life, yet none of these neighborhoods were connected digitally in any meaningful way.
I was a trained programmer and engineer, but the problems I wanted to solve were personal. My extended family lived in several of the neighborhoods that struggled most with access, visibility, and economic opportunity. They relied on local markets, community centers, and word of mouth for everything from childcare to business referrals. I wanted technology to strengthen those bonds, not replace them.
Chapter 5: The Health Catalyst (2000–2005)
As a first-generation daughter of Japanese and German parents, I was raised to see systems for what they were: structures that could be fixed if you were willing to confront the dysfunction. By the time I finished my data science degree and moved to Seattle in 2000, that lens felt impossible to turn off. Seattle’s combination of world-class hospitals, scrappy biotech labs, and ambitious engineering teams made it the perfect place to investigate the fractures of the American healthcare system.
For me, the problem was painfully personal. My mother suffered from an undiagnosed condition, and navigating her care felt like wandering through a maze with no map. Worse, it was a circular maze — we kept getting redirected to the same tests, the same specialists, the same forms, as if none of the prior steps existed. Every appointment felt like returning to territory we had already explored. Nothing connected. No one shared information. The system forced us to start from zero again and again.
Chapter 6: The Unfiltered Feed (2005-2010)
As a half-Jamaican, half-Chinese American living in Brooklyn in 2005, I felt constantly suspended between worlds. My days were spent inside Manhattan studios where perfection was manufactured frame by frame, and my nights belonged to Brooklyn’s raw creative spaces where artists refused to apologize for the truth. That tension sharpened my mission long before I knew I had one.
The financial crisis hit my family hard. My parents’ retirement savings evaporated because of decisions made by people who would never feel the consequences. Watching them return to work in the same media ecosystem that rewarded artifice felt like a quiet betrayal. I decided that whatever I built next would fight for authenticity.
From the WHY to the WHAT and the HOW
The stories from Part One trace the journey from the Why, to the What, to the How.
The ‘Why’ is anchored in their resilience.
In an age of disillusionment, these founders refused to accept insurmountable walls. Their hope was not a passive wish but an active decision to build.
The ‘What’ is defined by their clarity.
They met daunting challenges with ingenuity, transforming complex visions into tangible solutions that others could not see.
The ‘How’ is realized through agility and discipline.
Their greatest triumphs emerged from shared effort. With mentors, frameworks, and structural rigor, they transformed personal risk into collective reward.
From Mindset to Momentum: Your Blueprint for Action
The innovators in Part One weren’t superheroes. They were ordinary people who refused to wait for hope—they built it. The question is no longer what technology can do, but what you choose to do with it.
The Synthesis of Structural Mastery
Sustainable success rests on three imperatives that shape the Part Two toolkits:
- Resilience (The WHY): Hope begins within, but it requires discipline and structural integrity to grow.
- Clarity (The WHAT): With the right frameworks, even complex visions can become scalable solutions.
- Agility (The HOW): Discipline and resourcefulness turn problems into momentum.
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