Beth Monaghan named her electric car Joan Didion. This produced a small literary reward whenever her phone reported that Joan had finished charging. For a reader who had once bought a used copy of Play It As It Lays for $6.75 in Syracuse, it was a pleasing promotion: a favourite novelist had joined the household infrastructure.
The joke belongs in a story about work. Monaghan co-founded Inkhouse, a public relations agency whose stock in trade was helping other people become interesting. Her own interests kept escaping the usual business biography. Books mattered. Time mattered. So did the experiences employees brought through the door that had nothing to do with the client on the calendar.
Over the years, those concerns became company decisions. There were limits on overnight email, arguments for taking vacation, and books of personal essays written by staff. An agency founder had given herself an unusually practical writing assignment: work out what a humane workplace would actually require.
Learning to take the chair
Inkhouse began in 2007, when Monaghan and Meg O’Leary founded the agency. Its early setting was Monaghan’s kitchen table. The ambition was large enough to survive the furniture: build a business that could do demanding communications work while leaving people room for the rest of their lives.
Monaghan had studied at Syracuse University’s Newhouse school. Her education ranged across public relations, journalism, creative writing and music. There was already something of the later agency in that combination: an interest in how a message works, alongside an interest in how it feels.
Knowing the craft did not automatically make her comfortable running the room. In 2014, she described learning confidence by observing people who seemed to possess it. Hard work had helped establish her career; a seat at the table required her to learn how to occupy it. She practised behaviours she could adapt to her own manner.
Her advice was almost disarmingly concrete: stand tall, make eye contact, shake hands. Find a workable route through a request. She was also raising two young daughters and wanted them to feel entitled to put up their hands. The professional question and the domestic one met at the same point: who learns early that their ideas deserve a hearing?
The inbox gets a bedtime
In 2014, Monaghan banned email between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. The distinction matters because an agency can announce that it values creativity while quietly keeping everyone available all evening. A boundary gives the value a time and a place. At seven, the inbox was supposed to stop claiming the room.
Her wider argument concerned the conditions in which people produce ideas. The business sold judgement, language and imagination. Those resources needed something beyond an uninterrupted opportunity to reply. An evening could contain a book, a conversation or an unremarkable stretch of doing very little. None needed a client code to justify its existence.
The overnight email window Monaghan closed.
When Inkhouse later moved from accrued vacation to unlimited days, she found that generosity on paper could produce uncertainty in practice. Employees asked how much time was too much, how much was too little, and how long they could leave at once. A freedom that needs decoding is still work for the person receiving it.
Monaghan wrote about having to explain that she wanted people to use the policy. The company should judge work through ideas and results. Time spent visibly occupying a desk was a poor substitute. Even an unlimited allowance needed a leader willing to make its meaning plain.
The policies on Inkhouse’s current careers page give that philosophy a continuing administrative life: 20 weeks of parental leave, a six-week paid sabbatical at ten years, and every other Friday off. These are specific commitments, the sort a prospective employee can ask about before accepting a job. Culture becomes easier to discuss when it has a calendar attached.
When the principle has a price
Monaghan’s account of one early client decision supplies a harder test. Inkhouse dismissed its largest client when the agency had only eight. Protecting staff meant accepting a commercial consequence. She has also described removing high performers whose behaviour damaged the office. A valuable employee could still make the workplace too expensive for everyone around them.
Another client once delivered confidential documents to her house and wanted them leaked to The New York Times. Monaghan said she drove with the package in her car for roughly two months before refusing. The client had previously been a mentor, which made saying no more difficult. Her later regret was how long she had spent agonising over a decision she already understood.
These are untidy stories. The delay, the relationship and the revenue make them useful. Leadership here involves a person trying to arrive at an answer, then accepting what the answer will cost.
The people at the next desk
At Inkhouse, storytelling eventually turned inward. The Inkies were live events, developed with Book Architecture, where employees practised telling personal stories. The first took place at Boston’s Old South Church. People whose working days involved shaping somebody else’s message stood up and offered something of their own.
Monaghan noticed that the connection extended beyond the speakers. But a live programme could accommodate only a few people. Moving into a book widened the invitation. She expected ten to fifteen submissions for the first collection and received 44. She set aside three days in autumn 2019 to read them, then found herself absorbed by lives she had been working alongside.
That collection became Hindsight 2020. Aren’t We Lucky? followed. Monaghan admitted that these projects were her favourite part of the job, an answer she felt slightly embarrassed to give when PR paid the bills. Yet she understood the work as part of getting the bill-paying work done well. Knowing people more fully helped her understand what their workplace needed.
Inkhouse described its first book as an effort to move away from polarised headlines and make room for more complex messages. That aim carried a useful inconvenience: someone else’s experience might sit beside your own without agreeing with it. A company of storytellers was practising the attention it asked audiences to give its clients.
The collections continued with A Tiny Break in the Clouds and Landing on Solid Ground, the latter built around first experiences. Her current biography counts six employee essay books. By September 2026, Book Architecture was looking back on a decade of work with Inkhouse. What began as an invitation to speak had acquired a bookshelf.
A story needs something to say
Monaghan’s approach to outside audiences has the same impatience with empty performance. In her writing on thought leadership, the idea comes before the distribution plan. A leader needs a view that is actually theirs, evidence to support it, and a reason for an audience to care. A useful test is whether the conversation can continue without mentioning the product.
Her signature Storytelling Workshop drew on the literary hero’s journey to find emotional connections between an audience and an idea. The literature was doing work here. A company could explain its features at length and still leave a listener untouched. The workshop asked where a story might find human stakes.
She had been making related arguments for years. In 2013, writing about Google’s rules on links, she challenged content designed to game search rather than engage readers. By 2024, discussing AI, she was concerned about unreliable material becoming harder to distinguish from credible information. The technologies changed; the obligation to earn attention remained.
Her own position was open to experimentation with AI, including research and early structure, while insisting on credibility. She also anticipated that people would seek relevant material as feeds became more driven by algorithms. For someone who had spent years asking employees to write from experience, interchangeable content was a particularly unappealing destination.
The handoff, and the room after it
Inkhouse secured a majority investment from BerlinRosen Holdings in May 2023. Monaghan described growth in terms of opportunities for employees and clients, and pointed to complementary capabilities. The group later became Orchestra. This was a larger setting for an agency that had begun around a kitchen table.
The figures give the journey some scale. Inkhouse reported $27.5 million in revenue for 2022. Its November 2024 leadership announcement described more than 140 employees across seven major cities, with remote colleagues in 16 states. The experiment had grown large enough to require many people besides the person who started it.
“Jason is as strategic as he is kind.”
Beth Monaghan, on Jason Morris becoming CEO, November 2024
Morris succeeded her that month, after a decade helping build the agency’s West Coast business. Monaghan became chair of Orchestra’s Technology Group. The transition put a longtime colleague in charge and gave her another role across the network. Handing over was part of the company’s story, too.
In December 2025, she announced that she would finish her day-to-day involvement at year-end while continuing on Orchestra’s board. She thanked colleagues by name, acknowledged her mistakes, and described learning to hire people who knew what she did not. She also wanted more time with her family.
Her present work includes writing and teaching. The newsletter is called Learning to be Here. She makes hand-cut collages, combining vintage advertisements, photographs and images of space: familiar material placed in relationships its original makers could hardly have anticipated. Another way of finding a story.
There is a satisfying consistency in that change of pace. She spent years making room in a company for lives beyond the job. Now there is room in her own working life for another form. Joan Didion, wherever the car is parked, can finish charging without needing to join the meeting.