Hamza Khan had already written a bestselling book about burnout, delivered TEDx talks, built companies, and trained leaders at Microsoft, PepsiCo, and Deloitte. He had spoken on stages across the world. By most measures, he had it figured out.
But he had not figured out the question that started all of it.
A decade earlier, Khan delivered a TEDx talk called “Stop Managing, Start Leading.” It was a call for treating workers more humanely that drew from his own experience building a high-performing team at a Canadian university that won 11 awards in two years. By Khan’s metrics, he was overseeing a thriving operation.
The day after the talk, Khan’s boss demanded that he walk it back. Khan refused, and he eventually walked away from the job he loved, left with a nagging question: Why do leaders abandon collaborative leadership and revert to control, especially during times of change?
For years, he tried to answer it on his own, reading academic papers late at night, absorbing the work of leadership researchers. When he hit the ceiling of what he could figure out alone, he went looking for a program that could take him further. He found the Master of Professional Studies in Psychology of Leadership offered online through Penn State World Campus. Its curriculum focuses on examining how leaders think, make decisions, and influence the people and organizations around them.
The course work gave Khan a framework for ideas he had been building informally for years. The final project became the blueprint for a technology company he is now building. And a concept he had been circling, which he now calls entropic drift, got the academic grounding it needed to move beyond a personal theory.
For adult learners who come to graduate school deep in their careers, the goal is to expand their expertise. Read how Khan found not just an academic home for a decade of questions, but a launchpad for a theory, a business, and a direction he never saw coming.
You’ve built a significant career in leadership consulting and speaking. What brought you back to school?
I had reached the edge of my own understanding. I knew what was happening in organizations — I’d seen it, lived it, researched it informally for a decade. But I couldn’t explain it in a way that would hold up in a room full of skeptical executives or in a peer-reviewed journal. I needed to subject myself to the process of actually proving what I believed.
I also had a very specific research question: why do leaders revert to top-down, autocratic behavior during times of change? That’s not something you answer at a conference. That question needed a program built around the psychology of leadership, and Penn State had one online.
You’ve been open about burning out under a toxic boss. How did that experience shape what you were looking for academically?
I believe all research begins as “me search.” The professional crisis I went through — burning out while leading a high-performing team at a Canadian university — was the original question I was trying to answer. How did that happen? I had done everything right. The engagement was high, the work was meaningful, we were winning national recognition. I still left a job I genuinely loved, and it took a serious toll on my mental health.
For a long time, I thought it was me. When I started pulling at that thread, the research pointed somewhere else: burnout is driven by cultural factors — including fairness, values, community, workload — that are largely shaped by leadership. The problem wasn’t my performance. The problem was a system, and systems have mechanisms you can study.
Which course proved most valuable to your studies?
Dysfunctional Leadership. I nearly cried taking that course. I’d finish studying and go find my wife at dinner and just say, “Oh my god.” For 10 years, I had been exploring these ideas on my own like the dark triad of leadership, Barbara Kellerman’s work on destructive leadership, and suddenly, they had an academic home. I was getting 100% in the course because I had been waiting a decade to explore these ideas somewhere I didn’t feel like I was reaching into thin air.
The program told me I was on the right track and then pointed me toward the edges of the research. That same semester, I was taking another course, Follower-Centric Leadership — the idea that followers are as important, if not more important, than leaders.
One course showed me how leadership goes wrong. The other showed me what a different model could look like. That combination changed everything for me.
Your capstone project became the foundation for a company. How did that come together?
In 1999, Donald Sull at MIT published research on what he called “active inertia,” or the tendency for leaders during times of change to revert to the old playbook. I kept returning to a question I could not find answered anywhere: What is happening at the level of the human brain that causes a leader, under pressure, to stop working with people and start working over them?
That’s what my capstone addressed. I developed a conceptual framework I call “entropic drift” to describe this tendency, drawing on attachment theory, conservation of resources theory, and the psychology of change.
Then I asked how you build an intervention, and what a technology-assisted solution would look like to help a leader pause and respond rather than react, and how you make that available to the middle managers who never get formal leadership training, not just the executives who have coaches and assistants.
By the time I finished writing it, I had the blueprint for the company I’m building now. I was doing group projects where I’d ask my classmates to use my company as the case study.
What does Penn State’s program in leadership psychology offer that you didn’t see elsewhere?
Flexibility first. I’m running a consultancy, speaking globally, and writing books. A full-time, in-person program wasn’t an option. Getting my degree online through Penn State World Campus made it possible to do serious graduate work inside a life that was already full.
The substance is what kept me. The MPS designation — professional studies, not arts — meant there was always praxis. The ideas had to connect to real organizations, real decisions, and real people. The faculty pushed me toward the edges of the literature. For someone building a company and a research agenda at the same time, that distinction mattered a lot.
Where does the work go from here?
I’m starting a Ph.D. program this fall at Trent University in Canada in an interdisciplinary program that takes the ideas I developed at Penn State further. We’re establishing the Imperative Institute and building an annual Future of Leadership Report, the kind of longitudinal research product that sits alongside the Edelman Trust Barometer or Gallup’s engagement data.
It all goes back to my TEDx talk in 2015. My boss at the time saw it as a threat and pushed me out. Ten years later, I’m back at that same message, better equipped and no longer asking anyone’s permission.
Penn State is where that got its footing.