Alina Okun
Everyone who writes about the future of work starts with what comes next. Alina began with what no one had thought to question.
Tracing how a system built between 1870 and 1920 came to feel like the natural order of things, drawing on labor history, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and economics.
A growing research platform tracing the origins of the words, practices, and systems the world takes for granted about work. Named after the Japanese nariwai, a concept that never separated life from work.
Interviews with company founders, CEOs, and workforce strategists across technology, healthcare, finance, education, and consulting.
Alina spent two decades inside the system she would later study, working across corporate finance, publishing, retail, technology, and franchise ownership. She started at Arthur Andersen, served as CFO of a tech startup, and founded her own firm. She earned her CPA in New York, completed a doctorate in strategy and innovation, and co-authored two bestselling books, Luminary Leadership and Meet You in Calabar.
The range of industries and roles she moved through taught her something no single industry could. She could see the same system operating under different names in different places.
Born in Eastern Europe and raised in the New York City area, Alina grew up between cultures that organized daily life around completely different assumptions. The rules governing professional life in one country had no equivalent in another. The assumptions felt permanent in each place, yet they were entirely local.
That awareness is where the research began.
For six years, she researched and wrote across labor history, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, economics, and entrepreneurship, pulling together evidence those fields had never connected.
The result was a genealogy of the present, revealing that the system most people experience as permanent was built in a remarkably compressed period between 1870 and 1920. That genealogy became the foundation for Nariway and for The Brief Experiment, the founding argument that ties the evidence together.
Art gave Alina something her research needed. She collects the work of emerging Asian diaspora artists whose paintings hold two traditions at once, Eastern and Western, centuries-old and contemporary. These artists are building a new visual language for an experience the old vocabulary cannot express.
The most interesting work she has found, in any field, comes from people who live between worlds rather than inside one.
Liane Chu, When Stories Aligns, Secrets Exposed, They'll Know It's Show Time, 2025
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