About Rick

My name is Rick Sabatino. I’m not a political operative, a Democratic insider, or a progressive activist. I’m a change management consultant — I spend my professional life getting people within organizations to adopt systems they didn’t ask for and don’t especially want. There’s nothing glamorous about it. Nobody’s inspired by an ERP or CRM rollout. But organizations that navigate change well don’t run on excitement. They run on clarity, vision, and consistent messaging — and I’ve watched political campaigns get every one of those wrong, repeatedly and expensively, in ways that have real consequences for real people.

If you ask my liberal friends in Chicago, where I’m from and currently live, they’ll tell you I’m a bit conservative. If you ask my conservative friends in West Texas, they’ll say I’m a bit liberal. That probably puts me somewhere in the middle, maybe a touch left of it — close enough to call myself a centrist liberal. I have no tribe to protect inside Democratic politics, and no career that depends on activist approval — which means I can say some things insiders won’t.

Create or Lose grew out of watching my own information environment do to me what it does to everyone: pull toward outrage, reward the wrong instincts, and change absolutely nobody’s mind while doing it. I wrote this book because I have two daughters, and because I think the party that’s supposed to be building something better keeps losing to opponents who understand something about human psychology that it doesn’t.