A body of work on the natural way to grow your business on your own terms
The question most women in business have been asking for years without quite being able to name it.
Not why am I so exhausted. You already know you are exhausted.
Not how do I build a more successful business. You have done the work.
The question underneath all of that is harder to name and more important than any of the ones being publicly answered.
Why, despite everything I have tried, does something still feel fundamentally off?
Rooted answers that question with clarity, evidence, and a genuinely different framework than any currently available in the women’s business space.
The business model handed to women was not designed for their lives. The research that built the business education industry was built predominantly on the study of men and applied to everyone as universal truth.
The friction women feel in business is not evidence of personal failure. It is evidence of a structural mismatch.
Rooted does not stop at that diagnosis. It offers the alternative. And the alternative is not invented. It is ancient.
Matriarchal organizing principles, documented across living societies on four continents, confirmed by biological research on the most resilient systems on earth, and supported by decades of peer-reviewed behavioral and neuroscience research, describe a fundamentally different way of growing something that lasts.
Power moving outward, not downward. Leadership as stewardship, not control. Sustainability over scale. Relationships as infrastructure. Growing from the inside out.
These principles have existed for centuries. What they had never been applied to was the specific decisions a woman makes every day in her business.
That application is what this body of work is.
Rooted is a book for the woman who has done the work and is still searching for something the existing conversation has not given her. Written in the second person throughout, built on three independent bodies of evidence, structured across four movements and thirteen chapters that move from recognition through the case through the application and back to her.
The book draws on three converging bodies of research:
Anthropological evidence. Living matriarchal societies across four continents, including the Minangkabau of West Sumatra (the world’s largest matrilineal society, over four million people), the Mosuo of China, and the Khasi of India, have been sustaining themselves for centuries on fundamentally different organizing principles.
Biological evidence. Dr. Suzanne Simard’s mycorrhizal network research. Janine Benyus’s biomimicry laws. The documented principles of how the most enduring systems on earth organize themselves. Cooperation rewarded. Form fitted to function. Only the energy needed.
Behavioral and neuroscience research. The Women’s Brain Project findings on the infradian rhythm. Dr. Shelley Taylor’s research on the tend-and-befriend stress response. Hochschild’s research on the second shift. The biological and behavioral realities the conventional business model was built as if they do not exist.
These three bodies of evidence converge on the same organizing principles. Applied to the specific decisions a woman makes every day in her business; they constitute a genuinely different framework. Not a new version of the existing model. A different one entirely. One that accounts for her biology, her life, and her actual circumstances rather than pretending they do not exist.
Rooted is written in the tradition of Quiet by Susan Cain and The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Books that take rigorous science and apply it to lived human experience in a way that feels both intellectually grounding and deeply personal.
This is not mindset work. It is not inspiration. It is ancient, documented science applied to the natural way women grow their best businesses.
Rooted launches June 30, 2026.
The Rooted Workbook is a companion to Rooted and grounded in matriarchal principles, behavioral psychology, and neuroscience. It covers your energy, your relationships, your structure, and what success actually means for you. Substantial, research-backed, and designed for the woman who is done building from someone else's model. This is the deep work.
Releast June 30, 2026
The dominant eras of the conversation about women and business have each reached their natural limit.
The Lean In era told women to claim their seat at the table within the existing system. Its own organization now reports, for the first time in a decade of annual research, that women are leaning out rather than in.
The girlboss era celebrated women who hustled hard and competed on patriarchal terms. The term is now used ironically.
What is emerging in the space those eras have left is a hunger for something neither could offer. Women are not asking how do I succeed within the existing system. They are asking to succeed at what, exactly, and by whose definition. They are not looking for more inspiration. They are looking for a different organizing foundation, grounded in evidence, designed around how they operate.
Rooted is that foundation.
Michelle Cross is a Business Psychologist with a Master of Science in Business Psychology and twenty years of experience working with women in business. She is the founder of Women Lead Company and the creator of Applied Behavioral Engineering™.
She did not arrive at matriarchal business principles through an academic literature review. She arrived there through her own life, as a single mother building a business from the beginning of her son’s life, without a support structure, without language for what she was experiencing, and without a framework that accounted for her whole life. She lived the gap between what the model promised and what her actual life allowed, long before she had the research to explain it.
That origin is not incidental to Rooted. It is the reason the book exists.