Founder, The Why Inc.
The work repeats. The room keeps changing.
Classrooms. Regional workforce systems. Nonprofit program leadership. A statewide association. Mike Barba has spent his career finding the same structural gap in every one of them — where an organization's purpose and its structure have stopped agreeing — and building what closes it.
Mike is the founder and principal of The Why Inc., an embedded leadership and transformation practice operating since 2006. His record runs through classrooms, a regional workforce platform, nonprofit program leadership, and association executive work — different rooms, the same underlying job: find where an organization's purpose and its structure have stopped agreeing, and build what closes the gap.
As Chief Program Officer of South Central Workforce Investment Board (SCPA Works, 2017–2022), he led a $21 million regional workforce system across twelve departments and eight locations, with a 320-person network of providers, educators, and employers running through his office. Integrated workforce and reentry strategies there contributed to a 38% reduction in recidivism, and a policy interpretation he brought to the U.S. and Pennsylvania Departments of Labor opened services to hundreds of previously excluded returning citizens. Earlier, as Business, Program & Marketing Director at Crispus Attucks Center, he built the partnerships and funding behind education, workforce, and entrepreneurship programs serving more than 800 people a year, including Seed Catalyst, a micro-investment platform that helped launch 32 urban businesses. Running alongside all of it since 2006: The Why Inc., his independent advisory practice — through which he's secured more than $5 million in public and philanthropic funding and served as principal architect of Starbucks' 12-week Inclusion Academy for adults with disabilities.
That range is the point. Mike works best where mission, operations, politics, people, and public purpose intersect — and his strength isn't studying a problem from a safe distance. It's entering the environment, naming what's actually stuck, and building the structure that lets it move.
“The greatest gift you can give anyone is the gift of inspiration.”
See the work behind the approach
He currently also serves as Executive Director & Senior Vice President of the Pennsylvania Chiropractic Association — read that engagement as its own case study.
His own, not handed to him
The question he's been answering since before the firm had a name for it.
Classrooms, a $21M workforce system, a statewide association — different rooms, the same one underneath.
What he actually believes
A short list, held firmly.
Purpose must govern structure
An organization can't claim a mission while running systems that repeatedly defeat it. The structure serves the purpose — never the reverse.
Movement requires discomfort before clarity
Unease that the old explanation no longer holds. Conviction that the real problem is undeniable. Then, and only then, action.
Listening is a diagnostic discipline
Not passive agreement. A method for finding the incentives, fears, and myths people have learned not to say out loud.
The client keeps the agency
The job is to transfer knowledge, systems, and confidence back — not to build a permanent dependence on a consultant.
We aren't for everyone. We're for leaders who'd rather know what's actually wrong than keep managing the symptoms of it.