The one who annoys you

I’ve been in rooms with brilliant leaders who hadn’t been challenged in years. You can feel it. A certain settled quality to their thinking. Confident in ways that have nothing to do with evidence. Surrounded by people who have learned, often through hard...

Kindness that cripples

You think you’re helping. You step in, do the thinking, build the spreadsheet, and have the hard conversation they should be having themselves. You call it support. Leadership. Mentorship. It isn’t. What you’re actually doing is telling them, without...

The real bill comes later

As leaders, we make mistakes. Costly ones. Wrong hires, poor timing, misread markets. Most of them recovered. What I rarely see people recover from quickly is defensiveness. Not because it is dramatic or catastrophic in the moment, but because it is invisible. It...

The loneliest chair

The corner office comes with a view. It also comes with silence. Ask any CEO about the hardest part of their role, and many will tell you the same thing: it’s lonely up here. Not lonely in the sense of being alone, but lonely in the way that matters. No one to...

Choose your hard

Hard choices exist for a reason. They’re not simple. But inevitably, the hard decisions matter most. Choose your hard. Make the tough decisions now or risk the perils of the decision not made. We all do it. Forsake exercise to lounge about. Watch another show...