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Leadership thinking
that cuts through

Practical frameworks, uncomfortable truths, and field-tested strategies for executives who are done with generic advice.

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The Training Line Is a Receipt
Featured
Culture October 2026
The Training Line Is a Receipt
A new NBER working paper finds that better managed firms are more likely to train their people, even inside the same industry and labor market. My read is that the training budget works like a receipt for how a company promotes and manages its people.
4 min read
A Call Before the Vote
Leadership October 2026
A Call Before the Vote
A May ruling from the Delaware Court of Chancery describes a board designee who, according to the complaint, needed instructions from his own employer before he could approve a financing. The court's reasoning about delay and conscious inaction applies to any gate holder who answers to someone else. Here is how to check your own approvals for the same relay.
4 min read
Thursday's Promotion, Friday's Schedule
Agile October 2026
Thursday's Promotion, Friday's Schedule
A randomized test across 28 retail stores found that stable schedules raised median sales by 7 percent and labor productivity by 5 percent, and that store managers traced much of the instability to headquarters. This piece asks who pays when a plan changes late, and what an operations leader could count to find out.
5 min read
The Nearby Answer
Culture October 2026
The Nearby Answer
A 2026 study scored how closely executives' earnings call answers track the questions asked, and firms with the closest answers saw higher returns. I would argue the same listening happens in every town hall, where the audience has years of the leader's answers to compare against.
4 min read
Who Signs for It
Coaching October 2026
Who Signs for It
An NBER working paper models two ways jobs get redrawn. Cheaper handoffs reshape jobs even when no task is automated, and when a machine takes a middle task whose output the senior person must sign, the senior title survives with a longer list of duties while the middle rung disappears.
4 min read
Whoever Had Somewhere Else to Go
Leadership October 2026
Whoever Had Somewhere Else to Go
A working paper tracked about 31,000 regulators through the switch from automatic raises to merit pay. Rulemaking went up and so did departures, and the people who left were the ones with the most to gain from leaving. The first readout on a new pay plan tends to show only the output.
5 min read
Fit Comes First
Culture October 2026
Fit Comes First
PwC's 2026 survey of directors found that 81 percent rate cultural alignment as very important in a new colleague, while 27 percent say the same about specialized expertise. In the same report, 55 percent want someone on their own board replaced, and more of them now cite a missing skill. This piece reads those answers as one story about how a seat gets filled.
4 min read
An Even Lap Around the Room
Agile October 2026
An Even Lap Around the Room
GAO's July assessment of NASA's major projects counts only four of 18 projects in development as anticipating more delays or overruns. The same report puts almost 75 percent of the cumulative cost overrun on one capsule. A portfolio review that gives each program equal time spends its attention where the exposure is not.
4 min read
Eight Days Late
Leadership October 2026
Eight Days Late
At a national retail chain, employees whose birthday gift arrived late took more than 50 percent more sick days the following month than colleagues whose gift came on time. Managers called the delays accidents of workload. Retail workers asked about it said they would assume as much and feel slighted anyway.
4 min read
The Reviewer's Seat
AI Ethics October 2026
The Reviewer's Seat
Engineers using AI assistants say they write less code and feel more productive, yet among those surveyed twice, the share reporting a worse experience on at least one measure nearly doubled in six months. Their effort tilted toward checking, which the authors argue the usual task categories miss.
5 min read
Who Reads the Leadership Column?
Coaching October 2026
Who Reads the Leadership Column?
In 2017 a Chinese factory paid its team leaders mostly by the piece, like everyone else on the line. Once managers rated the leaders weekly on leadership, posted the ranking and paid a bonus by rank, worker productivity rose about 7 percent. The result raises an awkward question about what senior leaders are actually paid to notice.
5 min read
Mush in the Middle
Culture October 2026
Mush in the Middle
A funding committee's voting rule decides which mistakes it is willing to make. A study of venture capital, accepted at The Journal of Finance, models why a rule that requires broad agreement can screen out the exceptional idea, and when broad agreement is still the better rule.
5 min read
A Fast Lane for Unfinished Work
Agile October 2026
A Fast Lane for Unfinished Work
A July report from the Government Accountability Office shows what happens when a fast approval pathway is granted to work that still has unknowns inside it. The designation shortens the schedule on paper, and the learning moves inside the clock. A leader can separate the two before granting speed.
4 min read
Packed With the Furniture
Leadership October 2026
Packed With the Furniture
A working paper following 909 expatriate managers finds that women on their teams fared better on pay while they were there and kept the gain after they left. About half of it ran through promotions, a decision no policy forces.
4 min read
The Extra Fifth
Agile October 2026
The Extra Fifth
A bank's mobile app raised output per worker by roughly a fifth, and workers kept doing the same routine tasks. In an unpublished study, the shift to harder work came only after the bank redefined roles and performance criteria. The question for any automation business case is who decides what the freed capacity is for.
4 min read
The Higher Number Next Year
Culture October 2026
The Higher Number Next Year
Raising targets after a strong year is supposed to teach people to hold back. A study of high-level managers found targets did rise after good years, yet those managers judged the next target easier, more so where they had more private information about the year ahead and where long-term commitments were more credible.
3 min read
Still Settling In
Coaching October 2026
Still Settling In
Boards are far less likely to remove a struggling CEO who followed an interim, and a 2026 study suggests the caution may be justified. The decision that sets up the bind comes a year earlier, when the interim is appointed.
4 min read
What the Pickers Were Already Doing
Leadership October 2026
What the Pickers Were Already Doing
A warehouse field study let pickers choose the size of their next task. Picks per hour rose and job satisfaction fell, and interviews afterward showed why: the workers had already built their own way of taking control back from the machine, and the change cut across it.
4 min read
Even the Good News
Culture October 2026
Even the Good News
In a Management Science experiment, people placed in a manager's role held back some or all of a worker's test result about a quarter of the time. Good results went missing nearly as often as bad ones, and the reasons managers gave pointed mostly at their own views on transparency and duty.
5 min read
Already Introduced
Agile October 2026
Already Introduced
Bloomberg reports that Apple wants to run faster and leaner and has dismissed engineering program managers who coordinated work across teams. A new study of 42 product projects found that the delay distance adds nearly disappears between people who have worked together before. Reorganizations rarely count that.
5 min read
What a Detector Score Cannot Say
AI Ethics September 2026
What a Detector Score Cannot Say
A student newspaper ran Dartmouth provost Santiago Schnell's writing through an AI detector and reported a median score of 96 percent. The story holds a lesson about the gap between a leader's stated standard and practice, and a second about how much weight a detector number can bear.
5 min read
Eight Meetings a Year
Leadership September 2026
Eight Meetings a Year
A new law review article finds that boards have taken on cybersecurity, money laundering and climate oversight while meeting about as often as they did a decade ago. The same arithmetic runs on most executive teams, and nobody is assigned the total.
4 min read
Buying It Back
Leadership September 2026
Buying It Back
Syndio cut roles in May, watched several of the people it meant to keep resign, and rehired a laid-off labor economist in August. Amazon, after more than 30,000 layoffs, is contacting some of the same people about open roles and calls rehiring routine. The evidence about whether a layoff was right arrives months later, in pieces, and almost nobody is assigned to read it.
5 min read
The Price of Being Liked
Coaching September 2026
The Price of Being Liked
Some countries make listed companies disclose when a director votes against a proposal. A review of 73 studies, many built on those records, links directors' social ties to managers with fewer dissenting votes, and surveys in the same review say directors hold back because they fear what dissent does to their relationships and their standing. This piece asks what that means for a leadership team whose members like one another.
4 min read
Nobody's Numbers Are Wrong
AI Ethics September 2026
Nobody's Numbers Are Wrong
A study of nearly 3.4 million job applicants screened by one vendor's algorithms found that people who applied widely were turned down everywhere more often than independent decisions would produce. It also found racial disparities that the pooled numbers hid and that appeared once each job was examined on its own. Every aggregate was accurate. The problem lived one level down, and across employers.
5 min read
The Missing Rung
Leadership September 2026
The Missing Rung
Small and mid-size businesses cut manager hiring sharply after 2022, on an efficiency case their own industry productivity data does not clearly support. Meanwhile employment for young workers in AI-exposed jobs has fallen behind. Together they raise a question most flattening slides skip: who fills the layer in between?
4 min read
Arguing to an Empty Chair
Culture September 2026
Arguing to an Empty Chair
For decades companies wrote to the SEC listing every reason a shareholder proposal should come off the ballot, and a staff attorney weighed them. Last November the agency stopped judging the arguments, and in August it stopped answering at all. More than 80 percent of this season's exclusion notices rested on a single argument, which says something uncomfortable about what the others were ever for.
5 min read
Thirty-Four of Thirty-Seven
AI Ethics September 2026
Thirty-Four of Thirty-Seven
Pew surveyed 42,151 adults across 36 countries this spring and found that in 34 of 37 countries people expect AI to mean fewer jobs. A median of 55% say so across high-income countries. Those are the people filling in your adoption numbers, and nobody has told them what the tool is for.
5 min read
Grade GG or Above
Coaching September 2026
Grade GG or Above
Researchers tried to seed a study on ChatGPT into 511 World Bank divisions, sometimes through a senior employee and sometimes through a junior one. Rank changed how far it spread, while telling people their peers approved, or that the paper was credible, did not increase sharing. Even so, only 3 percent of colleagues could recall any detail of it a few weeks later.
5 min read
Ask Again at Day 150
Agile September 2026
Ask Again at Day 150
A health system tracked 220 clinicians across 314,845 visits after switching on an AI scribe. Note writing time fell 7 percent at the start and 16 percent by day 150, about seventy minutes a week, while billed work rose 2 percent. What nobody measured is where the recovered time went.
5 min read
Who Drew This?
Culture September 2026
Who Drew This?
A new working paper mapped the internal layers of more than 3,100 U.S. public companies out of resume data, and it lets you price what hierarchy actually delivers. More layers comes with higher margins, steadier numbers, and more patents that earn no more citations than anyone else's. It also costs more in overhead, more in wages, and fewer dollars of revenue per head.
5 min read
Footnote Two
Leadership September 2026
Footnote Two
The SEC proposed in May letting companies file twice a year instead of four times. A footnote in the Chairman's statement notes the change would not touch earnings calls, because companies set that frequency themselves. Much of the pressure blamed on the quarter turns out to be self-scheduled, and the same is true of every review rhythm inside the building.
5 min read
The Denominator Did the Work
Agile September 2026
The Denominator Did the Work
Set manufacturing productivity, output and hours worked all to 100 in early 2007 and run them forward to late 2025. Productivity is up about six and a half percent. Output is down about four percent and hours are down close to ten, which is the entire reason the ratio moved.
5 min read
Nine Thousand Dollars a Head
Culture September 2026
Nine Thousand Dollars a Head
A September 2026 working paper surveyed more than 9,000 workers against Norwegian administrative records and found meetings consume 12 percent of work hours and 14 percent of firm wage bills. The finding that complicates the obvious conclusion is that meeting intensity rises with firm pay and revenue, and that workers in meeting-heavy firms report learning more on the job.
4 min read
Then They Took the Tool Away
Coaching September 2026
Then They Took the Tool Away
A pre-registered randomized trial across eleven US law firms found AI assistance raised drafting quality by 0.38 standard deviations at ninety days, with the largest gains going to junior lawyers. When the tool was removed and everyone was tested on unaided judgment, the entire advantage sat with the senior lawyers. Junior scores showed no average gain and split into more poor results and more good ones.
5 min read
Everybody Who Could See It
Leadership September 2026
Everybody Who Could See It
A study of Colorado's 2021 pay transparency law found posted salaries rose about 3.6 percent even at employers who were already disclosing, and take-home earnings rose roughly 1.3 to 1.4 percent for incumbents and new hires alike. The law was written for firms that hid their ranges. The money reached people it never named.
4 min read
Nobody Had to Defend It
Agile September 2026
Nobody Had to Defend It
A March 2026 GAO report found that five of six selected agencies were not using the Office of Personnel Management's Cyber Workforce Dashboard, and neither was OPM. The detail that explains three years of non-use is that the effort had no separate budget line item, so no one was ever required to justify it. Continuing costs nobody a decision, and stopping requires an owner most organizations have never named.
5 min read
Watching People Fill Rail Cars
Culture September 2026
Watching People Fill Rail Cars
A 2026 study coded 1,422 procedural steps at a petrochemical facility and found that 32.9 percent departed from the written procedure, with every observed task still completed successfully. Almost nothing in a normal reporting structure carries that fact to a person who could act on it. What reaches a senior leader is an adherence rate, which only describes how far the document sits from the plant.
5 min read
Ordinary Business
Leadership September 2026
Ordinary Business
Communication metadata from 102 companies shows internal conversation dropping right after a CEO change and not recovering for about five months. The Vatican wrote rules for that gap in 1996. Most companies write nothing.
5 min read
Say It on the Form
AI Ethics September 2026
Say It on the Form
Artificial intelligence has been the leading stated reason for announced US job cuts five months running. From October 1, Connecticut employers filing a WARN notice must tell the state whether technology contributed to the reduction. Most companies have asserted that causal line rather than established it, and the same missing work is why they cannot show a return either.
5 min read
Now It Has a Price
Culture September 2026
Now It Has a Price
A German retail chain paid apprentices for perfect attendance and absence went up by about half, more than five extra days per person per year. The survey afterward showed why: people felt less obliged to turn up once turning up carried a price. The effect landed hardest on the newest hires and outlasted the bonus itself.
5 min read
One Decision Wide
Agile September 2026
One Decision Wide
Delegating hiring and customer-facing calls was associated with better financial performance. Delegating capital investment and new product decisions was associated with worse. The total amount of delegation, which is the number every leadership team argues about, was associated with nothing at all.
5 min read
When Did That Number Last Change?
Coaching August 2026
When Did That Number Last Change?
A June GAO report found that the portal Special Operations Command names as its key tool for monitoring programs held no current cost estimate for any of the eight programs required to file one. The policy said keep it current and never said how often. Meanwhile eight of nine programs were reported as meeting their cost goals, and the two furthest behind schedule had set new dates and were described as on time against them.
5 min read
Somebody Scraped Your Culture
Leadership August 2026
Somebody Scraped Your Culture
A new NBER working paper builds a firm-by-firm measure of organizational capital out of more than a million Glassdoor reviews, and it tracks performance. The theory it rests on defines that asset as slow-moving and producible only with the direct input of the firm's leadership. Most executives hand culture to a function and review it at the offsite. The research says that is the one input which has to come from them.
5 min read
Where the Steps Touch
Agile August 2026
Where the Steps Touch
Eighteen percent of US firms use AI in a business function, and most of them keep it inside three functions or fewer. A new NBER working paper explains why that yields so little. Automation pays inside contiguous runs of steps, so the constraint is the layout of the work rather than the capability of the model.
5 min read
Paid to Stop Building
Culture August 2026
Paid to Stop Building
Most companies say the technical track is equal to the management track. Four economists rebuilt the reporting chains at 43 firms from the personnel records and found the expert side paid below management at comparable positions, with the gap growing toward the top. Your best practitioner has already read that number.
5 min read
Four Tenths of a Promotion
Coaching August 2026
Four Tenths of a Promotion
Nearly one in four US mid-career professionals has gone five years or more without a meaningful promotion or any real wage growth. The research shows the trouble is detectable a full decade earlier, in a gap too small for any annual review to register. Every instrument an organization owns takes a one-year reading of something that needs ten years to become visible.
5 min read
You Deleted the Line, Not the Rule
Leadership August 2026
You Deleted the Line, Not the Rule
Duke Power dropped a discriminatory policy on the exact day the law required it, and added a new screen the same afternoon. Decades later, employers dropping degree requirements produced almost no change in who actually got hired. The rule was never in the document.
6 min read
They Copied the Hours
Culture August 2026
They Copied the Hours
Gartner's 2026 trend list describes organizations that took on startup-style hours and performance pressure without adding anything on the other side of the exchange. In a real startup that intensity is paid for by a decision loop short enough to see results in. Import one without the other and you have bought the fatigue and left the engine behind.
5 min read
Out of the Loop
AI Ethics August 2026
Out of the Loop
The most popular way to control AI agents right now is a person who validates outputs without watching the actions behind them. A 1983 human factors paper predicted exactly how that ends. The review step is real, the reviewer is real, and nobody costed the job.
5 min read
Upstream of the Sprint
Agile August 2026
Upstream of the Sprint
Whether a piece of work was worth doing gets settled the moment somebody puts it at the top of a list. Everything downstream of that is craft. So when a return review lands on a delivery team, it is examining the wrong end of the decision.
5 min read
Credit for the Weather
Coaching August 2026
Credit for the Weather
Quits are running at 2.0 percent and almost nobody is resigning. That is a condition of the hiring market, and it is being read in a great many quarterly reviews as a verdict on leadership. The two look identical on a dashboard.
5 min read
Blame the Form
Leadership August 2026
Blame the Form
Two 2026 surveys asked about the same missing information and came back with incompatible answers. Safety leaders said the reporting process was too slow and the systems too clumsy. Workers said one in seven of them had already made a preventable mistake because speaking up did not feel safe.
5 min read
The Scaffolding Stops at the Top
Culture August 2026
The Scaffolding Stops at the Top
A senior leader I coached had two decades in her company and still got dropped into a harder job with no plan and no support. The pattern is ordinary and costly, and it grows out of a belief that seniority is its own instruction manual. Here is what the organization owns and keeps refusing to see.
5 min read
Fluent in the Problem
Agile August 2026
Fluent in the Problem
Organizations have never owned more ways to describe what is wrong with them, and the describing has started to stand in for the fixing. A theory-building paper this year found that as explanations for dysfunction grew more sophisticated, the capacity to act on them narrowed. The retrospective and the enterprise survey run the same risk: fluency in a problem becoming a substitute for solving it.
5 min read
Hoarding Your Best People
Leadership August 2026
Hoarding Your Best People
A manager fights to keep his strongest analyst on the team, calls it protecting a delivery, and some months later she leaves the company for a title he could have given her himself. He was doing exactly what his scorecard rewarded. Fixing that falls to senior leaders, because they are the ones who own the scorecard.
5 min read
The Half-Life of Clarity
Coaching August 2026
The Half-Life of Clarity
A strategy can be well written, recited from memory, and already stale. When a named, measured constraint refuses to improve after a full year of attention, the odds are that everyone is fixing the wrong version of it. The fix most leaders skip is the unglamorous one, re-deciding the direction out loud, on a rhythm, as conditions move.
4 min read
Nobody Waited for Approval
AI Ethics August 2026
Nobody Waited for Approval
Executives keep asking how to get their people to adopt AI. Inside the same building, adoption already happened without a memo or a budget line. The real exposure is not reluctant employees but a governance cadence the tools have outrun.
5 min read
When Owning It Gets Expensive
Culture August 2026
When Owning It Gets Expensive
Every leader says they want ownership. A simulation of five thousand workplace scenarios found that ownership collapses exactly when reputational risk climbs, and that seniority offers almost no protection. The uncomfortable implication is that leaders are often the ones setting the price that makes ducking rational.
5 min read
Agreement on the Cheap
Agile August 2026
Agreement on the Cheap
Leadership teams mistake quick consensus for agreement, then watch execution splinter when the vague words everyone signed off on finally collide. Drawing on new work from BCG and a classic study of how executive teams argue, this piece looks at why false alignment is so seductive and where the buried disagreement resurfaces. It closes with the conditions that let a team argue about the work without turning on each other.
5 min read
Predicting a Boom They Haven't Seen
Leadership August 2026
Predicting a Boom They Haven't Seen
Executives at nearly six thousand firms forecast that AI will cut employment over the next three years. Employees at those same firms forecast it will rise. The executives reporting no measurable effect from AI over the past three years, and using it about ninety minutes a week, are the ones whose number reaches the hiring plan.
5 min read
Fifteen Names, Three You Know
Coaching August 2026
Fifteen Names, Three You Know
Flattening the org chart gets sold as speed and savings. What it removes is harder to see, the attention a manager needs to develop anyone at all. When one person inherits fifteen reports, coaching becomes the task with no deadline, and it loses to everything that has one.
5 min read
One Hour a Quarter
Culture August 2026
One Hour a Quarter
Every director in a recent poll said their senior leadership team works as a cohesive unit. A third of the executives on that team said it does not. The gap is not dishonesty, it is a question of when a board actually gets to watch the people it oversees.
5 min read
Ask the Nine Percent
Agile July 2026
Ask the Nine Percent
Sixty-one percent of executives trust AI with complex, business-critical decisions. Nine percent of the workers who would live with those decisions say the same. That gap is usually read as an adoption problem. It is closer to the most current information a company owns about what its tools can actually do.
4 min read
Everyone Priced It In
Coaching July 2026
Everyone Priced It In
Almost half of the workers under a strict office mandate now badge in and leave within the hour. The workaround is not the dishonesty. It is a response to a policy that hid the real decision, and the people who leave first are the ones you most wanted to keep.
5 min read
You Either Move the Weight or You Don't
Leadership July 2026
You Either Move the Weight or You Don't
A lifter's notebook holds three numbers because those are the three the lifter can act on. Most corporate measurement fails that test, collecting what is easy to capture rather than what anyone can use. A meta-analysis of 94 studies found no performance gain from monitoring at all, and the saying everyone quotes to defend it was published in 1956 as a warning.
5 min read
Slop Runs Downhill
AI Ethics July 2026
Slop Runs Downhill
There is a name now for polished AI output that looks finished but carries no real thinking: workslop. New research shows it is increasingly flowing downward, from supervisors to the people they lead. What that shortcut saves in minutes it spends in credibility.
4 min read
The Half They Keep
Culture July 2026
The Half They Keep
Accountability is two things at once, the responsibility to know and the authority to act, and leaders reliably push the first down while keeping the second. People end up answerable for outcomes they were never empowered to control, and the word gets stretched over the gap to make it look deliberate.
5 min read
One Person Deep
Leadership July 2026
One Person Deep
Consolidating C-suite roles is sold as speed and cost discipline, and by those measures it often delivers. What the reshuffle also does is concentrate a company's judgment into fewer heads, so more of the organization leaves the day one overloaded executive does. A look at the fragility hiding inside the efficiency case.
5 min read
Who Is Your Team?
Coaching July 2026
Who Is Your Team?
Most chief executives, asked to name their team, describe the function they run and the people below them, not the other leaders across the table. A look at why the best functional leaders so rarely arrive as members of the team at the top, and why the fix is a change of allegiance rather than another collaboration workshop.
4 min read
The Boss Everybody Liked
Culture July 2026
The Boss Everybody Liked
Researchers asked roughly 200 working adults about specific harmful things their manager might have done. About one in ten could recall anything negative. Most reached instead for something they liked about the person. That finding suggests the survey most organizations rely on to find their worst leaders may be measuring something else entirely.
5 min read
The Rollout Was an Email
Agile July 2026
The Rollout Was an Email
Only 9% of American workers say they get their information about AI from their employer. Most are learning it from YouTube and social media, on their own time, from people their company never vetted. The rollout that produced this was run as a waterfall project, and it is producing exactly what waterfall produces.
5 min read
One in a Hundred
Leadership July 2026
One in a Hundred
DDI scored more than a hundred thousand leadership assessments and found executives the weakest group at leading change, 8% strong against 30% for mid-level leaders. Underneath that sits a smaller number: 1% are strong at visibly rewarding the behavior the change was meant to create. When nothing observable happens to the people who comply, waiting is the rational move.
4 min read
Arriving Without the Reps
Coaching July 2026
Arriving Without the Reps
Spencer Stuart's snapshot of S&P 500 C-suites found 80 percent of chief operating officers were promoted from within, and only 12 percent had ever held the role before. Both numbers describe the same person. A long internal climb proves what someone was rewarded for defending, which is the one thing the new seat asks them to give away.
5 min read
Twenty-Two and Nineteen
Agile July 2026
Twenty-Two and Nineteen
Gallup's global data shows manager engagement fell from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025 while individual contributors barely moved, closing a gap that had held for years. The mechanism Gallup points at is span of control, and what spans consume is the one part of managing that has a hard ceiling on it. A look at why flattening keeps getting counted as a savings and never as a cost.
5 min read
Nobody Actually Said No
Culture July 2026
Nobody Actually Said No
New research finds a majority of CEOs expect pushback if they lead with empathy, a jump of twenty-two points in a single year. The executives in the worst cultures rate themselves highest on empathy and are the most aware of what their people need, and they still cut the most. A look at what an organization teaches its leaders without ever saying it out loud.
5 min read
Neither the AI nor the People
AI Ethics July 2026
Neither the AI nor the People
Nearly a third of employees, and 44 percent of Gen Z, admit to working against their employer's AI push, and the reason is fear that it works. Meanwhile companies are abandoning close to half of their own AI projects. Put the two together and a business can shed its experienced people, kill the tool meant to replace them, and end up holding neither.
5 min read
The Long Way to Yes
Agile July 2026
The Long Way to Yes
A director needed nine signatures to approve a routine contract, and four of them guarded against a mistake made by someone who had already left the company. This is what a decision-making problem looks like from the inside. Every gate was a reasonable fence when somebody built it, and no one was ever put in charge of taking one down.
4 min read
One Floor Down
Leadership July 2026
One Floor Down
A March 2026 Gallup study found leaders rate themselves at least twenty points higher than their own managers rate them across nearly every core competency, and accountability is the competency they score lowest on. The distance says less about vanity than about altitude. Here is why the view from one floor down is the one that tells the truth, and how a leader can arrange to hear it.
5 min read
The Mandate Gap
Culture July 2026
The Mandate Gap
Only about a third of chief strategy officers say they own the decisions on their own top priorities, while nearly two-thirds are told to drive transformation. Deloitte calls it the mandate gap. A look at why organizations keep handing out responsibility while holding back the authority that would make it mean something.
4 min read
Reading the Week Like a Receipt
Coaching July 2026
Reading the Week Like a Receipt
When uncertainty rises, capable executives rebuild the job around the parts they can control, the inbox and the standing meeting, and step back from the exposed work of being present with their people. Bill George calls it a retreat to the narrowest version of the role. The trouble is that it feels like responsibility from the inside, which is why a leader can go a year without noticing they have stopped leading the part of the job that carries risk.
5 min read
The Tool Nobody Owned
AI Ethics July 2026
The Tool Nobody Owned
Adoption curves climb while the promised return never lands on a finance report. The models are rarely the problem. The tools get dropped into unchanged work with no one answerable for the outcome. A look at what the ninety-five percent are actually missing.
4 min read
The Room Where Silos Start
Agile July 2026
The Room Where Silos Start
Most silo-breaking initiatives fail because they treat a behavior problem as a structural one. By the numbers, the executive team is often the least collaborative group in the company, and everyone below copies what they see the top team do in a resource fight. Redraw the org chart all you want; the permission that creates silos travels downward from the room that never learned to work as a team.
5 min read
The Oldest Technology
Leadership July 2026
The Oldest Technology
The words for magic and the words for learning were once the same word. From the creation story to the Declaration of Independence, a look at the oldest and most underestimated instrument any leader holds, and what we choose to do with it.
4 min read
The Quarter That Looked Fine
Culture July 2026
The Quarter That Looked Fine
New data shows executives running toxic cultures report financial growth at nearly double the rate of their healthier peers, and that short-term reward is exactly why the behavior keeps going. A look at why culture damage reaches the scoreboard last, and what an operator learns to watch instead.
5 min read
The Team That Never Turned Over
Leadership July 2026
The Team That Never Turned Over
The share of companies with high executive turnover dropped from 43 percent to 19 percent in a year, and almost sixty percent of senior leaders now plan to stay put for at least three more. Boards call that stability. Underneath it, the advancement that keeps an organization renewing itself has stalled, and the future leaders are the first to notice.
6 min read
The Strength That Stopped Working
Coaching July 2026
The Strength That Stopped Working
A chief technology officer built his career on being the person who could fix anything. Then his organization tripled, and the same instinct became the bottleneck. Why the strengths that carry leaders to the top so often stall them once they arrive, and what the work of letting go actually asks.
4 min read
What the Middle Was Doing
Culture June 2026
What the Middle Was Doing
Gartner projects one in five companies will cut more than half their middle managers by the end of 2026. Most leaders price that layer as a cost, while employees trust their direct manager over senior leadership by a wide margin and lean on them to translate what every change means. Remove the layer and the coordination does not disappear. It lands on executives who are already underwater, or it stops happening at all.
4 min read
The Initiatives You Never Finished
Agile June 2026
The Initiatives You Never Finished
The average employee now lives inside ten change programs a year, five times what it was a decade ago, and most of them never reach an outcome anyone goes back to check. Leaders read the exhaustion that follows as resistance and answer it with more pressure. What the wall of unfinished initiatives actually needs is a limit and a column for done.
5 min read
What You Called Sabotage
AI Ethics June 2026
What You Called Sabotage
Twenty-nine percent of employees admit to undermining their company’s AI strategy, and executives call it a serious threat. Read the same survey and you find a strategy that openly sorts people into an AI elite and a group marked for layoffs. The refusal starts to look less like defiance and more like people doing arithmetic their leaders have not done out loud.
4 min read
The Burnout You Designed
Coaching June 2026
The Burnout You Designed
Most burnout responses treat it as a personal failing and answer with resilience training and apps. New research argues burnout is a design problem that looks different at every level of the org chart. The cause sits in how work and decisions are built, which is the part a wellness budget is meant to avoid.
5 min read
The Accountability We Tried to Install
Leadership June 2026
The Accountability We Tried to Install
Leaders rate accountability as the competency they are worst at, and the usual fix makes it worse. When you install a structure to make someone accountable, you tell them you did not trust them to carry it alone, and they hand back compliance instead of ownership. Here is what moves a person from doing the task to owning the result.
5 min read
The Bench You Stopped Building
Culture June 2026
The Bench You Stopped Building
Entry-level hiring is collapsing as companies hand junior work to AI, and the payroll data already shows it. The grind they are automating was also the apprenticeship that produced every senior above it. A handful of companies are betting the other way, and they have understood something the rest have not.
4 min read
Where Good Managers Stop Deciding
Agile June 2026
Where Good Managers Stop Deciding
A new behavioral study found that capable people stall exactly where authority turns unclear and a wrong call turns dangerous, then act normally once those conditions lift. The lever leaders reach for, more training and tighter control, makes the freezing worse. The real fix is the design of who is allowed to decide what.
4 min read
The Presence That Stopped Listening
Coaching June 2026
The Presence That Stopped Listening
Boards promote people for executive presence: the confidence, the decisiveness, the habit of having the answer. New work from Harvard Business Review and Gallup suggests those same traits, once a leader reaches the top, shut down the information and the ownership that hard decisions depend on. A look at why the presence that gets you promoted can stop you from leading well.
5 min read
The Strategy Built to Be Seen
Leadership June 2026
The Strategy Built to Be Seen
A WRITER survey found three-quarters of executives concede their AI strategy is more for show than real internal guidance, even as most pour over a million dollars a year into it. The document is doing a different job than the one printed on it, and that job is protecting the leader who commissioned it. The fix is smaller and riskier than the deck: one team, one owner, permission to act, a number to watch.
5 min read
The Team You Never Built
Agile June 2026
The Team You Never Built
Most executive teams are collections of strong individuals who were never built into a team. McKinsey's team-effectiveness research shows a roster of stars often performs worse, and that the top team is the one group leaders never examine the way they examine everyone below them.
4 min read
The Seat That Wouldn't Open
Culture June 2026
The Seat That Wouldn't Open
Executive turnover dropped sharply in 2026, and leadership teams are staying put. That looks like stability from the top and a closed door from below, where the people meant to take those seats are leaving for lack of room. The fix is to hand real authority down before the chair ever opens.
4 min read
The Adoption You Can't See
Coaching June 2026
The Adoption You Can't See
Leaders and managers have adopted AI faster than anyone, and that head start hides how little the frontline has actually moved. The lever that closes the gap is the cheapest input in the building and the one fluent leaders are least likely to pull. A look at why your own competence is the thing keeping you from seeing the problem.
4 min read
The Mandate Nobody Signed For
Agile June 2026
The Mandate Nobody Signed For
When LHH asked senior leaders who owns AI strategy, they split four ways and no answer cleared a third. An empty Accountable column reads like an oversight, though it usually shelters the people who leave it blank. That habit explains why the decade's biggest bet keeps stalling.
4 min read
The System's Best Student Gets Promoted
Leadership June 2026
The System's Best Student Gets Promoted
Spencer Stuart's latest data shows 76 percent of CEOs and 80 percent of COOs are promoted from within. Boards reward fluency in how the company already works, and that fluency becomes a liability when the operating model itself is the thing that needs to change.
4 min read
The Lease Wrote the Memo
Culture June 2026
The Lease Wrote the Memo
Return-to-office mandates arrive in the language of collaboration. Cornell research finds the real predictor of a mandate is the cost of the company's office lease. It solves an accounting problem and costs you your most skilled people, who leave first.
4 min read
Where the Trust Runs Out
Coaching June 2026
Where the Trust Runs Out
PwC found executives trust entry-level staff far less than senior leaders, so authority pools at the top while the frontline waits for permission. Most leaders treat trust as something earned by proximity, which guarantees the people furthest away never earn it.
4 min read
What the Reorg Mistook for Overhead
AI Ethics June 2026
What the Reorg Mistook for Overhead
Companies are cutting middle management because AI can do the administrative half of the job. The administrative half was never the job. It was the residue of it.
4 min read
The Failure You Built Before the Vendor Showed Up
Agile June 2026
The Failure You Built Before the Vendor Showed Up
Ninety-five percent of GenAI investments produce no measurable return. The article reads that number as an operating model problem the technology is making visible, not a vendor problem. What changes the failure rate is a different question asked first.
5 min read
The Half That Has Already Made Up Its Mind
Leadership June 2026
The Half That Has Already Made Up Its Mind
LHH's 2026 research found that only half of workers believe senior leaders operate with genuine transparency, and the number has been stubbornly stable through years of investment in communication. The article works through why the gap does not close through better speeches, and what actually closes it.
5 min read
The Accountability System That Doesn't Build Accountability
Culture June 2026
The Accountability System That Doesn't Build Accountability
Gallup's 2026 data shows accountability is the lowest-rated of seven leadership competencies, and the one category where leaders and managers agree on how bad the score is. Most organizations respond by adding infrastructure. That response works at building compliance. It does nothing for ownership.
5 min read
The Same Mistake, Running on Better Hardware
Agile June 2026
The Same Mistake, Running on Better Hardware
The reason AI implementations are failing in 2026 looks a lot like the reason Agile implementations failed a decade earlier. It has nothing to do with the technology. It has everything to do with the operating model no one redesigned.
5 min read
What the Room Stops Telling You
Coaching June 2026
What the Room Stops Telling You
Research from April 2026 found that the instincts senior leaders rely on most at the top, projecting certainty and arriving with answers, can systematically close off the input they need most. The room goes quiet not because people agree, but because they have learned that disagreement carries a cost. One in four senior leaders believe their current decision-making processes do not adequately support their organization's needs.
4 min read
The Quiet Cost of Looking Like You Know
Culture May 2026
The Quiet Cost of Looking Like You Know
Most C-suite leaders are not missing information because their teams are hiding it. They are missing it because the way they show up in rooms has made honesty feel socially costly. The selection system that built them trained them for this, and most organizations never ask them to unlearn it.
6 min read
The Sponsor Who Left the Room
Agile May 2026
The Sponsor Who Left the Room
Seventy percent of Agile transformations fail to deliver their intended value. Research points consistently to one cause above all others: executive passivity after the kickoff. The sponsor who launched the transformation stopped showing up the moment the structural work began.
4 min read
The AI Strategy That Was Built for the Board
AI Ethics May 2026
The AI Strategy That Was Built for the Board
In 2026, 75% of executives privately acknowledge their AI strategy is more for show than operational guidance. The people below them have already figured this out. Twenty-nine percent are actively working against the rollout. What happens when strategy is designed for an external audience, and what accountability for AI decisions actually requires.
5 min read
Running on Empty at the Top
Coaching May 2026
Running on Empty at the Top
A Forbes piece this month named an invisible leadership gap that has nothing to do with skill: the slow depletion that comes from carrying decision load without relief. From the outside, a depleted executive's poor call is indistinguishable from bad judgment, so organizations coach the wrong thing. The fix is rarely more willpower; it is redistributing the decisions that never required the executive in the first place.
4 min read
The People Holding It Together Are the Ones You Can't See
Culture May 2026
The People Holding It Together Are the Ones You Can't See
SHRM's list of 2026 workforce challenges names the invisible high performer, the person doing the most load-bearing work while being seen the least. Organizations reward visibility because contribution is hard to measure, so the people who hold the place together get overlooked in favor of the ones who narrate it. The cost stays hidden until they leave, and then several things break at once in places no one realized were connected.
4 min read
The Person Leaving Is the Risk
Leadership May 2026
The Person Leaving Is the Risk
Most organizations treat leadership succession as a selection problem and spend their attention on the incoming leader. New research suggests the real risk sits with the person leaving. Here is what a handoff actually requires to take hold.
4 min read
The AI Deadline Was Set to the Wrong Clock
Leadership May 2026
The AI Deadline Was Set to the Wrong Clock
A new HCLTech report projects that 43 percent of enterprise AI initiatives are at risk of failing, and points the cause at timelines rather than technology. Executives keep setting AI impact deadlines on the tool's clock, which runs in afternoons, while the organizational rewiring that creates the value runs in quarters. The gap between those two clocks is where the failure rate comes from.
4 min read
The Strategy That Never Left the Room
Leadership May 2026
The Strategy That Never Left the Room
Research shows only 54% of C-suite executives are confident that leaders two levels below them can explain top strategic priorities. The gap is not in communication volume. It is in the absence of any mechanism to verify that the strategy has been understood well enough to be used.
4 min read
The Team the Board Believes It Has
Leadership May 2026
The Team the Board Believes It Has
A third of C-suite executives say their leadership team doesn't work well together. Boards disagree, nearly universally. Both observations are accurate, which is the problem. The gap between what the board sees and what the organization below actually navigates is where execution disappears.
5 min read
What Changes When You Change the Leader
Leadership May 2026
What Changes When You Change the Leader
A wave of leadership transitions signals organizational urgency. It rarely signals organizational change. When the structure that produced underperformance stays intact, the new leader inherits more than the role.
5 min read
The Manager Your AI Strategy Forgot
Leadership May 2026
The Manager Your AI Strategy Forgot
A new research finding reframes where AI impact actually concentrates in organizations. Manager behavior drives roughly twice the AI return of individual training. The organizations that understand this will spend their next AI dollar differently.
4 min read
The Math Behind Why Managers Let Low Performers Slide
Leadership May 2026
The Math Behind Why Managers Let Low Performers Slide
New HBR research finds that managers who go easy on low performers may be making a rational calculation, not a cowardly one. When negative evaluations trigger gossip, slowdowns, or sabotage, the damage to the enforcer often exceeds the benefit of holding the line. The accountability problem in most organizations is structural, not cultural.
5 min read
The Judgment That Has to Exist Before AI Can Use It
Leadership May 2026
The Judgment That Has to Exist Before AI Can Use It
When experienced leaders leave, organizations don't lose headcount. They lose the judgment that has been feeding their systems, shaping their decisions, and catching the errors that never made it into the documentation. No prompt retrieves what was never recorded.
5 min read
When Everyone Owns It, Nobody Does
Leadership May 2026
When Everyone Owns It, Nobody Does
When everyone owns the initiative, the accountability system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect senior leaders from being visibly wrong. The ownership gap at the top is not a communication failure. It is a structural choice with a measurable cost.
4 min read
When Decisive Leaders Go Quiet
Leadership May 2026
When Decisive Leaders Go Quiet
Senior leaders who built reputations on decisive judgment are increasingly withdrawing from high-stakes calls. It is not burnout. It is a rational response to accountability structures that punish the wrong call faster than they can validate the right one.
4 min read
The Friction That Should Have Been a Signal
Leadership May 2026
The Friction That Should Have Been a Signal
When a leader creates sustained friction with a dysfunctional system, that is a signal the organization is trained to misread as a leadership problem. The cost of the wrong diagnosis is rarely visible until long after the accurate leader has left.
5 min read
The Floor Report on AI Is Never the One the Boardroom Sees
Leadership May 2026
The Floor Report on AI Is Never the One the Boardroom Sees
Most organizations treating AI adoption as a change management problem have misidentified where the failure lives. The breakdown is in the reporting chain built to deliver good news and filter out everything else.
5 min read
The Habit That Built Your Career Is Limiting You Now
Leadership May 2026
The Habit That Built Your Career Is Limiting You Now
The behaviors that earned you a seat at the senior table are quietly closing the loop on what you hear. Research from HBR identifies exactly how executive presence degrades decision quality — and what the best senior leaders do instead.
5 min read
The Leader Who Made the Room Uncomfortable Was Probably Right
Leadership May 2026
The Leader Who Made the Room Uncomfortable Was Probably Right
When a leader creates friction, organizations default to a single explanation: the leader needs to change. What they rarely examine is whether that friction is a symptom of a system that cannot bear honest input.
5 min read
What the Slack Thread Knows That the Dashboard Doesn't
Leadership May 2026
What the Slack Thread Knows That the Dashboard Doesn't
Executives are making high-stakes AI scaling decisions while the organization quietly optimizes every status update for palatability. The adoption numbers look good. The Slack threads tell a different story.
4 min read
The Meaning-Making Gap
Leadership May 2026
The Meaning-Making Gap
Most executives believe their AI adoption is going well. Most of their teams feel anxious and underprepared. The distance between those two realities is not a training problem — it is a meaning-making problem that most leaders are not yet asking the right question to solve.
4 min read
When Accountability Becomes Theater
Leadership May 2026
When Accountability Becomes Theater
Most accountability initiatives fail not because leaders set unclear expectations, but because choosing accountability is genuinely costly for the individual. What gets built in its place is theater.
4 min read
When Leaders Grade Their Own Tests
Leadership May 2026
When Leaders Grade Their Own Tests
Accountability is the lowest-rated leadership competency across organizations. Leaders rate themselves 20 or more points above their teams. The leaders who most need development are the ones most confident they already have it.
4 min read
Why Half the C-Suite Says AI Is Tearing Their Company Apart
Leadership May 2026
Why Half the C-Suite Says AI Is Tearing Their Company Apart
54 percent of C-suite executives say AI adoption is tearing their company apart. That number is being read as a rollout problem. It is an organizational design failure in plain sight.
4 min read

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