Think about the last time a piece of work moved between two of your teams. The deal that closed and got thrown over to delivery. The candidate who went from the recruiter to the hiring manager. The project that left design and landed in build. Somebody promised to loop you in, and what arrived was a forty-message forwarded thread and the word "thoughts?" Somewhere in that gap, something everybody knew stopped being known. Here's a question worth answering honestly: who owned that transition?...
21 days ago • 4 min read
Think about your last team meeting. You laid out a plan, everyone nodded, and nobody raised a single concern. You walked out feeling good about it. That might be the problem. We usually picture a struggling team as a loud one: people snapping at each other, deadlines slipping, resumes quietly getting polished. But teams rarely fall apart that dramatically. Most crumble slowly, and the earliest warning signs tend to look like good news. Smooth meetings. Confident answers. Careful attention to...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Think about the best person on your team, and where they actually learned what they know. It almost certainly wasn't a training program. It was some stretch of tedious, repetitive work (the reports nobody read, the calls nobody wanted) that you'd automate tomorrow if the right vendor showed you the right demo. That matters, because the costliest automation mistake happening right now doesn't look like a mistake. Stanford's Digital Economy Lab tracks payroll data for roughly one in six...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
You've probably had the thought already: AI can do a lot of your job now. Draft the update. Summarize the meeting. Organize the notes you've been sitting on for three weeks. And once you notice how much it can take off your plate, a different question shows up right behind it — if AI can do this much, what am I actually still for? Here's the honest answer: more than you'd think, and it's the part of the job that was never about speed in the first place. The trap is treating every part of...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
You’ve got a new team. Maybe it came out of a reorg, maybe you inherited it, maybe you hand-picked every person on it yourself. On paper it’s stacked — smart people, real experience, the kind of roster you’d brag about in a leadership meeting. And it isn’t working. Or maybe yours is the other version: the reorg fused two groups with very different cultures, and now they’re clashing hard and collapsing fast. Either way, you’ve probably told yourself the thing every leader tells themselves in...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
You made a call that didn’t pan out. Or you were sharp with someone in a meeting last week and you’ve been half-thinking about it ever since. Or you told a member of your team something was going to happen, and then it didn’t, and neither of you has brought it up. Nobody puts “professional apologizer” on a résumé. But lead people long enough and it’s a real part of the job — and it doesn’t get easier as you get more senior. It gets harder. The stakes get bigger, the audience gets larger, and...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Your team is smaller, quieter, and a lot more anxious than it was a week ago. And the instinct in that moment is almost always the same: get back to business as fast as possible. Ship the projects. Hit the numbers. Move on. I understand the instinct. But it's backwards — and it quietly costs you the trust you have left. Here's why. Columbia's Joel Brockner has spent decades studying the people who keep their jobs after a layoff, and his findings are consistent: survivors experience guilt,...
2 months ago • 3 min read
You've felt it. The customer service maze that leads nowhere. The subscription that took nine seconds to start and three weeks to cancel. The same intake form filled out three times for three people who already have your information. It's tempting to assume somebody chose this. A greedy executive, a lazy team, a technology that ruined everything. But almost nowhere did anyone wake up and decide to make the experience worse. What happened is subtler, and it's happening inside your organization...
3 months ago • 3 min read
You've probably got a dashboard somewhere that says things are fine. Few problems reported, most metrics green. Here's an uncomfortable thought: that might not mean you have few problems. It might mean you have a team that learned not to report them. That's the real lesson buried inside one of the most famous business turnarounds of the last twenty years—and it's not the one that gets taught. In December 2009, Domino's did something almost no company ever does. They bought national TV time to...
4 months ago • 3 min read