BLUF/Summary Create a culture where goals are challenging enough that meeting 70–90% is considered a massive win. If your team is hitting 100% of their targets every quarter, you aren't setting goals; you’re just documenting current capacity. The Tension of Ambition Finding the right tension
The Trap: Communication Friction In small or rapidly scaling organizations, "tribal knowledge" often includes unwritten, and often destructive, communication habits. When pressure rises, leaders often default to "You" statements—"You missed the deadline" or "Why are you being defensive?" These are verbal
The Efficiency Trap In a recent piece, Scott Young revisited Stephen Covey’s classic concept of the Compass vs. the Clock. In our current "speed-at-all-costs" AI environment, this distinction has never been more vital. Most leaders are obsessed with the Clock: How fast can we ship? How many
The Chaos of Tribal Knowledge and Ambiguous Authority Small organizations often run off of "tribal knowledge." Everyone just knows how things are done because they sit in the same room (or Slack channel) and figure it out on the fly. There's a classic approach of "
The Trap Business leaders are currently navigating a storm of AI headlines. The pressure to transform, to automate before being left behind, is immense. I see this in the companies I support as a board member and advisor. They feel the FOMO, but they struggle to make wise bets in
I recently listed to a great podcast interview about Alpha School, on the Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy podcast, which is a new education model focused on using AI to personalize education to each student. It was recommended by a friend of mine, and was a
In past years, I've done personal and professional strategic planning and goal setting with a focus on goals first at a high level based around desires like Connection (Relationship), Purpose, Impact, and Service, and created goals under those headers. This year, instead, I reflected on what I wanted
When I try to explain how to play Carcassonne to friends who haven't played before, or when I play and it's been a while, I'm always frustrated that the game (which is great) doesn't include a simple scoring summary, and instead I
Several years ago, I had as great mentor who recommended the book The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt (also available as a graphic novel these days). I was chatting with someone recently about their team struggling, because their product team wasn't refining and prioritizing the backlog fast enough to
This 9.5-minute Harvard Business Review video is incredible. So many people use the word "strategy" poorly, and Roger Martin does a great job in this video explaining that strategy is not when senior leaders make a list of the projects they want to work on. Instead, strategy
Several months back, we wanted to get a corded landline for our kids to be able to call grandparents, aunts, and uncles; and as they get older, call us if they're not quite old enough for a cell phone and we're out and about. It'
I've been recently enjoying several episodes from IDEO's Creative Confidence Podcast, including an interview with Bob Sutton regarding this research and book "The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder". Some highlights from that episode: * Bob