Career
What I'd Tell Myself at Thirty: The Career Advice Nobody Gave Me
The advice you need at thirty is the advice nobody thinks to give you. It does not fit on a slide and it will not be the focus of any HR training.
Leadership
Career
Personal Board of Directors: Who Sits on Yours and Why You Need One
A company of one needs a board of five. Most senior people never assemble one and end up taking advice from whoever happens to be in the room.
Career
The Cost of Ambition: What You Pay to Move Up the Organization
Career ambition is sold as a matter of sacrifice and reward. The reward part is well documented. The sacrifice part is more specific than it looks.
Career
Curiosity as a Career Moat: Why Asking Better Questions Outpaces Intelligence
The smartest person in the room is rarely the most valuable one. The most curious person usually is.
Leadership
The Inner Game: Why Tim Gallwey's 1974 Tennis Book Still Changes Executives
A tennis coach wrote the best book about executive performance, and most MBA programs still haven't noticed.
Career
How to Handle a Bad Boss Without Quitting Your Career
Almost every senior professional has, at some point, worked for someone they considered a bad manager. The pattern shows up in surveys, in coaching engagements, in honest conversations among peers. A significant fraction of those same professionals will tell you, if they're honest, that the experience of working
Management
The Single Biggest Mistake First-Time Managers Make (and It's Not What You Think)
Most of the coaching literature for first-time managers focuses on specific skills: delegation, feedback, running one-on-ones, holding difficult conversations. These are real skills and worth developing. They are also not what actually fails most new managers. In the hundreds of first-time manager situations I've watched closely, the mistake
Leadership
Leadership Styles Are Fake — Context Is Real
The personality-quiz version of leadership — visionary, servant, transformational, authentic, situational — is a forty-year exercise in giving old ideas new labels. Every few years, a consulting firm releases a new taxonomy with four or five leadership styles, markets it aggressively, and then watches it settle onto the pile with the previous
Leadership
How to Give Feedback That Actually Changes Behaviour
The feedback sandwich was popularised in the 1980s by management consultants who had, probably, never tried to use it on a peer. The idea — wrap a critical message in two positive ones, so the recipient swallows the bad news more easily — sounds humane and turns out to be ineffective. The
Stoicism
The Stoic Playbook for Modern Executives: Marcus Aurelius in a Zoom-Call World
Stoicism, the school of philosophy developed in Athens around 300 BC and refined by Roman writers from Seneca through Marcus Aurelius, has been having a cultural moment for roughly ten years. Ryan Holiday's books have sold millions. Social media is full of Marcus Aurelius quotes on sunset backgrounds.
Strategy
The Two-Hour Strategy Meeting: Why Most Companies Waste the Most Important Session of the Year
Most companies have a strategy offsite. They happen once or twice a year, they last two to three days, they're held in conference centres or rented houses, and they produce slide decks that almost nobody refers to three weeks later. The offsite industry is worth hundreds of millions
Meetings
How to Run a Meeting That People Actually Want to Attend
The most productive meeting I have ever been in lasted seven minutes. It was a Tuesday morning at a mid-sized logistics company in Rotterdam, the weekly operations review for the Benelux region. Seven people. One agenda item at a time. Each person had exactly 45 seconds to flag a specific