Leadership
A COO I coached in Hamburg last year had 17 direct reports and was working 75 hours a week. He was convinced that the problem was his team — they weren't as senior as they needed to be, they couldn't be trusted with the harder decisions, and
Negotiation
The best negotiator I've ever worked with was a middle-aged procurement director in the Netherlands named Piet. Quiet, bookish, rarely spoke first in meetings, never raised his voice. He routinely extracted terms from suppliers that more experienced, more forceful negotiators had failed to get from the same vendors
Communication
A director I know at a large consumer goods company has a Post-it note on the side of his monitor that reads, in black Sharpie, "No is the new yes." He put it there in 2021 after a year in which he said yes to everything — every cross-functional
Decision Making
In 2019 I watched a senior executive I respected make a bad decision in about eleven minutes. It was a hiring decision — a Head of Sales for a 40-person software company. The candidate was charismatic, well-connected, coming off a strong run at a larger competitor. The interview was warm, the