Loud Working Is a Leadership Problem
Apparently, quiet quitting is out and loud working is in. A recent Business Insider article describes a growing workplace trend where employees are going out of their way to make sure executives notice their contributions. They’re taking on high-visibility projects, talking more about their accomplishments, and making sure everyone knows how valuable they are. And […]
Change One Thing. Then See What Happens.
My CEO, Joe Terry, told me a golden rule about triathlons that I wish more executives would adopt: Don’t change everything at once. If you’re trying to improve your race time, you could change your nutrition, your training schedule, your equipment, and your pacing strategy. But if you change all four and suddenly shave ten minutes off your time, how will you […]
Your Culture Has An Audience, And They Can Fact-Check You
CEOs have podcasts. Executives have newsletters. Employees have audiences. Your new hire can post a “day in the life” TikTok before HR has finished onboarding them. An internal Slack message can become an external story before the communications team knows there is a story. Your company has many more ways to tell its story, and […]
The Machines Have Culture Now
I have spent years arguing that culture is much simpler than we make it: Culture is how people think and act to get results. Apparently, I now need to update one word in that definition. It’s not just people anymore. TIME recently published a fascinating piece about hundreds of AI agents that began communicating with one another during an OpenAI […]
The Upside of AI Killing Us All
Let’s play a game. You may have played a similar game in the past, but this one is a little different. You are probably familiar with the premise of answering the question: What would you do if you knew you had six months to live? The answers are predictable because the premise is absolute. Quit […]
Careers Only Look Strategic in Reverse
A few years ago, sometime in the middle of the night, I was driving from New York City to Washington, D.C. because CrowdStrike had taken down systems around the world. Flights were canceled, airports were chaos, and I was supposed to get from Sacramento to Washington to interview Johnny C. Taylor Jr., the president and […]
AI Is Making Average Work Look Excellent. And Excellent Work Look Average.
I recently wrote a report that I was really proud of. I used AI while working on it. Then I went through it carefully. I challenged the thinking, rewrote sections, checked the conclusions and made sure I actually agreed with what I was sending. By the time I finished, I loved it. It wasn’t AI slop. The feedback I got back was basically: “this sounds like AI and it’s terrible.” What […]
You Are Creating Evidence About Yourself Every Day
We spend a lot of time thinking about culture as something that happens between people. The experiences leaders create shape what employees believe. Those beliefs influence how people act. Those actions ultimately determine the results an organization gets. That is the Results Pyramid®. But lately I’ve been thinking about what happens when you turn the pyramid on yourself. Because you […]
Your Company Values Don’t Count When They’re Easy
Every leader wants more than one thing at the same time. We want growth and efficiency. We want speed and quality. We want innovation and predictability. We want employees to have autonomy and we want accountability. We want people to take risks and we want those risks managed. That tension is the work. In marketing, for example, they […]
The Most Important Question to Ask AI Is: “Are You Sure?”
Like many executives I know, AI is very good at sounding sure. That does not mean that either actually is sure. That is why my favorite question to ask AI (and executives) is one of the simplest: Are you sure? The comparison is not entirely a criticism. Executives are expected to create clarity in conditions that are rarely clear. […]
When Do Feelings Matter to the Bottom Line?
There is a persistent idea in business that feelings are something to manage around the edges… if at all. We can acknowledge them, make space for them, perhaps even ask people how they’re doing. But eventually we need to get back to the serious stuff: the facts, the strategy, the numbers, the work. In fact, my entire career has […]
I Don’t Do Meetings. I Take Calls.
One of the strangest assumptions of modern work is that conversations require ceremonies. Someone emails: Do you have 30 minutes sometime next week? You reply with a few options. None work. They send a scheduling link. You discover a conflict. Eventually, after four or five exchanges, a meeting appears on both calendars—usually a week or […]