The team lost a leader they loved to a bigger job. You filled the seat, told yourself the hard part was done, and moved on. From day one the team measured your new manager against the person before, and your new manager had none of what that person had built up. Nine months on, your new manager is struggling, the team's best performer has resigned, and you are looking at running the search again. There was a moment early on when I felt the job was too big. An afternoon forecast call, and my...
9 days ago • 2 min read
You promoted your best performer last month and they said yes before you finished the sentence. But nobody told them what comes next, and likewise nobody probably told you either. I know because I said yes the same way. Years of doing the work with cold calling, booking my own meetings, eventually moving up to work with large key accounts. I consistently performed and did my numbers. Closed big contracts and delivered what we promised. People noticed. Then one day someone said we want you to...
16 days ago • 2 min read
If you know me well, you know I love my American football, played and coached it for years, still tune in every Sunday for my Eagles 🦅. In sport, and in leadership too, "trust the process" gets said constantly. Almost nobody actually does it. Turns out very few know where it came from or what it actually requires of you. The phrase has been said so many times it's lost its meaning. Printed on motivational posters, muttered by struggling sports fans, tattooed on people who've never read a page...
23 days ago • 4 min read
I had a member of my team, a high energy type A person, and another leader we worked closely with who were not clicking. The friction was real, and it kept impacting how work actually got done. On the verge of a full escalation. My first instinct was to "fix" the communication style with my team member. Address the tone, the timing, the delivery. What's the real problem? The communication problem wasn't actually the problem to solve. The real question was more basic. What is our job here? Our...
28 days ago • 2 min read
You've told your team courage matters. Then a call came in where the safe answer cost you nothing and the right one would have cost you, and you took the safe one. Nobody outside the room ever knew. You did. That gap, between the value you'd claim under questioning and the one you actually act on under pressure, isn't a personal failing unique to you. The people who literally wrote the rules on courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom (the Stoics) struggled with that exact same gap, their...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
For years, I told myself I didn't have enough time. I did. I was just spending it badly. Are you using your time to be busy, or to be effective and live the good life? I used to think I was effective. It took me a while to notice how much of that was actually just busyness and motion. Seneca: don't confuse activity with results Seneca wrote it plainly, two thousand years before calendars had colors in them: "It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
"Let me be honest with you." "I want to be transparent here." "I'll give it to you straight." What does it actually say about the person saying this? That the rest of the time, they aren't? Marcus Aurelius already flagged this, two thousand years ago In his private journal — never intended for anyone but himself — Marcus Aurelius wrote something that reads as if it were aimed directly at a modern meeting room: "How unsound and insincere is he who says, 'I have determined to deal with you in a...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
I keep coming back to the same two ideas, over and over, in almost everything I write. It took me a while to notice they were actually one idea, not two. One is from an investor who died in 2023. The other is from a man who's been dead for roughly two thousand years, and never wrote a word of it down himself. The question about everyone else Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner for over fifty years, built his reputation on one question: what is actually being rewarded here,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
What does it actually take to walk toward the one mistake that would kill you, and stay calm the whole way up? When I watched Free Solo the first time, I saw a story that was beautifully created in how it looked and with great storytelling, and most of all I saw what I though was fearlessness. Re-watching it now, I realize I was totally wrong! It's actually the opposite — a story about preparation so exhaustive that fear had almost nothing left to attach to. Lesson 1: Separate the consequence...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read