IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Sebastian Wernicke on automating insight:

“Machine learning is not equally suitable for all tasks. It performs best when applied to frequent, repetitive decisions or tasks of manageable complexity. At the same time, the limits of machine learning when it comes to tacit understanding ensure that humans will be anything but redundant for the foreseeable future. For any situation requiring careful, nuanced consideration, developing and deploying a useful algorithm often costs more time and effort than it saves. And even when an algorithm eventually performs an operational activity, humans must still plan and manage it, requiring organizations to cultivate the necessary skills to guide the models and set appropriate guardrails.”

Source: Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation

Mike Grossman on scope creep:

“No matter how excited and optimistic you are about the business, putting all your eggs in one basket is unsettling. As a result, it’s very tempting to look for ways to diversify. The result is scope creep. It’s also easy to be fooled into thinking that opportunities adjacent to your primary area of focus are natural extensions of your strategy. But that usually isn’t the case. It may seem counterintuitive, but less really is more. If you want to build a great business, it’s crucial to resist the temptation to spread yourself and the company too thin. Excellence demands focus.”

Source: Failure Is An Option: Reflections of a Silicon Valley CEO

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

IT'S a well-worn saying that the only constant in life is change, and that’s doubly true of the business world. If you’re successful, you need to constantly check your rearview mirror because there are always competitors right behind you.

Earlier in my career, I became CEO of a company, Equity Marketing (which became EMAK Worldwide). My thinking at the time was: “Okay, you’re the boss, so you need to come up with all the important strategic and visionary ideas because that’s what your job is and that’s what you’re expected to do.” But I ultimately concluded that’s actually not the job. The job as CEO is to make sure the company has a unique, compelling, and defensible advantage — whether you develop that strategy by yourself, or you curate it from your team.

Defensible in this context means that a competitor can’t easily remove you from your perch in the marketplace because you have a unique process, or unique technology, or unique talent with a unique culture, or unique client relationships. Whatever it is, you own something that makes it hard for a competitor to dislodge you from your position.

The ultimate hallmark of a defensible strategy is that it’s adaptable to the inevitability of change. So, if nepotism is your strategy and you got into Yale or Harvard despite your mediocre high school GPA because you’re a legacy, that’s not going to be sustainable when you get out into the world and your circumstances change. When you graduate from a college you never should have gotten into, all of a sudden you’ll find yourself competing with smarter and more talented people for jobs that they deserve more than you do — and you’ll be out of luck.

Defensible advantages are more fleeting these days than they used to be because technology levels the playing field. And the pace of disruption is also much faster than it used to be. Take advertising and marketing, for example: because of AI and other factors, our industry is undergoing a lot of change and consolidation. Why does the world need our advertising and marketing company (Omelet LLC)? For us, that’s the ultimate question. It’s a hard question to answer, but our survival ultimately depends on our ability to answer it.

The best our service business can do to stay ahead of the curve is to truly understand our defensible advantages and capitalize on them. Here are some keys to making sure our company has a defensible strategy:

1. Hire uniquely strong people. I’m a reasonably smart guy, but my biggest strength is recruiting good people, letting them have a real say, and then creating an environment to let the magic happen. Our competitive advantage when we hire good people is doing incredible work every time and providing impeccable client service.

2. Tap the team’s strategic ideas. The best thing about devising a defensible strategy for your business is that you don’t have to do it all by yourself. If the people on your management team come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives and different kinds of expertise, you can curate the best of everyone’s ideas and then formulate your strategy from their input — getting their ideas and then blending them with your own. It’s useful to have as many different perspectives as possible, because there are many things you might not know. In this way, not only are you developing a more robust strategy, but you’ll find it’s far easier to execute the plan when your people have had a say in developing it.

3. Define the business by the solutions we provide. Because disruption is inevitable, don’t define your business by your product or process. A defensible strategy is never defined by a simple product or service — it has to be something that evolves with the marketplace. And if there’s a better way to provide that solution, you should be indifferent to how you provide it. Some say that horse-and-buggy drivers should have been the inventors of the automobile because they were in the transportation business. I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but the underlying point is valid: you aren’t in the horse-and-buggy business; you’re in the business of getting from point A to point B. When automobiles began to emerge on the scene, the buggy manufacturers should have actively explored building cars.

4. Deliver on a strong work ethic. As I previously noted, I believe I’m a reasonably smart guy, but I’m definitely not smarter than everyone else around me. I don’t have to be smarter than everyone else, however, because there’s a more reliable way to make up for smarts — and that’s honest, hard work. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that natural gifts like intelligence and athleticism don’t matter, or that they don’t provide a strong advantage. But an advantage can be squandered if you don’t have the grit to do the hard work of maximizing it.

Companies can have a variety of defensible advantages — a premium brand, a low-cost operating model, access to low-cost capital, or a network effect like social media titan Meta. The key to winning in the long run is to curate a good strategy, execute it flawlessly, bend with the times, and stay true to your brand identity.

* * *

WHEN I speak to a room of leaders, I like to start with a quick show of hands.

How many would say they’re a bad leader? No hands. Good. How many think they’re exceptional, one of the best to ever do it? A few brave souls, usually with a laugh. And how many would put themselves somewhere in the middle, pretty good to very good?

That’s where most hands go up. And honestly, that’s where mine goes up too.

When Good Stops Being Enough

Here’s the catch. That “pretty good” is exactly where the trouble usually starts right now.

For most of our careers, good was plenty. Show up prepared, communicate clearly enough, hit your numbers, and treat people fairly. Success. In a stable world that adds up to a solid leader and a steady team. But we’re not leading in a stable world anymore. Economic whiplash, AI anxiety, restructuring, burnout, or the news alert that makes a 23-year-old wonder if their job will exist in two years. Uncertainty is the operating environment now.

And uncertainty changes the math. My team and The Harris Poll surveyed more than 2,000 employees about their leaders, and the finding that stuck with me is now on a sticky note on my desk: uncertainty multiplied by good leadership doesn’t produce good outcomes. It produces a slow rise in anxiety, a creeping complacency and a quiet drift. Not a collapse. Nobody calls a meeting about it. It’s the erosion you don’t notice until trust has already thinned.

What I Learned in a Parking Lot

I learned this the hard way, and not in a boardroom.

Late last year I taught my daughter Avi to drive. Picture an empty parking lot. No traffic, no danger, just the two of us and a lot of nerves. She started out confidently. I was the problem. Every time she took a turn a little fast, I grabbed the door handle. Every sharp breath I took, she paused. My white knuckles weren’t keeping her safe; they were teaching her to freeze. She went from learning to surviving, in an empty lot, with the one person who most wanted her to succeed sitting right beside her.

It hit me halfway through that lesson: I do this to my team. Not on purpose. I care about them, same as I care about Avi. But when I lead from my own anxiety, it travels. People feel it, they tighten up, and the very capability I need from them shrinks.

That’s what good leaders tend to miss.

The Mirror

So, here’s the mirror I’d hold up. Three questions, and they’re harder than they look.

1. Do the people you lead feel that what matters to them is valued, not just what they produce? In our research, 35% of employees under good leaders feel their work is appreciated. Only 16% feel that what’s important to them, as a person, is valued. Those are two different things. One says, “nice job on the task.” The other says, “I know what you’re working toward, and I see how this connects to it.” Good leaders are reliably strong at the first; most never get to the second. Good leaders praise the work; exceptional leaders ask what someone cares about beyond it, then connect the work back to that answer.
2. Do they feel heard? Only 19% of employees under good leaders say yes. Sit with that. Four out of five people in your meetings don’t feel heard by you. Usually, it has nothing to do with the leader being callous. A lot of us were taught early that professional means impersonal. Don’t let them see you sweat. So, we armor up. And the thing about armor is that it works both ways. It keeps people from reading us, and it keeps us from taking in what they’re trying to say. Good leaders ask, “how’s it going” and accept “fine.” Exceptional leaders ask, “what do you need from me?” and stay quiet long enough to hear the real answer.
3. Do they feel they’re growing? At 14%, this is the lowest score of all. Most people under good leaders have stopped believing there’s a future worth investing in where they are. They aren’t complaining. Rather, they’re quietly saving their best energy for somewhere that sees their potential. Where a good leader explains what’s changing, an exceptional one shows each person how the change includes them and what their future looks like in it.

None of those gaps show up in a quarterly engagement score until it’s too late. That’s what makes these gaps so easy to miss.

The Leaders No One Worries About

The Heart Work Can Be Taught

The good news is that the distance between good and exceptional isn’t a talent gap but a training gap. These skills are learnable. Today, they’re the heart work of leadership, and not one of them requires charisma or a preference for extraversion. Ingraining new habits is about starting small. In this case, start with gratitude, which our research found is the single biggest differentiator between good and exceptional leaders. Retire “great job, team.” Try “I noticed what you did in that meeting, and it mattered.” Name the behavior, name the impact, and make it personal. Then go further. Have one conversation this week that isn’t about tasks. Ask someone where they want to grow, and how what you’re building together connects to that. Then actually listen to the answer.

I’ve come to believe the leader makes the weather. In a parking lot or a team meeting, the same rule holds. Create a climate of tension and watch people hunker down. Offer calm and watch them start to drive.

Good used to be good enough; it isn’t anymore. The difference isn’t the storm, it’s who’s steering the ship.

* * *

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Jim Collins on the love of doing the work:

“There is a big difference between being in love with the idea of one’s work and being in love with doing the work itself. It means not just the love in the 0.001% highlight moments; it means love in the other 99.999%.”

Source: What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative

Morgan Housel on the pain of pursuit:

“Most things worth pursuing charge their fee in the form of stress, uncertainty, dealing with quirky people, bureaucracy, other peoples’ conflicting incentives, hassle, nonsense, long hours, and constant doubt. That’s the overhead cost of getting ahead.”

Source: Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in June 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Data Inspired: Building an Organizational Culture of Inquiry for Lasting Transformation by Sebastian Wernicke

Ninety-nine percent of businesses surveyed say that data and AI are a top priority―but two-thirds admit to feeling stuck. What most leaders miss is that to succeed at becoming a data-driven business requires developing a nuanced understanding of why data holds such transformative power, what a data-inspired culture looks like, and how to get there. Data Inspired shows that the secret isn't to be more data-driven―it is to become data-inspired. This book reveals the crucial strategic distinction between using data to optimize existing operations and using them as a catalyst for deep transformation and innovation.

Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams by Ron Friedman

What do the best teams do differently? To find out, award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman surveyed thousands of teams and pinpointed the precise habits that separate the best from the rest. The results upend everything we think we know about teamwork. It turns out that the most successful teams aren't the ones that collaborate most, get along best, or put in the longest hours. What really sets them apart is the way they manage their energy and attention, bring out the best in one another, and keep improving over time. Blending eye-opening discoveries with unforgettable stories, Superteams takes you inside the writers' room of Succession and Bridgerton, the recording studio of ABBA and Fleetwood Mac, the kitchens of Michelin-starred restaurants, the laboratories of Nobel Prize–winning scientists, the locker rooms of NBA and NFL teams, and the boardrooms of the world's most innovative companies.

Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World by Melissa Swift

Navigate the weird, chaotic world of modern work, no matter your position. While there's no shortage of advice on being amazing or avoiding burnout, what if you simply want to get things done in a workplace that feels increasingly impossible? Effective is here to help you get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing from up-to-date research and provocative interviews with employees across industries and levels, renowned people consultant Melissa Swift offers a positive, well-illuminated path through the dark forest of destabilizing workplace changes.

Wired for Peace: Using 7 Neuroscience-Based Principles to Resolve Conflicts by Jeremy Pollack

A deep dive and exploration into the critical role of the nervous system in conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Drawing from neuroscience, social neuropsychology, predictive-processing theory, and decades of applied conflict resolution practice, Wired for Peace presents a transformational model for understanding why conflict escalates and how sustainable peace is created. Moving beyond traditional communication-skills or mediation-only approaches, this book shows that lasting conflict resolution begins with the autonomic nervous system and the brain’s threat-prediction mechanisms. The book illuminates the internal neural architecture that determines how individuals perceive danger, construct narratives, react to stress, and attempt either protection or connection.

Failure Is An Option: Reflections of a Silicon Valley CEO by Mike Grossman

For nearly three decades, Mike Grossman has been at the center of the world’s most mythologized innovation hub, leading early-stage, venture-funded tech companies through the highs, heartbreaks, and near misses that define life in the Valley. He has raised millions, managed boardroom crises, built great teams, and navigated moments when everything seemed one bad quarter away from collapse. Failure Is An Option gathers forty-four sharp, candid essays shaped by years in the trenches. Together, they form a mosaic of what leadership really looks like when the cameras aren’t rolling: the moments of absurdity, fear, luck, and endurance that make or break a company and the person leading it. Unflinchingly honest and darkly funny, Grossman dismantles the myths of startup success and offers an insider’s view of what it means to build under pressure. This is not a playbook or a victory lap. It is a collection of truths about ambition, uncertainty, and the art of holding it together long enough for the story to make sense.

Here is a selection of Posts from May 2026 that you will want to check out:

• After the Surface by Manu @27_BUCKS The most creative work in modern history was made by people who'd been told their profession was finished. We are here again.
• Who On Your Team Are Leaders versus Maintainers? by @PhilCooke
• 9 Step Process of Successfully Dealing with Adversity by @BrianKDodd
• Steady Note: The Human Moment by @donhornsby
• Why Edge Intelligence Is the Future of Real-Time Business by @DanielBurrus
• Why Gutting Management Layers Is the Wrong Response to AI by @artpetty
• The Power of Proximity by @PhilCooke If you want to grow creatively, don’t just ask, “What should I learn?” Ask, “Who should I be near?”
• Agency Interrupted: The Chains We Can't See by @pescatore via @LBBOnline Linear forward-prediction isn't what humans are built for, even smart humans with good intent
• Preserving Process in the Age of AI Design by Olivia Bruhmuller
• What Humility Has to Do With Our Work by @donhornsby
• The Cost of Comfort by Ted Lamade via @collabfund
• No One’s Coming to Assign You by @PhilCooke
• Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It by @ChrisClearfield
• Clarity Is What Creates Speed by @AdmiredLeaders
• When Friction Isn’t Growth: A Leadership Distinction That Changes Everything by MarleneChism @stopyourdrama
• AI is the latest Generation at Work... by @ElizaFilby
• Is America in a Pre-Heroic Moment? by @jamesstrock
• How leaders can help their organizations metabolize strain via @McKinsey
• UK Electoral Earthquake—Harbinger for USA? by @jamesstrock
• From Boomers to Gen Z: What Each Generation Wants from Leadership by @annaliotta
• The 4% Drug That Enhances Your Life by Jamison Price
• The 5 Ways AI Is Affecting Journalism by @AdiGaskell
• The five philosophical disagreements underneath every AI argument by @chalmermagne
• The Feedback Gap at the Top (And Why It Spreads Faster Than You Think) by Karin Hurt and David Dye
• How To Build a Personal Brand That Actually Gets You Noticed by @PhilCooke
• The Art of Thinking Differently In a World That Thinks the Same by Ariyan Rana
• AI is changing our minds. When is that a good thing? via @cosmos_inst
• The Three Tragedies of Change by MarleneChism @stopyourdrama
• Calling Mr. Gladstone by @jamesstrock
• 5 Leadership Secrets to Silencing Critics Without Saying a Word by @BrianKDodd
• 4 Reasons Why Consistency, Not Talent, Defines Great Leadership by @BrianKDodd

See more on Twitter.

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz on what is required to learn:

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”

Source: Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary

Simone Stolzoff on not knowing:

“When we experience uncertainty, it activates two parts of our brain simultaneously: the amygdala, which is responsible for alerting the brain to potential threats, and the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for analytical and deliberate thinking. The amygdala signals the body to release stress hormones, while the prefrontal cortex analyzes the situation to plan for a logical response. If the situation is particularly high stakes (for example, a looming layoff at work) or if you have a particularly low tolerance for uncertainty, it’s easy for the amygdala to hijack your brain’s response, prompting you to enter a fight, flight, or freeze mindset-whether or not there is actually a threat to your survival. Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist who helps leaders navigate uncertainty, says, ‘Uncertainty tolerance allows us to explore different options, rather than rushing to whatever is most reassuring.’”

Source: How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

AT first glance, leadership mistakes are difficult to explain. Many failed decisions are made by highly intelligent, experienced, and capable people. The leaders involved often possess strong analytical skills, deep industry knowledge, and years of practical experience. They are not careless. They are not uninformed. And yet, serious mistakes still happen: A company commits to the wrong strategy despite clear warning signs. A leadership team continues investing in a failing initiative long after the evidence turns negative. An executive becomes increasingly confident precisely when caution is most needed.

From the outside, these failures often appear irrational. But internally, they rarely feel that way. That is what makes them dangerous.

Most flawed leadership decisions do not feel obviously wrong when they are made. They feel reasonable. Logical. Sometimes even unavoidable. The problem is rarely intelligence itself. The problem is the thinking structure behind the decision.

In strategic environments, strong decision-makers eventually learn an uncomfortable truth: expertise does not eliminate cognitive distortions. In some cases, it amplifies them.

Experience improves pattern recognition, speed, and confidence. But it can also create hidden rigidity. The more successful people become within a particular model of reality, the less likely they are to question the assumptions behind that model. This creates a subtle trap. Leaders become highly effective at solving problems inside the framework they already understand, while becoming less willing to question whether the framework itself still fits reality.

Intelligent people are often exceptionally good at defending conclusions that feel internally consistent. Once the underlying assumptions become flawed, intelligence can make the problem worse rather than better. The danger is not bad reasoning. The danger is good reasoning built on unexamined assumptions.

The Expertise Trap

Experience is one of the most valuable assets a leader can possess.

• It improves judgment.
• It accelerates pattern recognition.
• It allows leaders to process complex situations more quickly and with greater confidence.

In stable environments, this creates a major advantage. The problem is that expertise is built from past patterns. It relies on accumulated models of how the world works. Most of the time, those models are useful. But when conditions change, the same expertise that once improved judgment can begin to distort it. Leaders start interpreting new situations through outdated assumptions.

Signals that contradict the existing model are dismissed as temporary noise. Evidence is filtered selectively. Familiar explanations are favored over uncomfortable alternatives.

This happens because expertise creates efficiency. Experienced leaders do not evaluate every situation from first principles. They rely on mental shortcuts developed through repetition and prior success. That is normally rational. Without those shortcuts, decision-making would become impossibly slow. But shortcuts introduce vulnerability.

The more often a particular model has worked in the past, the harder it becomes to recognize when it no longer applies. This creates one of the most dangerous dynamics in leadership:

Success increases confidence in the model precisely when the model may need to be questioned most.

In strategic games, strong players sometimes lose not because they misunderstand the position, but because they interpret it through patterns from previous games that no longer fit the current reality. Leadership works the same way. Past success can quietly reduce curiosity. And once curiosity declines, assumptions stop being tested. That is where intelligent leadership mistakes often begin.

One of the clearest examples of this dynamic can be seen in elite sports leadership. For years, José Mourinho achieved extraordinary success using a highly disciplined and defensively structured approach to football management. He won league titles across multiple countries and captured Champions League titles with teams that were not considered tournament favorites. The success was so consistent for so long that belief in the model became almost unshakable. And that is understandable. When a framework repeatedly produces elite outcomes, questioning it begins to feel irrational. The model has earned trust through years of validation.

But environments change. Opponents adapt. Cultures evolve. New strategic approaches emerge. What once created an advantage may gradually become a limitation.

One of the most difficult challenges for highly successful leaders is recognizing when the methods that created success are no longer producing the same edge, not because the original model was flawed, but because every model has conditions under which it works best.

The danger is that prolonged success can quietly reduce the willingness to re-examine those conditions. At that point, confidence in the model becomes stronger than sensitivity to new evidence. Once that happens, adaptation slows down precisely when it becomes most necessary.

Organizations Reinforce Assumptions

Leadership decisions are rarely made in isolation. Even highly independent leaders operate inside systems shaped by culture, incentives, hierarchy, and group dynamics. Over time, these systems begin reinforcing certain assumptions automatically.

This creates another hidden risk. Once an organization collectively accepts a particular interpretation of reality, that interpretation becomes increasingly difficult to question, not necessarily because people are afraid to disagree, but because the underlying assumptions gradually stop being visible. They become embedded in the language of meetings, strategic priorities, performance metrics, and internal narratives. What once began as a hypothesis slowly evolves into something treated as self-evident.

At that point, organizations stop testing assumptions and start defending them. This is especially dangerous during periods of success. Strong performance creates psychological validation. Growth, profits, or market dominance make the existing model appear unquestionably correct. As long as results remain positive, few people feel pressure to challenge the structure behind them.

However, success can conceal structural weaknesses for surprisingly long periods of time. A flawed strategy may continue producing acceptable results simply because market conditions remain favorable. A leadership model may appear effective because past momentum continues carrying the organization forward.

The danger emerges when the environment changes. Organizations that built their identity around a particular way of thinking often struggle to adapt because adaptation requires more than operational change. It requires cognitive change. And cognitive change is uncomfortable. It forces leaders to reconsider assumptions that may have defined years of previous success.

In many organizations, the cost of questioning the model quietly becomes higher than the cost of defending it. That is when intelligent organizations begin making predictable mistakes, not because nobody sees the problem, but because the system itself discourages seeing it clearly.

The strongest leadership cultures are not the ones that eliminate disagreement. They are the ones that make constructive doubt acceptable before reality forces the issue externally.

The Illusion of Confidence

One of the paradoxes of leadership is that confidence is both necessary and dangerous. Leaders are expected to project certainty. Teams want clarity. Investors want conviction. Organizations tend to reward decisiveness far more than hesitation.

In uncertain environments, visible confidence creates stability. However, confidence and accuracy are not the same thing. Over time, many organizations begin confusing the appearance of certainty with the quality of judgment itself. This creates a subtle distortion.

Leaders who express strong conviction are often perceived as more competent, even when the underlying assumptions behind their decisions remain untested. Meanwhile, leaders who openly acknowledge uncertainty may appear weaker despite thinking more carefully about the problem.

As a result, organizational cultures can unintentionally reward overconfidence, not because people deliberately reject thoughtful analysis, but because certainty feels reassuring. In strategic environments, however, certainty is often precisely where the greatest risk hides.

The strongest decision-makers rarely assume they fully understand a complex situation. They remain aware that every model is incomplete and every interpretation contains blind spots.

That awareness does not make them indecisive. It makes them adaptive.

Poor leaders often protect certainty. Strong leaders protect the ability to update. This distinction becomes critical when environments begin changing quickly.

Leaders who tie their identity too closely to being “right” become slower to update when reality changes. New information starts feeling like a threat rather than feedback. At that point, confidence stops functioning as a leadership tool and starts functioning as a defense mechanism.

Once certainty becomes emotionally protected, intelligent decision-making begins to deteriorate rapidly.

What Strong Leaders Do Differently

The strongest leaders are not necessarily the smartest people in the room. Nor are they always the most confident.

What separates exceptional leaders is often something less visible: the ability to continuously re-examine the assumptions behind their decisions. They understand that every model eventually becomes incomplete. As a result, they build systems that make adaptation easier rather than harder. This often means deliberately introducing friction into the decision-making process.

Strong leaders invite disagreement before reality forces correction externally. They encourage alternative interpretations, stress-test assumptions, and actively look for information that contradicts their preferred conclusion, not because they lack confidence, but because they understand the limits of confidence.

In strategic environments, the goal is rarely to eliminate uncertainty completely. That is impossible. The goal is to remain responsive to new information without becoming emotionally attached to previous assumptions.

This creates an important distinction between weak and strong leadership cultures. Weak leadership cultures optimize for agreement. Strong leadership cultures optimize for accuracy. That difference becomes especially important during periods of success.

When performance is strong, the pressure to question the existing model naturally declines. This is precisely when the best leaders become more vigilant, not less. They recognize that success can validate flawed assumptions for long periods of time. As a result, they continue asking uncomfortable questions even when the system appears to be working.

• What if our current advantage is temporary?
• What assumptions are we treating as permanent?
• What evidence would prove that our model no longer fits reality?

These questions create cognitive flexibility, and cognitive flexibility is one of the most important competitive advantages a leader can possess in changing environments. The leaders who adapt fastest are rarely those with the strongest certainty. They are the ones most willing to update

The Ability to Update

Leadership is often described as the ability to provide answers. However, in complex environments, leadership is equally the ability to question assumptions before reality forces the issue externally.

The most dangerous leadership mistakes rarely begin with incompetence. They begin with certainty that slowly stops being examined. Experience reinforces the model. Organizations normalize the model. Success validates the model.

Over time, intelligent people can become trapped inside systems that once created advantage but no longer fit reality. This is why strong leadership is not simply about confidence, decisiveness, or expertise. It is about maintaining the ability to update.

The best leaders do not assume they are immune to cognitive distortions. They assume distortions are inevitable and build processes designed to expose them early. Leadership quality is ultimately not determined by how strongly a leader believes in a model. It is determined by how quickly the leader recognizes when the model needs to change.

* * *

IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Brad Stulberg on goals:

“Goals are like mountaintops. They are important insofar as they provide definition and direction for our journeys. They serve as targets, offering a wellspring of motivation. They keep us focused and prevent us from aimlessly wandering. Yet nearly all of our growth, development, and meaning occur not at the point of accomplishing a goal but during its pursuit. There is no greater illusion than thinking the accomplishment of some goal will change your life. What will change your life is how you are transformed in the process of going for it. When you select what goals to pursue, you are selecting what kind of person you want to become.”

Source: The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World

Anne Lamott on forging ahead:

“There are parts of your life you keep placing just out of reach because they feel inconvenient, unclear, or not quite ready yet. So you wait for the right stretch of time, the right version of yourself, or the right set of circumstances that will finally make it all make sense. But life doesn’t rearrange itself for clarity. It responds to movement. The thing you keep circling might not need more thinking. It might need a first step. What you are waiting for may be created by the act of beginning.”

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

THE causes of job strain, burnout, and poor mental health at work are well understood — and so are the solutions. Workload can be managed. Jobs can be designed with autonomy and voice. Leaders can be trained to create psychological safety. Systems can be built that reward recovery and fairness, not just output. Which means harm to our workers isn’t inevitable — it’s a design choice.

Organizations that fail to design for good work will pay for it in absenteeism, turnover and disengagement. But the deeper cost is borne by the workers.

People don’t thrive when they’re confused, unsupported, or underused. They thrive when they feel capable and valued. Research by organizational psychologist Arnold Bakker shows that when employees have structural resources (such as autonomy), social resources (such as support), and challenging demands (such as growth tasks), they experience more flow and less burnout.

If organizations are serious about sustainable performance, they need to design for it. That means pacing workloads instead of treating every week like quarter-end.

Well-designed work provides energy. Poorly designed work sucks it out. Designing roles that are sustainable, setting realistic expectations, and creating cultures where people feel safe and valued are central to worker’s mental health and sustainable high performance. They also fuel innovation and pay dividends in productivity.

The pathway for enabling a fully functioning and committed workforce is through designing the way that people work. Every role has an architecture — the tasks, responsibilities, and demands that make up a day. Too often, that architecture grows by accident: jobs are patched together over time, loaded with new tasks but rarely redesigned with intention. The result? Roles that look efficient on paper but leave people feeling like crap.

The alternative is positive job design — treating the structure of roles as a wellbeing lever, not just an operational one. Done well, it turns work into a source of energy rather than depletion.

Being intentional about work design means stepping back and asking: What are we really trying to achieve here, and how can this role be structured so it fuels rather than drains energy? From there, it’s about making deliberate choices. That might mean:

• Stripping away tasks that no longer add value
• Redesigning workflows so people can focus on the most meaningful parts of their role
• Checking whether decision rights actually match responsibilities

To make work contribute to worker wellbeing, job design needs to be embedded into the systems of work — shaping the policies, structures and rhythms that govern how people work. This involves:

1. Building it into strategy, not side projects — Treat work design as a lever for performance and wellbeing, not just a P&C responsibility. Ask in strategy reviews: Are our roles structured tofuel human energy as well as output?

2. Using a SMART check in decision-making — When restructuring, allocating resources, or introducing new technology, run a SMART check. For each decision, ask: Will this increase stimulation, mas tery, agency, relationships, and tolerable d emands or undermine them?

3. Making job audits routine — Every couple of years, or after major change, review roles and workflows. Look for where tasks have piled up, where decision rights are mismatched, or where demands outstrip resources. Don’t wait for burnout data or turnover to tell you.

4. Empowering leaders to co-design with their teams — Encourage managers to have regular design conversations with their people: What’s energizing? What’s draining? What could we shift?

5. Embedding work design into leadership development — Treat work design as a core leadership skill, not a niche topic. Teach leaders how to analyze jobs through the SMART lens, how to run role-redesign conversations, and how to balance demands with resources.

6. Tracking energy, not just output — Alongside KPIs and dashboards, measure how energizing jobs are. Pulse surveys can include questions about variety, agency, and connection. Imagine if leaders were held accountable not just for results, but for how they structured jobs to unleash energy?

When leaders and teams take these small, deliberate steps, they contribute to worker wellbeing in ways that are practical and immediate.

Keep in mind that good work design isn’t a policy or even a program. It’s a practice that’s shaped and reshaped with people over time. Think of it less like drawing up blueprints for a house and more like tending a garden. You don’t plant once and walk away. You prune, water and replant depending on the season.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Nicole Vignola on learning as default thinking:

“The first major underpinning of a growth mindset is that people with this mindset understand that learning is a valuable opportunity in the face of adversity. When people believe that they can improve and grow from failure and setbacks, they are more likely to engage in challenging tasks and persist through difficulty. When people know and understand that the brain is malleable and are willing to adapt to circumstance, they are more likely to persist in the face of obstacles. This perseverance can enhance pathways in the brain that are associated with learning, which strengthens the notion that learning is a dynamic process that’s forever evolving.”

Source: Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change (Your Neurotoolkit for Everyday Life)

Morgan Housel on happiness:

“Your happiness depends on your expectations more than anything else. So in a world that tends to get better for most people most of the time, an important life skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. It’s also one of the hardest. A common storyline of history goes like this: Things get better, wealth increases, technology brings new efficiencies, and medicine saves lives. The quality of life goes up. But people’s expectations then rise by just as much, if not more, because those improvements also benefit other people around you, whose circumstances you anchor to. Happiness is little changed despite the world improving.”

Source: Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

MOST leaders reach a point where they can see exactly where their company needs to go. The vision is clear — more sophisticated, more scalable, more aligned with the leader they’ve become. They didn’t get to this point by accident. The clarity they have now is the product of a commitment to transformation expressed through years of building, learning, and evolving.

But the company is still organized around an earlier version of their leadership. The revenue is real. The clients are happy. On paper, it works. But the routines, the roles, the decision-making patterns were designed for a different stage. Maybe a different strategy entirely.

As the founder, every day pulls you back into the same patterns: the firefighting, the decisions only you can make, the sense that if you stop moving, everything stops.

This is the tension between where you’re going and what got you here, and it’s one of the most common inflection points in a founder’s journey. At this stage, part of your responsibility as a leader is to transform the company along with you.

New Goals Demand New Thinking

A founder I worked with ran a specialized professional services firm. Over a few years, he had made an important leap from transactional operator to strategic advisor. He built a new framework, renamed his practice, and reimagined his value proposition to create a market segment he could own — higher-trust, higher-fee, more durable client relationships.

He knew where he was going. But the company was still organized around what had gotten him here.

The team’s routines were built for the old model: high volume, fast turnaround, lots of reactive work. The systems rewarded output, not depth. His top producer embodied the old approach perfectly, earning seven figures doing it the traditional way.

There was no reason for that person to change. Because they were successful, challenging the model felt like challenging results.

The founder said it plainly: I can see it. My challenge has been to get there.

He wasn’t confused about the destination. He was caught in the tension between the leader he had become and the organization that was still designed to produce something else.

This is the principle most founders eventually collide with: personal transformation enables organizational transformation, but it doesn’t happen automatically. You have to redesign the organization to match the leader you’re becoming.

Creating that alignment is the hardest part of leadership. But there is a way through it, and it starts with seeing clearly.

Stepping Back to Move Ahead

Rose, a co-founder I worked with, ran a predictive-maintenance startup. In a single hour-long meeting about one of her strategic priorities, she got interrupted eight times; every decision, every customer question, every call was routed through her. She was the bottleneck and she knew it.

The conventional answer would have been to delegate more. However, delegation wasn't the issue. As we worked together, Rose started to recognize that she was actively choosing urgency.

Once she could see what urgency gave her (a feeling of being essential and in control) and what made strategic focus so easy to avoid (it felt boring and lacked immediate payoffs), she recognized that her own choices were keeping her stuck as the bottleneck.

Her dedication to urgency had built a system where her team had no way to make decisions without her, not because they lacked capability, but because she had never designed the conditions for them to use it.

As she changed her relationship to urgency, her team’s relationship to it started to shift as well. Instead of answering questions, she started designing what her team needed to move ahead on their own: clear context, clear constraints, clear freedoms. The company didn't change because she hired new people. It changed because she became a different kind of leader — a designer instead of a doer.

And once she made that shift, she could actually spend her time on strategy instead of being drowned in the urgent. That shift didn't just free up her calendar, it changed what the company was capable of without her in the room.

This kind of transformation starts with three moves:

1. See the tensions you’ve been avoiding: Where loyalty to what built this company conflicts with what the company needs next. Where your habits serve comfort instead of progress. Where good enough has become the ceiling. These aren’t problems to solve. They’re tensions to navigate.
2. Own your contribution to the pattern: Acknowledge that you designed this system and it’s doing exactly what it was built to do. The meeting cadence, the decision flow, the hiring bar, the standards you enforce and the ones you work around are living expressions of your leadership. The company is a mirror.
3. Shift from doer to designer: Stop solving problems and start redesigning the processes, roles, and culture of accountability that align better with the future you've envisioned, not the past you’re coming from. Finally, curtail your instinct to intervene so your team learns to trust themselves and stops gravitating toward old habits.

The next phase of growth is a different kind of growth. Not more effort, not better systems, not another hire who’ll finally take things off your plate. It’s the work of closing the gap between where you’re going and what got you here so that growth stops being a grind and starts feeling like momentum.

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IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with:

Carey Nieuwhof on large and loud opponents to change:

“The loudest people affected by a proposed change are those who are most opposed. The more opposed people are, the louder they tend to become. The problem arises because the noise of opponents to any change will make you a bad mathematician.

“You will confuse loud with large. And you will confuse volume with velocity. You will begin to believe that because opponents are loud, they are many, and because they have volume, they have momentum. Those are the two traps almost every leader falls into at some point. We simply assume loud means large, and that volume signals velocity. But loud does not equal large. And volume does not equal velocity. Just because a voice is loud doesn’t mean you should listen to it most.”

Source: Leading Change without Losing It: Five Strategies That Can Revolutionize How You Lead Change When Facing Opposition

Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson on leading change:

“Leaders of successful change do more than follow a checklist; they draw on a nuanced understanding of human nature to respond to unique challenges every day. For this reason, we sometimes say that change leadership is a rough-water sport. Every four years, you may watch some footage of an Olympic event called canoe slalom, in which competitors crash down a course of surging whitewater—reading the currents ahead of them, positioning their boat in the right spots at the right moment, and getting back on course when the unexpected occurs. Just like these competitors, change leaders need to predict and respond to the changing currents of human behavior, emotion, and thought across their organizations. Like canoe slalom, leading change is messy and tough—and there is no such thing as a perfect run.”

Source: How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization

Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.

THERE’S a phrase that seems to be everywhere in the business world right now, but it is likely missing from most companies’ crisis management plans: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Crack open any decent crisis planning playbook, and you’ll find detailed roadmaps for navigating natural disasters, system failures, and traditional cyberattacks. These risks are well understood, and crisis management planners have often seen how other organizations have handled these setbacks or even dealt with them themselves.

Although AI now touches on great swaths of our professional and personal lives, it is still a very young technology. And while most people vaguely understand that AI introduces some new level of risk, these dangers largely have yet to materialize in the sorts of public disasters that make headlines and get business leaders to take notice.

Although no one can predict exactly how AI-related risks will unfold in the years to come, businesses should start incorporating the technology into their crisis management plans now. Bad actors are already using (and misusing) the technology, and some of the vulnerabilities in early AI deployments are starting to reveal themselves. Armed with this knowledge, organizations can prepare for AI-driven incidents before these events cause full-blown crises.

How AI Is Reshaping Cyber Threats

Unfortunately, AI is already making cyber attackers faster and more effective. Attacks that once required ample time, expertise, and manual effort to carry out can now be automated and scaled. The technology is also opening organizations to new attack types meant to leverage the vulnerabilities of AI systems.

Consider phishing attacks - a form of social engineering in which users are tricked into clicking a malicious link, downloading an infected file, or providing sensitive information such as passwords or banking information. With the help of AI, attackers can generate countless highly personalized messages, tailoring their tone, language, and details to specific targets. This makes fraudulent communications more difficult for employees to identify, increasing the likelihood of a successful breach.

At the same time, AI is introducing entirely new categories of risk. Many businesses are deploying the technology for processes such as customer service, which involve troves of sensitive information. Emerging cyber-attacks such as prompt injection, data poisoning, and model manipulation can be used to expose this information, or to manipulate AI outputs in ways that harm the business.

Finally, AI is blurring the line between fact and fiction. With deepfake video or audio messages, attackers have impersonated executives or colleagues, creating the trust needed to convince employees to take potentially disastrous actions.

Bringing a Crisis Planning Lens to AI

Perhaps understandably, many organizations still treat AI as a mostly technical capability aimed at transforming business outcomes. However, leaders must also carefully consider the risks of the technology. Looking at AI through a crisis planning lens means considering it with the same seriousness that teams bring when planning for a potential natural disaster, a system outage, or a data breach that exposes customer payment information.

Crisis management teams must think through how they would respond if an operations or management system were compromised by external AI. For instance: What is the role of legal, public relations, and product teams if a company’s chatbot begins providing users harmful or biased responses? What steps will the organization take if an attacker impersonates the CEO with a deepfake video that leads to a large fraudulent transaction or jeopardizes the company’s reputation? And what happens if a previously unknown vulnerability in an AI tool makes confidential human resources data available to users across the company or, worse, external bad actors?

AI is evolving quickly; crisis plans must be revisited frequently. It’s important that these conversations include cross-functional teams, because that is who will be responding to virtually any crisis involving AI. IT Security teams may be the first to detect an issue, but legal departments, communications professionals, and executive leadership will all likely play critical roles in determining how the organization responds. Aligning these groups ahead of time will avoid delays and confusion when the time comes to act.

Although all the risks surrounding AI may not yet be fully understood, we can say with certainty that the technology will play a role in future high-profile crises. Organizations that wait for an incident to force action will find themselves making critical, on-the-spot decisions under extraordinary pressure. But those that begin integrating AI into their crisis planning now will be able to respond from a position of preparedness rather than panic.

HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in May 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.

Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better by David Epstein

We live in a world that gives us seemingly infinite choices and prizes freedom above all else. We have an unprecedented number of options regarding what to do, who to be, and how to spend our time. All that choice is wonderful; it is also overwhelming. The irony is that total freedom can be paralyzing, and unlimited resources don’t necessarily lead to the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, overvaluing complete freedom can be disastrous for everything from starting a company to harnessing creativity to finding personal satisfaction. David Epstein argues that all of us—individuals, businesses, institutions, even societies—can benefit from narrowing our options.

Valuable and Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image by Vanessa Errecarte

You’ve built real skill. You’ve solved real problems. But in a world that rewards visibility, doing meaningful work isn’t enough. Recognition matters. Yet the modern version of “personal branding” feels exhausting. Somewhere along the way, personal branding became synonymous with self-promotion, follower counts, and algorithm-chasing. For thoughtful professionals and students like you, that version feels performative at best and misaligned at worst. And yet invisibility is no longer neutral. If your work is going to matter, your ideas have to travel. In Valuable & Visible: Redefining Personal Branding by Leading with Impact Over Image, award-winning marketing lecturer Vanessa Errecarte offers a different path: a service-first approach designed for professionals who want credibility, not clout.

Why Start-Ups Fail: Avoiding the Traps on the Path to Commercial Success by Bernie Bulkin

A shocking 90% of start-ups fail. Many of these failures are preventable, but you need to understand the causes and how to avoid them – both as an entrepreneur and an investor. From technology to the market, from leadership to money, there are numerous reasons why your start-up will fail. Bernie Bulkin guides you through the six major reasons why start-ups fail, and how to avoid them. Instead of accepting failure as inevitable, this book breaks down the main reasons why start-ups fail and how to turn them on their head. Whether you're a founder or an investor, if you're going to put in the time, money, and effort to ensure a company succeeds, you should go in with your eyes open. Bernie's common-sense approach offers the experience of a venture capitalist who has been there and done that. Leadership at all levels makes a difference.

How Change Really Works: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization by Julia Dhar, Kristy Ellmer and Philip Jameson

Companies have never invested more in transformation—or wasted more on failed attempts. Finally, a science-based, practical guide to making change stick. Market volatility. AI. Regulatory uncertainty. Geopolitical risk. Leaders know they must adapt faster than ever—yet most transformation programs still fail to deliver their expected outcomes, with enormous costs to companies, shareholders, and the broader economy. But some companies do succeed. In How Change Really Works, Boston Consulting Group experts Dhar, Ellmer, and Jameson show that these successes aren't random—they're connected by a common set of principles and practices. The authors offer seven principles that form the core of a truly human-centered approach to successful organizational change.

Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing by Jenna Nicholas

What if business and investing could be rooted in the deepest values of the human spirit? In Enlightened Bottom Line, Nicholas explores the powerful intersection of spirituality, business, and investing—an intersection too often overlooked in a world driven by profit alone. Drawing on moving stories of entrepreneurs, investors, and leaders who are living out this integration, along with cutting-edge research, Nicholas reveals how spiritual wisdom can guide ethical choices in finance and business. Unlike other books on business or investing, Enlightened Bottom Line is not just about strategies, numbers, or policies. It is about reimagining what wealth, success, and leadership can truly mean when guided by purpose, compassion, and integrity. It offers readers concrete frameworks and real-world examples to align their financial decisions with their deepest beliefs.

Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries

For decades, we've explained corporate corruption as a problem of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. But that story doesn't match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behavior, and mission abandonment—often despite the best intentions of the people inside them. Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical. It is structural. As organizations grow, the systems that govern them—ownership, incentives, charters, accountability, and decision-making—quietly reshape behavior. When those systems are poorly designed, even principled leaders are pushed toward outcomes they never wanted. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, bending companies away from their original purpose. Ries shows how these failures arise predictably—and how they can be prevented. He reframes corporate governance not as bureaucracy or compliance, but as a creative and strategic act at the heart of building enduring, mission-controlled companies.