Leadership

A collection of 54 posts

Leadership

Dependency Machine

Watch what happens in most meetings. Someone brings a problem. The boss solves it. Everyone nods. Meeting ends. Problem → Answer = Dependency We just trained them to bring more problems tomorrow. Here's what nobody talks about. Every answer you give makes your team weaker. Every solution you provide teaches

Leadership

Already Prompt Engineers

Every manager knows how to brief a contractor. Goal. Resources. Timeline. Success criteria. Check-ins. That's prompt engineering. We've been teaching this skill for decades. We just called it "delegation." The best delegators at your company? They're already your best prompt engineers. They

Leadership

Backwards Works Better

Ever notice how we explain everything before asking for what we want? Amazon figured this out in 2004. They banned all PowerPoint presentations. Instead, before building any new product, teams write a fake press release. Just one page. Announcing the thing like it already exists. No context. No buildup. Just:

Leadership

Comfortable Lies

Netflix asks managers one question: "Would you fight to keep this person?" If no, they're gone. Good severance. But gone. Cold? Maybe. Clear? Absolutely. Everyone knows where they stand. No guessing. No politics. No wasted energy trying to change minds. (Sometimes harsh truth is kinder than

Leadership

Managing Physics

Andy Grove ran Intel. He had one rule: "Disagree and commit." Say your piece. Make your case. Then fully support the decision. Or leave. Harsh? No. Honest. (Most advice pretends power doesn't exist. Grove just said it out loud.) When you stop trying to change your

Leadership

Invisible Ladder

Valve says they have no managers. Also, Gabe Newell runs Valve. They have "cabals" instead—groups that form around projects. No titles. No hierarchy. Total freedom. Until Gabe walks in. (Funny how everyone suddenly knows who's in charge.) Every flat company has invisible power. The founder&

Leadership

Equal Illusion

"But shouldn't it be 50/50?" No. Ray Dalio built Bridgewater on total honesty. Anyone can challenge anyone. Best idea wins. Beautiful story. Except when two ideas are equally good. Then Ray's wins. Because it's Ray's company. (Even "radical

Leadership

Breaking In

We all try to change our managers. We think we can break them in like new shoes. Here's what happened at Xerox. They invented the mouse. The screen you click on. The internet connection. Everything computers would become. The engineers knew they had gold. Management wanted better copy

Leadership

Making Safety Visible

You can't measure psychological safety directly. Ask "How safe do you feel?" and you've weaponized the metric, making people less safe. But Google found the proxy signals. Teams with psychological safety showed: * 12% higher productivity * 47% more likely to generate innovations * 27% lower turnover

Leadership

The 10% Solution

Toyota discovered something that sounds impossible: Teams spending 10% of time improving HOW they work consistently outperform teams spending 100% on deliverables. They called it kaizen. Any assembly line worker could pull the andon cord, stopping production to fix problems or suggest improvements. American manufacturers thought this was insane. "

Leadership

The Compound Cost of Silence

Problems have expiration dates for cheap solutions. The O-ring concern surfaced in 1979. Cost to fix: A design modification worth $50,000. By 1985, fixing it meant halting the shuttle program—politically impossible. By January 28, 1986, seven people paid with their lives. Here's the brutal math: Every

Leadership

The Meeting That Never Happens

Picture a meeting where someone knows exactly why the project will fail. They see the flaw, understand the consequences, stay silent. You've been in that meeting. Google spent millions studying 180 teams to understand why. They assumed the best teams had the best people—the rockstars, the A-players.

Leadership

The Purpose Switch

"Changing the system's purpose changes it immensely, even if all of the elements and interconnections remain unchanged." —Steven Schuster Here's what he means. You've got a marketing team. Same five people, same tools, same stale donuts in that Tuesday meeting room. But

Leadership

The Motte and Bailey (Part 4 of 5)

Every softened word is a diluted currency unit. Your organization is experiencing hyperinflation. "Strategic" means nothing when it also means "follow SOPs."  "Critical" applies to 70% of projects—all documented per process.  "Innovation" means "change that fits the existing framework."

Leadership

The Prompt Leader [Part 5 of 5]

Here's the plot twist I've been holding back... The best teams don't wait for better prompts. They prompt their leaders for what they need. (Think about it. When's the last time someone on your team prompted YOU?) Remember Part 1? Those brilliant

Leadership

The Prompt Leader [Part 4 of 5]

The three promised intelligence boosters? They're hiding in plain sight. AI performance breakthroughs come from the same three things. They work on humans too. 1. Tool Calling → Empowered Execution When GPT-4 hits its limits, it calls specialized tools: Calculator for math, Browser for current events, and Database for

Leadership

The Prompt Leader [Part 3 of 5]

Do you remember that hidden "system prompt" I mentioned? (Hold that thought because that's where it gets weird...) Your team isn't making decisions. They're pattern-matching. Like AI. (Stay with me.) LLMs don't "think." They predict the next word

Leadership

The Prompt Leader [Part 2 of 5]

Remember the promise from yesterday? The best "prompt" isn't a prompt at all. We've been confusing prompts with context. They're not the same. Not close. A prompt is "Build a dashboard." Context is the entire universe of understanding that enables

Leadership

The Prompt Leader [Part 1 of 5]

Imagine a brilliant team delivering mediocre results. The same type of people excel elsewhere. Different leaders, different outcomes. What different? Not the people. The prompts. Here's what's breaking my brain lately: We've built incredible AI systems that respond brilliantly or terribly based on our

Leadership

The Prompt Leader [Part 0 of 5]

There's a meeting right now where everyone is lying. Including you. It's the talent review meeting. Someone's presenting slides about "capability gaps" and "hiring needs." Everyone's nodding. Everyone agrees: "We need stronger players." Here's

Leadership

Intelligence Theater

Nassim Taleb bombed every strategic planning session. He said, "To outperform trial and error intellectually, you need at least a thousand IQ points." Let that sink in... I used to think smart people had the edge. If you were brilliant enough, you could think your way past the

Leadership

The Competence Illusion

Who’s actually in charge here? Simple question. Should have a simple answer. The pilot flies the plane. The CEO runs the company. Someone has the whole picture. But watch what happens when you push on it… The pilot’s counting on air traffic control. Control’s watching software displays.

Analytics

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 5 of 5]

Breaking Free Your team can escape. But not how you think. The answer isn't better data. It's better questions. Data driven asks, "What should we do?" Data inspired asks, "What's happening here?" That second question changes everything. Here's

Innovation

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 4 of 5]

Why Smart Teams Stay Stuck Smart teams choose data-driven thinking. Even when they know better. It's not because they're dumb. It's because of how we reward teams. Here's what I mean. Two team members keep fighting about everything. Creative direction. Deadlines. Who

Analytics

Data Driven vs Data Inspired [Part 3 of 5]

Being Data Inspired Data inspired is different. Let me show you. Data driven sees: "Sales dropped last month. Run Campaign X again." Data inspired sees: "Sales drop every time we launch without testing messaging first." Notice the difference? Data-driven copy solutions. Data-inspired find principles. You look