Category Archives: Leadership

Allocate Resources as if People and Planet Matter

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Business is about allocating resources to achieve business objectives. And for that, the best place to start is to define the business objectives.

First – what is the timeframe of the business objectives? Well, there are three – short, medium and long. Short is about making payroll, shipping this month’s orders and meeting this year’s sales objectives. Long is about the existence of the company over the next decade and happiness of the people that do the work along the way. And medium – the toughest – is in-between. It’s neither short nor long but bound by both.

Second – define business objectives within the three types: people, planet and profit.

People. Short term: pay them so they can eat, pay the mortgage and fund their retirement, provide healthcare, provide a safe workplace, give them work that fits their strengths and give them time to improve their community. Medium: pay them so they can provide for their family and fund their retirement, provide healthcare, provide a safer workplace, give them work that requires them to grow their strengths and give them time to become community leaders. Long: pay them so they can pay for their kids’ college and know they can safely retire, provide the safest workplace, let them choose their own work, and give them time to grow the next community leaders. And make it easy.

Planet. Short term: teach Life Cycle Assessment, Buddhist Economics and TRIZ and create business metrics for them to flourish. Medium: move from global sourcing to local sourcing, move to local production, move from business models based on non-renewable resources to renewable resources. Long: create new business models that are resource neutral. Longer: create business models that generate excess resources. Longest: teach others.

Profit. Short, medium and long – focus on people and planet and the profits will come. But also focus on creating new value for new customers.

For business objectives, here’s the trick on timeframe – always work short term, always work long term and prioritize medium term.

And for the three types of business objectives, focus on people, planet and creating new value for new customers. Profits are a result.

Image credits: Gemini

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How Should CEOs Operate?

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How Should CEOs Operate?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

A post a little while ago of Dealbook with Andrew Ross Sorkin led off with a great topic: How hands-on should founders be in their companies? As Sorkin notes,

In the framing of Brian Chesky, the Airbnb co-founder and C.E.O., and Paul Graham, the Y Combinator co-founder, it comes down to “founder mode” versus “manager mode.” It’s not a new question — and it draws on longstanding examples like Steve Jobs — but it has taken on fresh significance as start-ups struggle with how to grow while keeping antsy investors happy.

This relates directly to the Zone to Win and the discipline of zone management, so I want to riff off of Sorkin’s column in a Point/Counterpoint way to tease out what I think are the key issues.

My core thesis is that “founder mode” is centered in leadership and is critical to the operating models of the Incubation Zone and Transformation Zone, and that “manager mode” is centered in management and is critical to the operating models of the Performance Zone and Productivity Zone. This is an and, not an or, situation—both are mandatory—but who is in charge where can be up for grabs.

My view, however, is that it should not be. The CEO needs to call the shots when it comes to dealing with disruption and catching the next wave, be that through incubation or transformation. In parallel, the ELT executive suite needs to be in charge of current lines of business in established categories, delivering performance and productivity. The ELT reports to the CEO, so the latter has oversight over the Performance and Productivity Zones and is accountable to the board of directors for their success, but this should largely be accomplished through hiring and promoting the most talented operators, not standing shoulder to shoulder with them on the front lines.

As for the struggle start-ups experience between how to grow and keeping antsy investors happy, the key point is that growth investors are willing to accept short-term shortfalls in financial metrics in order for the enterprise to invest in incubation and transformation initiatives to catch the next wave. Value investors are not. They prefer predictable execution of performance and productivity initiatives that leverage the inertial momentum of established categories. When a high-growth start-up goes public, they get reviewed by financial analysts who are inevitably focused on performance and productivity, and it takes all the narrative skills that the CEO and CFO can muster to build support for any kind of transformation.

Graham, as reported by Sorkin, tells a somewhat different story:

The prime example Graham cited was Chesky. The Airbnb boss shared his story at a recent Y Combinator event, and also discussed it on a podcast: “The less hands-on I was, the more I got sucked into problems. And by the time I got sucked into a problem, it was like 10 times as much work,” Chesky said on the podcast.

Instead, he decided: “I’m going to be involved in every single detail. And Airbnb is not going to do anything more than I can personally focus on.”

That has gotten results, Graham wrote, with Airbnb now having some of the best free cash flow in Silicon Valley. Then again, Airbnb’s stock price is 31 percent below its 52-week high.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. Brian, in my view, is a great CEO leader. The fact that he got sucked into a lot of problems, I suspect, is not because his team does not know how to manage but because the category itself is transitioning from hypergrowth to growth, the competition is catching up, the regulators are weighing in, and so there is still a lot of pathfinding to do. As these paths become more established, he should deliberately step away from those operations to free himself for the next wave of changes. The fact that the company’s stock price is 31 percent below its 52-week high, given that Airbnb has great free cash flow, is far more likely to be due to category dynamics than management execution.

Sorkin goes on to list a number of well-known examples of CEOs, in addition to Jobs, who have taken a very hands-on approach to management, including Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman. All, however, are living in the midst of categorical disruption, where leadership takes precedence over management. That is because categorical stability and inertial momentum, which are the prerequisites for management success, are simply not there yet.

Sorkin also mentions Howard Schultz, who built Starbucks from a local Seattle coffee chain into a global colossus and was famously hands-on, also fits the mold. But here I think we have a CEO who has not orchestrated the transition to management well, witnessed by the volatility in its stock price for the first half of this decade, in a category that is not under disruption.

Finally, there are a handful of examples at the end of the column that can serve as litmus tests for zone management principles:

Dan Rose, who held leadership positions at Amazon and Meta, wrote that Jeff Bezos and Zuckerberg “were both micro-managers, deep in the details of the product and business. They never set expectations of autonomy, and they fired anyone who resisted their oversight.”

Amazon has never stopped disrupting, and the core of its innovation engine, and Bezos’s personal genius, is an incredibly deep and fine-grained inspection of established processes which underpins their radical reengineering to generate astounding competitive advantage. Meta is more of a mixed bag, but again, with a quarter of the Earth’s population on the platform, it is in the midst of every disruption on the planet. The idea that management should have autonomy under such conditions is ludicrous.

Others said there were nuances. Jessica Lessin, the founder of The Information, argued that founders do need capable managers, noting that Jobs relied on Tim Cook to oversee the vast and intricate manufacturing operation that became one of Apple’s most crucial assets. A start-up investor, Henrik Torstensson, agreed that execution mattered, citing Microsoft under Satya Nadella as a “Hall of Fame example” of manager mode done right.

In both instances, Apple and Microsoft are leveraging well-established businesses in personal computing, supplemented by Apple’s success in smartphones and media distribution, and Microsoft’s in business applications and, most recently, cloud computing, while at the same time engaging with the category disruption of AI. This calls for a balance of leadership and management, which is Satya’s gift. Tim has a tougher hand to play because Steve is an impossible act to follow. But since they are running two of the most valued companies on the planet, I think they are probably doing OK.

Stepping back from this whole line of thinking, the key takeaway is that the discipline of zone management is well-equipped to deal with these challenges. The first question to answer is not who should be in charge, but rather, how should we tackle this? What zone, in other words, offers the best operating model for coping with the challenges at hand? Once we decide that, then we know whether leadership or management gets the primary nod, and, thus, whether the CEO or the ELT should take the reins.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Geoffrey Moore

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Why the Incredible GE Turnaround Could be a Sign of the Times

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Why the Incredible GE Turnaround Could be a Sign of the Times

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When Jack Welch took the helm at General Electric in 1981, it marked the beginning of a new era. Corporations would no longer coddle workers, but would slash costs, close factories and focus on increasing shareholder value. By 1999 he had increased revenues from $26.8 billion to nearly $130 billion and in 2000 he was named “Manager of the Century” by Fortune magazine.

Yet all the success belied serious problems rumbling underneath the surface. As David Gelles explains in, The Man Who Broke Capitalism, Welch increased profits largely by “financializing” the firm and operations suffered. Under his successor, Jeffrey Immelt, GE collapsed and was removed from the Dow index.

Yet while Welch’s rise marked a new era of shareholder capitalism, the new CEO at GE, Larry Culp has taken a different turn. He invests in workers, distributes authority and has refocused the firm on improving manufacturing productivity. The result has been one of the most dramatic turnarounds in industrial history, perhaps signaling a larger shift.

The Welch Myth

To understand why the Welch era was not what it seemed, let’s look at one common practice that took hold in the 1980s and 90s: Offshoring. From a shareholder value perspective, it has an intuitive logic. You move your factory from high wage countries such as the US to low wage countries such as China and pocket the savings. You lower costs and increase profits, at least in the short-term.

Yet that analysis omits some important factors. First of all, it undermines trust among employees, suppliers and other partners when relationships are treated as purely transactions. Also, a Harvard study found that moving the factory floor thousands of miles away from R&D reduces knowledge transfer and has a negative effect on innovation.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how this played out at GE. The company became more profitable, but less productive. For decades, it failed to innovate. Its last major invention was the CT scanner, which came out in the 1970s, before Jack Welch took the helm. For all of the hype about his management genius, in truth Welch was, in large part, living off the accomplishments of his predecessors.

One helpful way to look at managing an enterprise is to group it into two major activities: capacity building and optimization. Building capacity is a drag on profits in the short term, but builds a foundation for the future. Optimization focuses on efficiency, which drives short-term profits, but doesn’t build anything for the long term.

Welch’s layoffs created profits, but undermined GE’s ability to build capacity. The firm’s increasing reliance on its finance arm to smooth earnings masked real problems and increased risk. The stage was set for a downfall.

The Road To Ruin

In 2001, after a lengthy succession process, Jeffrey Immelt was named Jack Welch’s successor and he began his star-crossed tenure. The 9-11 attacks hit the firm’s aerospace business hard and, while he used many of the same accounting tricks involving GE finance that Welch employed, the share price continued to lag. That’s when Jeffrey Immelt set out on a journey to transform GE into a 124 year old startup.

No longer would GE be a boring old manufacturing company, but would make a “pivot” to the digital age. Although it was one of the largest private organizations in the world, with 300,000 employees, he sought to become agile and nimble enough to compete with high-flying Silicon Valley firms. A key ambition was the development of Predix, an industrial software platform.

He also brought in Lean Startup guru Eric Ries to help instill a more entrepreneurial culture and speed time to market. The initiative caught on and eventually became the FastWorks program, One of the most touted projects was the development of a gas turbine , which reduced development time by a full year while significantly increasing performance. Immelt also acquired the power division of Alstom, essentially doubling down on the same bet.

It didn’t end well. As renewable energy began to take off, demand for gas turbines declined markedly. In 2017, problems in the firm’s power division led to massive layoffs and GE’s removal from the Dow after 110 years.. Immelt was forced to step down as CEO. The company, once famous for its sound management, was now an iconic failure.

The Rebirth

In the aftermath of GE’s collapse, Larry Culp was named as the first outsider CEO in its history and he came with a very different approach. Unlike Jack Welch, he didn’t take pride in layoffs or try to be a management guru. Nor did he fall in love with Silicon Valley and fashion himself as some sort of new age hero, like Jeffrey Immelt.

Instead, he focused on improving operations through lean manufacturing, a methodology focused on continuous improvement that’s been around for over four decades, and shed debt to improve the resiliency of its balance sheet. He also broke the company up into three separate firms, reversing GE’s history of growth through acquisition.

Most of all, he shifted management’s focus from seeing its employees as cost centers to profit centers. Rather than offshoring to cut costs, lean manufacturing puts an emphasis on getting the factory floor involved, using frontline hands-on knowledge to improve productivity and efficiency. GE’s famous culture of stack-ranking and shooting the messenger has been replaced by one in which workers are encouraged to report problems so they can be solved.

The results are hard to argue with. In 2023, GE’s share price leaped by 95.8%, outperforming darlings such as Apple, Google and Microsoft and sending its market cap back over $150 billion. Perhaps most importantly, he’s shown that you can best serve shareholders by serving employees, much as MIT’s Zenep Ton argues in her book, The Case for Good Jobs.

Rethinking American Industry

General Electric has long been symbolic of the US economy. Formed in the 1890s when J.P. Morgan merged Thomas Edison’s electric company with other firms, it was one of the original components of the Dow Jones index and signaled America’s industrial rise. It also became the first major conglomerate, forming the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919, which became a leading broadcaster.

That all began to change when Jack Welch took over in 1981. He led a new era of “Welchism,” in which CEO’s laid off employees, offshored factories and engaged in “financial engineering,” to goose profits. American industry followed suit, cutting investment in R&D, lobbying hard for cuts in government spending and corporate taxes, hollowing out the US industrial base.

Yet it appears that GE’s new CEO, Larry Culp, might be as emblematic for the new era as Jack Welch was for the old one. Instead of layoffs, he’s investing in lean manufacturing methods that put front-line workers at the center and instead of using acquisitions to fuel growth, he’s broken the company up to help focus on operational excellence.

This reflects a greater shift that began during the Obama Administration with the creation of the Advanced Manufacturing Office and the Manufacturing USA Institutes. It has continued under the Biden Administration with legislation such as the CHIPS Act and the IRA. The results are clear. Manufacturing employment has increased by roughly 1.5 million jobs since 2010, productivity is up and unemployment is at record lows.

The truth is that we’re moving from an era of bits to an era of atoms and that means we can’t just move fast and break things anymore. We can expect the basis of competition to shift away from design sprints, iterating, and pivoting to building meaningful, collaborative relationships in order to solve grand challenges.

Once again, what’s going on at GE might be a sign of the times.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: 1 of 1,550+ FREE quotes for you at http://misterinnovation.com

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Goal-Setting That Actually Works

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Goal-Setting That Actually Works

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Goal-setting is one of the most powerful tools a leader has. But most leaders don’t wield it nearly as well as they think. And if we’re honest, many treat it as just another item on the management checklist. You draft goals at the beginning of the year, plug them into your HR system, and then forget about them until the next performance review cycle. That’s not leadership. That’s busywork.

And when goals are vague, misaligned, or constantly shifting, they don’t inspire effort—they create confusion. Your team stops trusting the process. Eventually, they stop trusting you. And when that happens, performance drops, motivation tanks, and the team dynamic starts to unravel.

That’s not the kind of team you want to lead. And it’s definitely not the kind of team you want to be on.

The good news is, goal-setting doesn’t have to go wrong. But before we talk about how to fix it, we need to talk about how most leaders get it wrong in the first place.

The Most Common Goal-Setting Mistakes Leaders Make

There are a few ways leaders unintentionally sabotage themselves—and their teams—when setting goals. And one of the most well-documented comes from a study with a surprisingly catchy title: Goals Gone Wild. Researchers at Harvard found that when leaders set too many goals, or overly aggressive ones, it actually hurt performance.

Instead of building focus and momentum, teams start scrambling to hit numbers without understanding the bigger picture. They cut corners. They burn out. And they start working in silos instead of collaborating. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: metrics aren’t meaning.

And then there’s the issue of stretch goals. They’re great in theory—designed to push the team beyond business-as-usual. But stretch quickly turns into stress when the goals are unrealistic. If your team is standing at the starting line thinking, There’s no way we’ll ever hit that target, the most common reaction isn’t motivation. It’s apathy. Why try if you’re already destined to fail?

Finally, there’s the confusion between learning goals and performance goals. Performance goals are about execution—hitting a number or completing a process. Learning goals are about experimentation—trying new things and embracing occasional failure. Both are valid. But when you try to hit both at the same time, you’re essentially slamming on the gas and the brakes. And teams stall out.

Now that we’ve identified the common traps, let’s talk about how to set goals the right way.

How To Set Goals That Actually Work

Here are four research-backed strategies for goal-setting that will strengthen performance, boost motivation, and build long-term trust with your team.

1. Choose a Clear Focus

Before you start drafting goals, get clear on the kind of work your team is doing right now.

If your team is executing on something known—like running a proven process or scaling an existing strategy—then set performance goals. These should be measurable, time-bound, and tied to operational excellence.

But if your team is exploring something new—developing a prototype, entering a new market, or experimenting with a different process—then it’s time for learning goals. These goals encourage experimentation, reflection, and iteration.

You can shift between learning and performance goals over time. In fact, most innovation cycles require both. But don’t mix them in the same cycle. When everything is both a test and a target, nobody knows what matters most.

Make it clear: are we in learning mode or performance mode?

2. Clarify the Purpose Behind the Goal

Most goals focus on what to do. But few explain why it matters. And that’s a missed opportunity. Because while some people are naturally competitive—motivated by the scoreboard—most people need more than a number to stay engaged. They need meaning.

So instead of saying, “Increase repeat customer business by 15% this quarter,” clarify what that number means. For example: “Increase repeat business by 15% because that shows customers trust us enough to keep coming back—and that we’re delivering value worth repeating.”

It’s not just about the number. It’s about the impact that number represents.

That doesn’t mean you abandon metrics. Specific, measurable goals still matter. But they work best when they’re connected to something deeper. Remember: metrics guide performance. Meaning fuels it.

3. Co-Create Goals and Take Feedback Seriously

Top-down goal-setting kills motivation. If your team has no say in how their goals are defined—or no visibility into how they’re progressing—then those goals won’t inspire action. They’ll be seen as arbitrary mandates. And people disengage.

Great leaders define the “what” but collaborate on the “how.” You can set the targets, milestones, and success metrics. But bring the team in to help design the approach. When people see themselves in the plan, they take ownership. And ownership drives motivation.

That collaboration shouldn’t stop after goals are set. Check in regularly—not to micromanage, but to monitor progress, solve challenges early, and adjust course if needed. Talk about what’s working, what’s not, and what the team is learning. That ongoing feedback loop keeps goals relevant and keeps people engaged.

4. Watch for Signs of Goal Fatigue

Even the best goals can backfire if they come too fast, too often, or without a break. Goal fatigue happens when every project is urgent and every metric is top priority. When your team is always sprinting, it’s only a matter of time before they burn out.

Your job as a leader isn’t just to set goals. It’s to sustain ambition.

That means watching for early signs of fatigue—slipping deadlines, fading creativity, or a drop in team energy. And when you see those signs, don’t push harder. Take a pause.

Ask: “What’s essential right now?” Maybe it’s time to scale back or switch from performance goals to learning goals for a while. Give your team space to recover, reflect, and rebuild their sense of purpose. When motivation returns, performance will follow.

The Real Goal of Goal-Setting

When done right, goal-setting doesn’t just drive results—it builds trust. It clarifies direction, reinforces purpose, and gives people ownership in the outcome. But when done wrong, it becomes just another bureaucratic task. A checkbox. A system no one believes in.

So if your current goal-setting approach isn’t energizing your team, it’s time to change the way you lead it.

Pick a focus. Tie goals to purpose. Build them together. Check in often. And don’t forget to rest.

Because the goal isn’t just to hit a number. The goal is to build a team that’s motivated, focused, and in it for the long haul.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Uncertainty Barometer

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Uncertainty Barometer

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Novelty, or newness, can be a great way to assess the status of things. The level of novelty is a barometer for the level of uncertainty and unpredictability. If you haven’t done it before, it’s novel and you should expect the work to be uncertain and unpredictable. If you’ve done it before, it’s not novel and you should expect the work to go as it did last time. But like the barometer that measures a range of atmospheric pressures and gives an indication of the weather over the next hours, novelty ranges from high to low in small increments and so does the associated weather conditions.

Barometers have a standard scale that measures pressure. When the summer air is clear and there are no clouds, the atmospheric pressure is high and on the rise and you should put on sun screen. When it’s hurricane season and super-low system approaches, the drops to the floor and you should evacuate. The nice thing about barometers is they are objective. On all continents, they can objectively measure the pressure and display it. No judgement, just read the scale. And regardless of the level of pressure and the number of times they measure it, the needle matches the pressure. No Kentucky windage. But novelty isn’t like that.

The only way to predict how things will go based on the level of novelty is to use judgement. There is no universal scale for novelty that works on all projects and all continents. Evaluating the level of novelty and predicting how the projects will go requires good judgement. And the only way to develop good judgment is to use bad judgment until it gets better.

All novelty isn’t created equal. And that’s the trouble. Some novelty has a big impact on the weather and some doesn’t. The trick is to know the difference. And how to tell the difference? If when you make a change in one part of the system (add novelty) and the novelty causes a big change in the function or operation of the system, that novelty is important. The system is telling you to use a light hand on the tiller. If the novelty doesn’t make much difference in system performance, drive on. The trick is to test early and often – simple tests that give thumbs-up or thumbs-down results. And if you try to run a test and you can’t get the test to run at all, there’s a hurricane is on the horizon.

When the work is new, you don’t really know which novelty will bite you. But there’s one rule: all novelty will bite you until proven otherwise. Make a list of the novel elements of the and test them crudely and quickly.

Image credits: Pexels

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Do These 3 Things to Tell a Compelling Story

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Do These 3 Things to Tell a Compelling Story

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There’s a great, although perhaps apocryphal, story about Franz Kafka and a little girl. The relatively unknown author—he wouldn’t achieve great fame until after his death—met a young girl who lost her doll. Kafka helped her look for it, but to no avail. The doll was lost forever and the girl was heartbroken.

But then Kafka told her a story. The next day he brought her a letter from the doll. “Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world.” Kafka would bring her letters telling her of the doll’s adventures. He eventually bought her another doll and gave it to her with another note that said, “my travels have changed me.”

As the story goes, after Kafka’s death the girl found another letter hidden in the replacement doll that said, “Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.” We can’t all write like Kafka, but with a little bit of knowledge and some practice, we can all learn to tell stories that give meaning and purpose to our messages.

1. Create Tension

The first element of any story is its exposition, which is the world you build around the story. It includes the setting, the characters and other background information. That’s where most people start their stories, but it can be a trap, like when your mother starts a story about meeting someone at a drugstore and ten minutes later you’re still hearing about the grandchildren and wondering what the point is.

Master storytellers start with a tension or conflict, like the girl losing her doll in the Kafka story or a James Bond movie when it starts with him hanging from a helicopter and you have no idea why. It’s the tension or conflict that keeps our attention because we want to see it resolved. The Metamorphosis, the only novel Kafka ever finished, began with:

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

Another element of tension and conflict is the characters themselves. David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, points out that we find characters like Darth Vader more interesting than one dimensional characters like Superman because they lack moral clarity. It is that ambiguity that makes them interesting and provokes thought and discussion.

Notice how in the story with the girl, the resolution to the lost doll creates its own tension. What will the letters say? Will she appreciate them, learn from them or see through the ruse? We appreciate the ending of the story not only because the tension was resolved, but in a way that honored the feeling of loss that created it.

2. Manage The Cognitive Budget

Born in the late 13th century, William of Ockham was a giant of his age. As one of the few intellectual lights of medieval times, his commentaries on reason, logic and political theory are studied even today. His ideas about the separation of church and state were literally centuries ahead of their time and formed the basis for our own constitutional principle.

Yet he’s best known for Ockham’s Razor, sometimes known as the “principle of parsimony.” Often, the principle is interpreted as “Keep It Simple Stupid,” but that’s not quite right. Notice how the Kafka story, although it’s short, has a sort of elegant complexity to it. The notion of a doll traveling around the world having adventures certainly isn’t simplistic.

A much more accurate translation would be, “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” In other words, if something doesn’t need to be there, it shouldn’t be. Everything you include, should be intentional and have a purpose. Even a subplot needs to play a role in the overall narrative. Anything else just distracts from what you’re trying to say.

A useful device I use for applying Ockham’s razor is to imagine my audience, whether that is a reader or a listener, as having an internal “cognitive budget” they are willing to devote to whatever I’m trying to tell them. Then I judge everything I include by the standard of, “is this worth using up my cognitive budget?”

So be cautious and respectful with your audience’s attention. If you have any doubts whether it needs to be there, it probably doesn’t. Take it out and see if anything meaningful is lost. If not, keep it out and don’t look back.

3. Create “Buts” And “Therefores”

Being mindful of your audience’s cognitive budget doesn’t mean stories should be linear. In fact, you want twists and turns. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone call this their But & Therefore Rule. Learning how to master it can dramatically improve the way you tell stories and engage audiences.

The idea is that each element of a story is either a causal connection or a twist. There should never be a simple, “and then” linking two elements together. You can see Parker and Stone explaining the concept in this video:

We can see the concept at work in the Kafka story. Kafka found the girl crying, THEREFORE he helped her look for it BUT they couldn’t find it THEREFORE she was heartbroken. BUT he brought her the letter telling her the doll was going on a trip to see the world. BUT eventually he bought her a new doll. Kafka dies and their relationship ends, BUT he left her one final note.

Each THEREFORE reinforces the element that precedes it and each BUT creates a new twist. Everything has a purpose and nothing is there that doesn’t need to be, which is what makes the story so elegantly compelling.

We All Need To Learn To Leverage The Power Of Story

Some years back I was invited to visit the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Over the years many of the world’s greatest minds have taken up residence there. It was where Einstein, along with other giants like Oppenheimer, von Neumann and Gödel, would reside until his death in 1955. It is a place, for me at least, in which stories permeate from every corner and crevice.

There is a common room in the main building, Fuld Hall, where tea is served every afternoon and, if you know the stories, you can almost hear the din of legends arguing, cajoling and discussing pathbreaking ideas when you enter. That is the power of story. It can imbue even inanimate objects with meaning. Without the stories, Fuld Hall is just a red brick building.

Look at great leaders throughout history, from General George Patton to Martin Luther King Jr. to Steve Jobs, and they all used the power of story to anchor an enterprise with a sense of mission and destiny. It was undoubtedly a big part of their success. We need to learn to tell better stories, if we are to give meaning to others and build faith in a common endeavor.

Stories, as Hollywood mogul Peter Guber has put it, provides emotional transport for ideas. Emotions are like little yellow highlighters in our brains, providing markers that tell us, “remember this, it’s important.” It is, of course, crucial to get your facts straight, but if you don’t learn how to tell a story, those facts will be easily forgotten.

Do yourself and those around you a favor. Learn how to tell stories and tell them well. Life’s too short to be boring or to be bored.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Time to Stretch Yourself

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Time to Stretch Yourself

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If the work doesn’t stretch you, choose new work. Don’t go overboard and make all your work stretch you and don’t choose work that will break you. There’s a balance point somewhere between 0% and 100% stretch and that balance point is different for everyone and it changes over time. Point is, seek your balance point.

To find the right balance point, start with an assessment of your stretch level. List the number of projects you have and sum the number of major deliverables you’ve got to deliver. If you have more than three projects, you have too many. And if you think you take on more than three because you’re superhuman, you’re wrong. The data is clear – multitasking is a fallacy. If you have four projects you have too many. And it’s the same with three, but you’d think I was crazy if I suggested you limit your projects to two. The right balance point starts with reducing the number of projects you work on.

Now that you eliminated four or five projects and narrowed the portfolio down to the vital two or three, it’s time to list your major deliverables. Take a piece of paper and write them in a column down the left side of the page. And in a column next to the projects, categorize each of them as: -1 (done it before), 0 (done something similar), 1 (new to me), 2 (new to team), 3 (new to company), 5 (new to industry), 11 (new to world).

For the -1s, teach an entry level person how to do it and make sure they do it well. For the 0s, find someone who deserves a growth opportunity and let them have the work. And check in with them to make sure they do a good job. The idea is to free yourself for the stretch work.

For the 1s, find the best person in the team who has done it before and ask them how to do it. Then, do as they suggest but build on their work and take it to the next level.

For the 2s, find the best person in the company who has done it before and ask them how to do it. Then, build on their approach and make it your own.

For the 3s, do your research and find out who in your industry has done it before. Figure out how they did it and improve on their work.

For the 5s, do your research and figure out who has done similar work in another industry. Adapt their work to your application and twist it into something magical.

And for the 11s, they’re a special project category that live in rarified air and deserve a separate blog post of their own.

Start with where you are – evaluate your existing deliverables, cull them to a reasonable workload and assess your level of stretch. And, where it makes sense, stop doing work you’ve done before and start doing work you haven’t done yet. Stretch yourself, but be reasonable. It’s better to take one bite and swallow than take three and choke.

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The Language of Thought

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The Language of Thought

GUEST POST from Geoffrey Moore

Where do thoughts come from? Is there any structure to them before they manifest themselves in language? Is there a universal grammar that underlies every actual grammar?

These questions have been asked many times before. My answers are as follows:

They come from below, not above.
They do have a readily describable structure.
That structure does indeed underly every actual grammar.

The first answer is the most important one. If the language of thought precedes symbolic language, then symbolic language is emergent from it, and the way to study is not through self-examination but rather by observing the behavior of non-language speaking agents. Of these my favorite two are babies and dogs. Both exhibit a myriad of strategic behaviors that imply thought but clearly do not entail language. So, based on observing them, what can we say about the structure of such thinking?

Babies and dogs, I propose, process the following five concepts routinely and effectively:

Agents. They recognize and respond to people and animals that can interact with them, as indicated by their eye contact, their coming and going, and response to commands and gestures.
Objects. They recognize and can discriminate among objects that interest them, both inanimate and animate, including foods, toys, playmates, and parents. They do not distinguish between animate and inanimate objects in any consistent way.
Actions. They initiate and respond to actions in ways that further their interests, be that in feeding, playing, or getting attention. They are inherently attracted to action in any form.
Valence. They discriminate between things they like and things they don’t like, seeking the former and avoiding the latter, as witnessed by their eating and their expressions of mood.
Uncertainty. When uncertain, they hesitate and respond tentatively until they can resolve their uncertainty.

My claim is that these five concepts map directly to the fundamental syntax of every one of the six thousand or so symbolic languages currently in use. Agents and objects both convert to nouns and noun-like entities that serve as subjects and predicate objects in declarative statements. Similarly, actions convert to verbs and verb-like phrases. When we combine nouns with actions, we get predications, or what I like to term claims, which are the fundamental units of symbolic discourse. Valences foreshadow the use of adjectives, adverbs, and other modifiers that add nuances to our claims, and uncertainty is represented by modal verbs expressing possibility, probability, or necessity.

As much ground as all this covers, it is important to understand what the language of thought does not entail. Take the sentence “John is tall.” That thought would never occur to either a baby or a dog. It is inherently symbolic in nature, and until you have a symbolic language, it cannot exist. In The Infinite Staircase, it belongs to the stairstep of analytics, whereas the language of thought can reach no higher than the stairstep of narrative.

It is on the stairstep of narrative that the language of thought passes the baton to symbolic language. We cannot tell stories without symbolic language, but it is clear from the behavior of both toddlers and long-term pets that we want to. The connection that binds the two at this point is a realization of cause and effect. Narrative is how we process cause and effect. The breakthrough of symbolic language is that we can not only be a lot more precise in our communication, increasing its efficacy, but also that we can abstract from one narrative concepts and patterns that can be applied elsewhere. This is the miracle of analytics, and it only comes with symbolic language.

To close, let’s revisit our first question—where exactly do our (symbolic-language-expressed) thoughts originate from? This is not a brain-processing question—that landscape is still under investigation—but rather a question of lived experience. Where does it feel like they come from?

My answer is that they are chemically generated responses that represent fluctuations in our homeostatic balance. Like all organisms, we are compelled to seek this balance all the time. The more we get out of balance, the stronger the chemical signal to respond, the more intense the resultant stream of thoughts will be. This applies to dreams as well as to when we are awake. We are continually processing a stream of thoughts that emerge into consciousness and finding their linguistic expression as they do. We register these thoughts through listening to ourselves and shape them further through talking to ourselves. It is only when we get to the talking that we are fully immersed in symbolic language.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

— Image credit: Pixabay

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The 8 Best Teamwork Books That Actually Improve Collaboration

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The 8 Best Teamwork Books That Actually Improve Collaboration

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Most leaders know teamwork matters. But few take the time to study what actually makes teams work.

We rely on instinct, gut feel, or experience from past teams—good or bad—and assume it’ll all work out. But in today’s complex, collaborative, cross-functional world, those assumptions often lead us astray.

If you want to lead high-performing teams consistently, you need better inputs. And for me, some of the best inputs have come from books—not just books about leadership, but books specifically about teamwork. The kind that change how you think about team culture, team dynamics, and the actual work of working together.

These aren’t just good reads. They’re the best teamwork books I’ve found, presented in no particular order because this isn’t a ranking… it’s a resource.

📚 Best Teamwork Books

1. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Probably the first one you thought of too. This is a business fable that somehow nails real team dysfunctions with precision. Lencioni’s model—from lack of trust to inattention to results—offers a practical, memorable way to diagnose and address breakdowns. I’ve referenced this book with dozens of leaders because it gets past the surface and straight to the relational heart of team performance.

2. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Coyle makes the case that talent alone doesn’t create great teams—culture does. He distills team culture into three key behaviors: build safety, share vulnerability, and establish purpose. What stood out to me is how much of team excellence is invisible, built in the small moments. It’s a great reminder that culture is less about slogans and more about habits.

3. Dream Teams by Shane Snow

This one turns a lot of conventional wisdom upside down. Shane Snow argues that the best teams aren’t the most harmonious—they’re the ones that learn how to disagree productively. With examples from science, sports, and even organized crime, he shows that friction (when handled well) makes teams smarter. A great read for leaders dealing with complexity and cognitive diversity.

4. Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal

McChrystal’s story of transforming Joint Special Operations Command is a masterclass in breaking down silos. His team couldn’t win modern battles using traditional hierarchy. So they built a “team of teams” built on shared consciousness and empowered execution. It’s a great reminder that agility isn’t just for startups—it’s a requirement in any complex environment.

5. Collaboration by Morten Hansen

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: not all collaboration is good. Hansen shows that ineffective collaboration can actually make performance worse. His concept of disciplined collaboration—knowing when and how to collaborate—helped me see the difference between helpful alignment and wasted effort. Especially valuable for leaders in large or matrixed organizations.

6. Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, John King & Halee Fischer-Wright

This book maps out five stages of team culture, from toxic to world-changing. What makes it stand out is the focus on language—how the words people use reveal the tribe they belong to and the performance they can unlock. It gave me a new lens for diagnosing team dynamics and helping leaders upgrade their team’s shared narrative.

7. Teaming by Amy Edmondson

Unlike most books that treat teams as fixed entities, Teaming focuses on teamwork as a dynamic, ever-evolving process. Edmondson shows how people must learn to collaborate quickly across boundaries, roles, and expertise areas—especially in fast-moving environments. It reframed for me how learning and collaboration go hand in hand, especially when teams are temporary or fluid.

8. Best Team Ever by David Burkus

Yes, it’s mine. But if you noticed, a lot of these other books are pretty old. They’ve stood the test of time, but research is always evolving. And so I wanted to understand what consistently sets high-performing teams apart—based on the latest evidence. What I found were three repeatable habits: common understanding, psychological safety, and prosocial purpose. Best Team Ever is a blueprint for building teams where people do their best work—and genuinely want to.

Final Thoughts

You don’t have to read every book on teams to lead a great one. But you do need to rethink how you approach teamwork—what you reward, what you reinforce, and how you respond when things go sideways. These are the best teamwork books that helped me do that. They changed how I build, lead, and coach teams—and they might do the same for you.

Because great teams aren’t just born.

They’re built — habit by habit, choice by choice, leader by leader.

Image credit: David Burkus

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Leading to the Future of Work

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GUEST POST from David Burkus

If you led a team through 2025, you probably felt like you were trapped in a never-ending game of workplace buzzword bingo. Coffee badging. Quiet quitting. Quiet firing. Corporate catfishing. Every week came with a new term, a new “trend,” and a new reason to wonder whether you were falling behind in the future of work—or just drowning in noise.

That’s the challenge for leaders right now: not “keeping up,” but getting clear on what actually changed. Because some of what we saw in 2025 wasn’t a fad. It was a preview. And 2026 won’t be a clean break from the past; it’ll be the year those shifts harden into the new defaults.

Here’s what I mean. In hindsight, 2025 wasn’t a year of brand-new problems. It was a year when familiar tensions finally became impossible to ignore: autonomy versus control, speed versus security, loyalty versus flexibility, experience versus reinvention. The labels made it feel new. The underlying issues weren’t.

And the way most organizations responded? Predictable. Also, mostly wrong.

When leaders face uncertainty, they usually reach for what worked before. They tighten policies. They standardize schedules. They add approvals. They try to “fix” culture with perks. It’s a natural reflex—especially when performance pressure is high. But it assumes the problem is that people need more rules, more oversight, or more incentives.

In reality, the lesson of 2025 is simpler: the rules of work didn’t just bend. They rewired. And if you keep trying to manage 2026 with a 2016 playbook, your team won’t just feel frustrated—they’ll quietly build workarounds. That’s where the real risk lives.

The Future of Work Is Structured Flexibility, Not a Return to the Old Office

Take the return-to-office story. Early 2025 looked like a full-scale push back to “normal,” with big-name companies raising the stakes and making attendance a mandate instead of a suggestion. Plenty of leaders braced for a rebellion.

But the more interesting story was what happened after the headlines: most people returned. Not necessarily happily. Not necessarily five days a week. But they showed up — often because they felt they didn’t have a better option.

And then something else happened. Leaders started realizing that office time isn’t a strategy. It’s a setting. You don’t get collaboration just because you share a zip code.

In the data, the pattern has been consistent: the best outcomes show up when people have flexibility—and when that flexibility is designed with intention. Hybrid can work. Remote can work. In-office can work. What doesn’t work is forcing one model without explaining the purpose or giving people any control.

That’s why I don’t think 2026 will be the year “RTO wins” or “remote wins.” I think 2026 will be the year structured flexibility becomes the default. You’ll see more anchor days, where teams coordinate time together for the work that benefits from face-to-face interaction. You’ll see more meeting-free focus time. You’ll see more experiments that look like “summer Fridays,” only year-round.

The real debate was never about office chairs. It was always about autonomy.

And autonomy doesn’t mean chaos. It means leaders stop managing presence and start managing performance.

AI Didn’t Replace Your Team. It Joined It.

The second shift is happening just as fast, but with more confusion: AI stopped being a novelty and started becoming a coworker.

In 2025, a lot of organizations rolled out enterprise AI tools — often with the best of intentions. But leaders ran straight into a new kind of friction: security guardrails that made the tools less useful than the consumer versions people were already using.

So employees did what humans always do when systems slow them down: they routed around them. They used personal accounts. They used personal devices. They found ways to keep moving.

From a productivity standpoint, that makes sense. From a risk standpoint, it’s terrifying.

And it creates a trust problem on both sides. Leaders worry about data leakage and compliance. Employees feel like the company is handing them a power tool…then wrapping it in bubble wrap and asking why the job isn’t done faster.

Here’s what 2026 is likely to bring: less debate about whether AI belongs at work, and more expectation that everyone knows how to use it responsibly. Senior leaders will lean on it for strategic thinking and competitive analysis. Frontline employees will use it to automate the “gray work” that clogs calendars—summaries, drafts, templates, first passes—so they can spend more time doing what humans still do best: judgment, creativity, and problem-solving.

The winners won’t be the companies with the fanciest AI license. They’ll be the ones that treat AI like a teammate who needs onboarding, training, and clear norms.

Your Team Is Becoming a Network

Meanwhile, another major shift has been quietly becoming permanent: freelancing is no longer a side hustle. It’s becoming infrastructure.

Layoffs, hiring freezes, and reorganizations pushed a lot of talented people out of traditional roles. At the same time, organizations started pulling contractors in—not just for gig work, but for high-skill roles: finance, HR, operations, even fractional executives.

This blurs the line between “employee” and “teammate.” And in 2026, that line will blur even more.

That creates a leadership challenge most managers weren’t trained for. Traditional management assumes stable teams: the same people, the same roles, the same reporting lines. But the emerging reality looks more like a project-based network, where talent plugs in, contributes, and moves on—sometimes to your competitor, sometimes back to you, sometimes to three other clients at the same time.

If you keep treating contractors like “temporary labor,” you’ll get temporary commitment. But if you start treating them like part of the mission, you’ll get better work, better collaboration, and—over time—a stronger talent ecosystem around your team.

In the future of work, leadership is less about supervising a roster and more about stewarding a network.

Generational Change Isn’t a Culture War. It’s a Coordination Problem.

Finally, 2025 made one more shift impossible to ignore: the workforce mix is changing fast.

Millennials have moved into the largest share of management roles, Gen Z is stepping into leadership earlier than many expected, and boomers are retiring—but unevenly, and often later than planned. That means many teams now include people in radically different life stages, with different expectations about careers, technology, and what work is “for.”

A lot of leaders respond to this by stereotyping. “Gen Z doesn’t want to work.” “Millennials are entitled.” “Boomers won’t let go.” That framing is easy…and lazy.

The better framing is this: cross-generational teams aren’t doomed. They’re just harder to coordinate. And coordination improves with curiosity.

If you want the brilliance without the conflict, you can’t lead by assumption. You have to lead by inquiry.

What to Do Next: 5 Moves to Lead the Future of Work

The point of all these trends isn’t to predict the next buzzword. It’s to build a team that can adapt when the next shift arrives — because it will.

Start here.

First, design autonomy on purpose. Don’t “allow flexibility” as a perk; build it as a system. Get clear on which work truly benefits from synchronous time together — onboarding, creative collisions, complex problem-solving—and which work benefits from uninterrupted focus. Then build schedules around those moments. When people understand the “why,” they’ll stop treating policies like arbitrary rules and start treating them like shared commitments.

Second, upgrade accountability from monitoring to check-ins. If your instinct is to measure hours, logins, or keystrokes, you’re solving the wrong problem. Accountability works best when it’s social and meaningful: clear goals, frequent progress conversations, and regular moments where people can ask for help before they’re stuck. When teammates feel counted on—not watched—they show up differently.

Third, onboard AI like you would a new hire. Make training normal, not optional and not reserved for “the tech people.” Give your team safe ways to experiment. Define guardrails in plain language: what data can be used, what outputs must be verified, what decisions require human judgment. And partner with IT and compliance to make policies usable in real work, not just defensible in audits.

Fourth, lead your contractors like they belong. Invite them into the rhythms that create cohesion: the kickoff, the retro, the celebration, the shared language of “what good looks like.” Show them how their work connects to outcomes, not just tasks. You don’t have to pretend they’re full-time. But you do need them to feel like insiders while they’re with you—or you’ll pay the tax later in misalignment and rework.

Fifth, build reverse mentoring into the culture. Don’t wait for it to happen organically. Create opportunities where Gen Z can teach tools and trends, while more experienced employees share context, judgment, and the “why” behind how the organization works. The goal isn’t to make everyone the same. The goal is to help people value what the others bring.

If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that change isn’t a season anymore. It’s the operating environment. High-performing teams aren’t the ones that finally “figure it out.” They’re the ones that keep learning faster than the world keeps shifting.

That’s what the future of work will reward in 2026: leaders who can replace control with clarity, replace policies with purpose, and replace rigid teams with resilient networks.

Image credit: Pixabay

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