The Vessel Our body is a vessel. So is the organisation you lead. Your environment doesn't just surround the vessel — it conditions it. Every report you sign off without questioning it, every steering committee you sit through half-present, every hard conversation you...
You Can't Discipline Your Way Out of Drift. You Have to Trick Your Way In. Most executives think the problem with their program is a willpower problem. Enforce the process. Mandate the reporting standard. Hold people accountable in the steering meeting. Eventually,...
Happy Independence. Now Question It. Happy Independence — to those who are actually free and sovereign. Living in a free country does not mean you are free. We may be free from outsiders. Their influence may not be. That's not a slogan. It's worth sitting with,...
Success Success attracts people. Failure repels them. That's the illusion we carry — that people are drawn to us, or pull away from us. They are not. There is nothing about us that changes from Tuesday to Wednesday. What changes is our success and our failure. Our...
Why It's So Hard to Start With the End in Mind? Everyone has heard the advice. Start with the end in mind. Picture where you want to land, then work backward. It sounds obvious once someone says it out loud — and almost nobody actually does it. I don't think that's a...
Who is Actually Leading When I Lead? A program director I know once snapped at his project manager in a steering committee meeting over a two-day delay in a status update. It was a small thing. The room went quiet the way rooms do when the reaction doesn't match the...
The Reward Never Stops Costing You Something clicked on a scrap of paper this morning: no wonder we are too busy. We're not just chasing rewards. We're preserving them. And that second job never ends. Here's the pattern underneath most of what we call success: Effort...
There Is No Greatness in Serving Your Own For the people we care about, we give our resources and ourselves. We think about them when they're not in the room. We plan for them. We set aside what we've built so they can pressure-test it, prosper from it, evolve past...