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If This Business Model Works, Why Isn’t It Working for Me?
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: A business model can show us what someone did, but it cannot capture every condition that made what they did work. Before concluding that a model doesn’t work, it may be worth examining whether the problem is the model itself or something less visible that is affecting…
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When confidence outruns understanding
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Confident misunderstanding can cause an organization to define the wrong problem, accept the wrong reality and commit itself to the wrong direction. Once that happens, talent, strategy and execution begin amplifying the error. Confusion can be uncomfortable, but it carries an important admission: we know that we…
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The Distortion isn’t in the Tool
Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal Post in two sentences: The quality of AI’s output often reflects the quality of the thinking we bring to it, making the real issue less about the tool and more about the user. Before evaluating any tool, it is worth examining the thinking behind deciding to use it in the first…
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Stop Trying to Create Perfect Stability
When I first read Thriving on Chaos years ago, what remained as a foundational thought, was not any particular model or management technique. It was the challenge buried inside the title itself. Most people spend an enormous amount of energy trying to create conditions that feel permanent. Businesses do it. Leaders do it. Entire industries…
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The fog of war does not only exist on battlefields
The fog of war is a phrase that originally belonged to military strategy…those moments where commanders were forced to make decisions while visibility remained partial, communication fractured, and information arrived distorted through fear, delay, assumption, ego, or incomplete observation. From a distance, war often looks like movement directed by certainty. Inside it, however, people are…
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“More than physical pain, I fear humiliation…”
The title of today’s post is the line spoken by Duncan, the insecure CEO of an up-and-coming data-mining company called Hypergnosis, during a therapy session with Joanne in the AMC series Audacity. While the darkly comedic drama eventually reveals other fractures moving beneath his life…an unraveling marriage, unresolved father wounds, mounting emotional instability…the statement itself…
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What Apollo 13 Understood about Leadership Under Pressure
“Houston, we have a problem” has survived all these years partly because of the way it was delivered. The sentence itself carried no drama. There was no attempt to inflate the moment emotionally even though an oxygen tank had exploded in space and three men were suddenly inside a situation that could very realistically kill…
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What Happens when your Business is Operationally Efficient but Emotionally Flat?
I was listening today to a conversation around relevance and customer experience and I started to think about just how many businesses have become incredibly efficient at producing transactions while slowly losing their ability to produce feeling? There are businesses where everything technically works and yet the entire experience feels emotionally flat. Then there are…
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Most Leaders Never Get to Practice
How strange it is that we expect business leaders to perform at extraordinarily high levels while structuring their lives in ways that would completely dismantle almost every other performance discipline we admire. If you watch elite athletes closely, or musicians at the highest level, most of what they do is not performance itself. Most of…
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Don’t Volunteer yourself into Future Anxiety
In other words, don’t emotionally solve problems you think may occur in the future. We have all done this at one time or another. Something happens. We anticipate the problem. We immediately start solving. A problem becomes a prediction. What makes this difficult is that entrepreneurship does require anticipation. You cannot operate responsibly without thinking…
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