Essays
Leadership lessons on execution, transformation, and what actually works.
The First 30 Days
You don't earn credibility by announcing a vision. You earn it by listening to 200 people tell you what's broken — and then fixing it where they can see.
Read more →The Real Cost of Getting Hybrid Work Wrong
Most hybrid policies are written by people who've never had to make one work across time zones.
Read more →Distributed Teams Don't Need Micromanagement. They Need This Instead.
Remote teams thrive through clarity, trust, and intentional systems — not oversight.
Read more →Your Employee Experience Is Your Customer Experience
If your support team feels like an afterthought, your customers already know it.
Read more →Is Poaching Employees Ethical?
I've been on both sides of it. The ethics aren't as clean as either side pretends.
Read more →Offshore Isn't a Dirty Word
Global workforce strategy fails when it's treated as cost arbitrage. It succeeds when it's treated as capability building — and when leadership does the hard work of actually leading across borders.
Read more →Integration Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Systems Problem
Post-acquisition integration fails when leaders treat it as a tooling exercise. The real work is cultural — aligning people, expectations, and identity.
Read more →Your Backlog Is a Leadership Problem
A growing case backlog isn't a staffing problem. It's a signal that something upstream is broken — and throwing more people at it won't fix it.
Read more →The Reorg That Didn't Fix Anything
Reorganizations are the most common response to dysfunction and the least likely to solve it. The org chart isn't the problem — and redrawing it isn't the fix.
Read more →What Breaks When You Scale
Every organization hits inflection points where what used to work stops working. The patterns of failure are predictable — and most leaders don't see them until it's too late.
Read more →The Meeting That Should Have Been a Decision
Organizations don't drown in work. They drown in meetings about work. The fix isn't fewer meetings — it's clearer ownership.
Read more →Nobody Wants Your Transformation
Every transformation program assumes buy-in will come. It won't. The people you need most are the ones most likely to resist — and they have good reasons.
Read more →The Metrics That Actually Matter
Most operational dashboards are full of vanity metrics. The numbers that matter are the ones that change behavior, not the ones that look good in a slide deck.
Read more →What Accountability Actually Means
Everyone talks about accountability. Almost nobody practices it — starting with the leaders who demand it most.
Read more →The Five Pillars of Leadership That Actually Hold Weight
Five principles for leading teams through real challenges — from honesty under pressure to knowing your people as people.
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