Notes on AI, teams, and leadership.
Plain, practical writing from the work. No hype.
Why asking 'dumb' questions in meetings makes you look smart
The person who admits they are confused looks more confident than the one who stays quiet.
Read →When your team changes: what actually helps
When someone joins or leaves, the team quietly resets. The boring fixes that actually help.
Read →Why psychological safety actually matters
What psychological safety really is, what it is not, and the small thing that quietly destroys it.
Read →A simple way for CEOs who feel lost on AI
Two paths, productivity and business model, and where to start when the direction is not yet clear.
Read →Maybe your colleagues are not ruder, maybe they are finally talking
Workers say colleagues are ruder since the pandemic. Another reading: teams are finally having the debate they avoided for years.
Read →Four questions that reveal whether your AI training is working
Four yes-or-no questions that show whether your AI effort is landing or just making noise.
Read →Why Copilot-only AI approaches backfire
What goes wrong when a company makes one tool its official AI and trains everyone on it.
Read →Why CEOs sound silent on AI even when they are talking
Hedging and dismissing both read as silence. What employees want is visible effort and honesty, not certainty.
Read →Due diligence: what investors actually want to know about your team
Documents are the easy part. What investors really probe is whether your leadership team can work through hard things together.
Read →Why Special Forces pick trust over performance every time
Why vulnerability-based trust is the pillar most teams neglect, and how to build it on purpose.
Read →Constructive confrontation: why teams need hard conversations
Avoiding hard conversations lets problems rot. How to confront directly and respectfully, and why trust depends on it.
Read →Why most teams can't debate
The two ways teams get disagreement wrong, and what makes real debate work.
Read →What makes a team great: purpose, trust, and competence
After 35 years with teams, a short model: three pillars, none of them easy, but the list is short.
Read →Why no one brings you their problems
If your team has stopped bringing you problems, you have lost the ability to lead them. What to do about it.
Read →Purpose at work: why most companies get it wrong
Real purpose keeps good people around. Most purpose statements do nothing. The difference, and how to fix it.
Read →What I wish I had known before becoming a manager
The gap between knowing what to do as a manager and knowing what it feels like in the middle of it.
Read →Introverted managers still need to network
As a manager, your network is part of how much you can do for your team, whether you enjoy it or not.
Read →Kind and strong: why leadership is not a tradeoff between warmth and toughness
Kindness and strength are separate dimensions. The best leaders are high on both at once.
Read →