Focus: Why the Dysfunction You Keep Fixing Keeps Coming Back.
You keep fixing the same dysfunction and it keeps coming back. Here is the causal chain you have been treating as three separate problems (information, decisions, execution) and what changes when you treat it as one.
Dan McKeown introduces himself and Organizational Intelligence Global eight weeks into building the business in public. Twenty-three years in the corporate world, from the shop floor to senior leadership, shape a practice spanning board and C-suite advisory, executive leadership coaching, and organizational assessment and transformation. His differentiator is treating information, decision-making and execution as one interlinked system rather than three specialisms: better information leads to better decisions, better decisions to better execution, and better execution to better organizational performance. He argues that dysfunction persists because organizations manage symptoms instead of identifying sources. Alongside the thinking, he commits to sharing the anxiety, self-doubt and isolation of the founder journey as well as the wins. A newsletter follows in 2027 and a book may land by 2028.
Focus: Your Cloud Migration May Have Moved the Problem, Not Solved It.
You moved to the cloud and assumed AI was the next box to tick. Same house, new neighborhood. Here is what actually has to change before an AI agent is safe to plug in.
KJ Green pairs a weekly Solo Star business update with the AI Readiness framework he has been building. A conversation with a prospective AI-agent vendor pushed him past being impressed by capability and into asking what data it touches, what risks are accepted, what controls must exist and what problem is actually being solved, work that produced a formal AI ethics position and expanded security into a core capability alongside AI and cloud. His definition of AI readiness spans infrastructure, data, security, governance, product fit, organizational capability and economics, not just the model. The main argument targets lift-and-shift rehosting: many organizations migrated in the 2010s by moving workloads largely unmodified. Same house, new neighborhood. The question leaders should ask is whether their migration actually produced the architecture they need next.
Focus: The Answer Was in the Message. Nobody Found It.
You asked for a quick update and got a long story with the answer buried at the end. Four moves that decide what belongs in a message, and what you can cut without losing anything.
Part three of Natascha M.'s four-part series on the Communication Judgement Framework covers Select, following Clarify and Diagnose. The problem it solves is familiar: you ask for a quick update and receive a long story with the answer buried at the end. Her point is that information can be accurate and still misplaced, because not all contextually relevant information is relevant all the time. She recommends starting from the intended outcome (whether the recipient needs to understand, evaluate, decide or act) and working backwards from there. Four moves follow: Select what they actually need, Filter what can be left out or deferred, Prioritize what matters most in this situation, and Structure the order in which they hear it. The aim is not a shorter message but one where every part earns its place.
Focus: The Promotion That Looked Like a Step Up, and Wasn't.
The next role looks greener from here. Four questions to answer before you take it, starting with whether fear or fit is driving the move.
Mark J Peterson describes a career built on reaching for the next rung, and the times that instinct delivered him into roles that were a bad fit and a nightmare. He calls himself the textbook case of someone who sees greener grass, occasionally through a lens that makes brown, dead grass look healthy. His guardrails are to work hard at knowing yourself, to surround yourself with a few trusted advisors and actually listen to them, to stay willing to take a chance, and to listen when an inner voice warns about cost. He separates imposter-syndrome fear, which should never hold you back, from fear about losing the things you value, which warrants a real pause. Four written questions close the piece: what you gain, what you lose, whether fear or fit is driving the choice, and the effect on priorities, relationships and well-being.
Focus: The Person Who Believed in You Is Still Owed Something.
Someone believed in you before you believed in yourself, and you have probably stopped thinking about it. Here is why that debt is paid forward, not back, and who is waiting on you to pay it.
A keychain tag reading “behind every player who believes in themselves is a coach who believed in them first” sends Brian Carver back to the parable of the starfish. After a night of storms, a boy throws stranded starfish back into the sea; an old man tells him he cannot save them all and it will not make a difference, and the boy replies that he made a difference for that one. Carver's twist is that he does not see himself as the old man who missed the value, or the boy doing the saving, but as the starfish. He writes about an imperfect home life, drifting toward the outcasts, and the coaches who noticed his value and refused to give up on him. Championships and personal awards matter far less to him now than the chance someone gave him. His closing charge is to recognize who believed in you and pay it forward.
Focus: The Worst Performer on the Team Had Been Given the Wrong Diagnosis.
Before you write off your worst performer, read the file again, because it may be describing the conditions around them, not them. One manager changed four conditions and got a reliable contributor in weeks.
Marijana Jarc inherited an engineer with a poor reputation (there had even been talk of letting him go) onto a project so aggressive it ran in shifts with no slack and no time for gradual onboarding. With no time to investigate the history, she worked from what she could observe, and it did not match the warning: not disengagement, but uncertainty about what was expected, how his work connected to the outcome, and where he stood before something went wrong. The project gave him clear ownership, immediate feedback, visible work that mattered, and the expectation that he would deliver. Within weeks his engagement changed, and by the end other managers were surprised to find him among the more reliable contributors. He had acquired no new skills and standards had not dropped; the conditions changed. Her closing question is how many people have been diagnosed with the wrong problem.
Focus: The Words Most Leaders Will Do Almost Anything to Avoid Saying.
You are holding back an apology because you think it will cost you authority. The defense you offer instead costs more. Here is what changes in the room the moment you say it plainly.
Doreen Jokerst argues that the hardest sentence in leadership, “I was wrong, I'm sorry,” is also one of the most powerful. Early in her career she believed leadership meant having the answers; experience taught her that the strongest moments come from acknowledging when she did not. She recounts meeting someone who had been mistreated by members of an organization, listening properly rather than defending, explaining or correcting parts of the story, and then saying plainly that it had not been handled correctly. The temperature in the room changed almost immediately; the apology could not undo the harm, but it opened a conversation rooted in dignity and respect. Her position is that leaders give credit when things go right and step forward when things go wrong, including for mistakes that were not personally theirs. Apologizing takes confidence, humility and courage, not weakness.
Focus: What Fifteen Protected Minutes Can Do to an Entire Week.
If your week runs you instead of the other way round, you do not need a new system. Fifteen protected minutes, and the worksheet that goes with them, turn reacting into deciding.
Stephanie Caprini Houser builds her leadership practice around fifteen minutes a week, daily if possible, set aside to reflect, plan and reset. The time is explicitly not for solving problems: it is for noticing them and booking the thirty to sixty focused minutes needed to address them properly the following week. She uses it to capture what went well and should continue, including small wins worth enjoying, to review what is still working across processes, marketing and engagement, and to schedule outreach such as client calls, follow-ups and newsletters so that work feels less all-encompassing. A downloadable worksheet supports the routine, with a coaching call as the alternative for people who want help. She closes with a reading list (Sinek, Carnegie, Covey, Brown, Maxwell, Greene and others) on the premise that leadership growth comes from continued learning, in increments.
Focus: Nine Words That Wake Up a List Everyone Else Wrote Off.
Your list has gone quiet and you have decided silence means no. Before you buy more traffic, send the nine-word email (no story, no pitch) and find out who was only busy.
Daniel Pope argues that a quiet email list is rarely a dead one: people raised their hand, life got loud, and the business decided silence meant no. Rather than buying more traffic or blasting a long re-engagement campaign, he uses Dean Jackson's nine-word email, “Do you still need help with X?”, with no story arc, no pitch and no hope-you're-well. X must be the problem the prospect already named, in their words: onboarding, client intake, follow-up, webinar fill, course completion, not your service menu. He recommends running four email types rather than one (abandoned cart, welcome, re-engagement and value-add) and notes that abandoned-cart follow-up tripled one client's daily sales with no extra ads and no coupon. Pair reactivation with list hygiene via a clean fourteen-day notice, and treat AI as a drafting tool that gets you ninety per cent there.
Focus: Why the Conversation You Rehearsed Went Nowhere.
You scripted the hard conversation and it still went sideways. The script was the problem. You cannot reason someone out of a feeling, and here is what to bring instead.
Stephanie Wycoff used to prepare for hard conversations like building an argument (reasoning mapped, examples lined up, rebuttals ready) and then watched almost none of it go to plan. She distinguishes two kinds of difficult conversation: the persuasive one, where a business case has to be made and preparation is a gift, and the human one, where feelings are the terrain and a relationship has to survive the truth being spoken. In the second kind the other person's emotional brain arrived first, and you cannot reason someone out of a feeling. Her script, she realized, was not helping her connect; it was armor, and armor keeps the other person out. Often both people arrive armored, performing prepared versions of the truth, so there is no one actually in the room. Her conclusion is that the human conversation asks not for perfect words but for willingness to walk in present.
Focus: The Layer Above Strategy That Almost Nobody Has Named.
Your strategy keeps changing because nothing upstream of it has been settled. Name the conviction layer first and a thousand plausible options stop competing for the same yes.
Kathryn Dolmans opens with three job offers (one pays more, one has the title, one has the mission) and the spreadsheet that fails to decide between them. The choice, when it finally comes, feels less like analysis than recognition, produced by an internal filter built from everything you have lived, rejected and decided matters. That filter can stay implicit for individuals because circumstances already narrow the field, and because only you have to act on it. A business has neither advantage: the field of options is unconstrained, and the logic has to be explainable to a team. She calls the missing layer the Center, not a framework or a methodology, but the conviction that makes one path feel inevitable and the rest beside the point. Until it is named, everything downstream is guesswork.
Focus: An All-American Finish That Still Felt Like Failure.
One bad performance is starting to sound like a verdict on you. Shift the language by one degree. “I failed” is an event, “I am a failure” is an identity, and you get your next choice back.
Deren Wilder examines the moment just after failure, when we start giving it language, and how quickly “I failed” slides into “I am a failure.” His example is the 1992 NCAA Division II championships in San Angelo, Texas, where he earned All-American honors in the hammer throw while competing poorly. His body was in the ring but his mind was on what could go wrong, what people back at college would think and whether he would disappoint his father, avoiding failure instead of executing the technique he had practiced. Both the accomplishment and the disappointment were real; the danger was letting one performance become evidence of who he was. Failure is an event, not an identity, and honest reflection does not require a verdict on the self. He suggests shifting the language by one degree, to “this is where I am right now, not where I have to remain,” then making the next choice.
Focus: $1M Over Asking in Sixteen Days, and the Part Nobody Credits.
If you are counting on a hot market to carry the deal, it will do the opposite and expose you. What actually produced $1M over asking in sixteen days: pricing, negotiation, and managing very nervous people.
Christopher Stafford sold a listing a million dollars over asking in sixteen days and refuses to credit the market for it. The deal closed, he argues, because he priced it right, negotiated hard, and managed two agents and two very nervous clients as if it were a full-time job, because it is. Thirty years in the business have taught him that a hot market does not make the work easier: it makes it more crowded, with more offers, more competing agents scrambling at the same time, and more money on the table amplifying everyone's nerves. A good market does not replace skill; it exposes who does not have it. He has watched agents blow deals in strong markets by assuming conditions would carry them. Pricing, negotiation and managing people under pressure are the actual job, in any market.
Focus: What Happens When Both Answers Are Right and You Still Have to Pick One.
Everything that got you promoted rewarded finding the right answer. Senior roles hand you two right answers and a real cost either way. Here is how to stay in the grey long enough to choose one you can defend.
William J. Maggio names the transition most leadership development skips: the move from puzzle-solving to dilemma-navigating. Early careers reward finding the hidden right answer, with a clean feedback loop of right answer, good outcome. Senior roles instead present competing claims that are each legitimate (at different time horizons, or for different constituencies), so the choice is between two things that are right in different ways. Holding both without collapsing into one is cognitively uncomfortable, because the brain wants resolution, and emotionally costly, because every path creates a real cost for someone in the organization. He walks through three cases from his own practice, none of which resolved neatly or the way he wanted. Rigor is getting cheaper in an AI-augmented environment; judgment, integrity and relational courage are not, and the job is to stay in the grey long enough to choose a path you can defend.
Focus: Same Facts, Two Companies, Opposite Futures.
You sent the data, ran the briefing, and still did not get alignment. Netflix and Blockbuster read identical facts and saw opposite futures. The gap is the frame, not the information, and frames can be shaped.
D.M. Burgess opens with Netflix and Blockbuster examining the same early-2000s conditions (internet advances, shifting consumer preferences, viable digital distribution) and reaching opposite conclusions about the future. The leadership lesson is that facts do not automatically create understanding; information requires interpretation before anyone can judge its significance. He calls those interpretive frameworks Meaning Systems, shaped by experience, beliefs, values, assumptions and professional background, and they govern what people notice, ignore and find credible. This explains why more reports, briefings and data often fail to produce alignment: the message was received, but read through a different frame. A restructuring that senior leaders see as long-term investment can read to employees as preparation for workforce reductions. Leadership therefore depends on shaping and aligning the narratives through which people answer a prior question: what does this mean?
Focus: The Sentence That Lets Every Problem Fall Through the Cracks.
“That is not my job” is quietly costing you customers who do not care whose job it was. Three practices that build ownership, without turning your best people into everyone's servant.
Joseph Buraimoh argues that the sentence “that is not my job” quietly weakens any organization, because problems do not come with job descriptions. Customers, patients and church members do not care which department or committee owned the issue; they only know that something is not working. Moving toward a problem you could have walked past is where leadership shows up, though he is clear that ownership needs boundaries rather than turning anyone into everyone's servant. He offers three practices: make responsibility clear so people know what belongs to them and where their authority ends; build a culture of responsible escalation, where the answer is “this is not mine to solve, but I will get it to the right person”; and reward the people who protect the whole organization. Responsibility says this belongs to me; an ownership mindset says this matters to all of us.
Focus: Why the Best Person on the Team Keeps Getting the Worst Assignments.
You are the one they hand the hard things to, and it feels like trust. It is load-bearing. Here is the test that shows whether your team stays standing when you disappear for a week.
Ralitsa Bakoeva opens with an old project manager's army saying: the good riders get the bad horses and the bad riders get the good horses. Competence has a strange gravity, quietly attracting the next difficult client, the next impossible deadline and the next conversation nobody wants, which looks like trust but is often just the path of least resistance. She compares it to a load-bearing wall: nobody admires one, because its achievement is the absence of visible events, the crisis that never happened. Good work removes the evidence of itself, which is exactly what makes competence so easy to overload. No single assignment creates dependency; their accumulation does, and by the time it is visible the problem is architecture rather than performance. The real test is not more praise but whether the system stays stable when that person disappears for a week.
Focus: What Gets Lost When the Advice Arrives Before the Thinking.
AI will hand you a polished policy brief in minutes, and it will read beautifully. What it cannot tell you is which trade-offs it made on your behalf, which is the part you are accountable for.
Julie examines what happens when generative AI inverts the order of policy work, producing framing, jurisdictional comparison, risk analysis and draft recommendations in minutes. She cites a 2025 UK government study in which two researchers ran the same rapid evidence review from the same brief, one human-only and one AI-assisted: the AI-assisted version took 23 per cent less time overall and the final reports were judged broadly similar in quality, but the AI-assisted first draft needed almost nine additional hours of revision and was found less succinct, more repetitive and weaker at relating studies to one another. Reviewers were also more confident the human-only author could explain the decisions made during analysis. Her larger point is that advice becomes the institution's advice through the work of developing it: contest, testing against legal and operational reality, consultation that unsettles assumptions. A brief can be coherent and persuasive while resting on trade-offs nobody knowingly accepted.
Focus: One Word High Achievers Use That Gives Them Away.
If you keep saying you are “trying” to fix the offer, the leads, the next chapter, then the word is the problem. It is a permission slip to stay out of the decision you already know how to make.
Amy Loana says one word tells her more about a high achiever than their calendar or their bank statement: trying. Founders and leaders arrive sharp, accomplished and making real money, yet describe their goals as things they are trying to do: dial in an offer, generate leads consistently, get out of the day-to-day, work out what the next chapter looks like. Drawing on more than twenty-five years mapping behavior in founders and coaching upward of 27,000 people, she treats three uses in a row as a signal worth stopping for. With one client (a research leader, angel investor and mother) she banned the word mid-call and barred intellectualizing why. What the word protects, she argues, is permission to stay out of present-tense ownership. The choice is to keep trying or to decide, and readiness is a decision you make rather than a feeling you wait for.
Focus: What Coalition Leadership Looks Like When Nobody Can Give Orders.
You lead people you cannot compel, and you have been waiting for a headline to signal progress. New Delhi shows the alternative: competing interests, a chair with no authority to command, and movement built through infrastructure rather than proclamation.
Abhinav Mudaliar reports from the expanded BRICS summit in New Delhi on September 12–13, and the story is as much about how coalitions are led as about geopolitics. Eleven members with divergent economies and open rivalries still adopted a 140-paragraph New Delhi Declaration spanning finance, trade, governance, technology, health, energy, climate and conflict, alignment reached through patient agenda-setting rather than authority. Prime Minister Modi framed the case around voice, arguing that Global South countries have too often been affected by decisions in which they had insufficient representation. No common currency was announced; the consequential work was the BRICS Payment Task Force's progress on cross-border payment interoperability and local-currency settlement, unglamorous plumbing of the kind that compounds while everyone waits for an announcement. Leaders hand on more than they announce: the chairship passes to China, and the framework India leaves behind is broader than the one it inherited.
Focus: The Fastest Team in the Building Isn’t on the Org Chart.
You keep asking who built the thing that actually works when something breaks. Nobody did. Here is why the paths people choose under pressure outrun the ones you draw, and why putting a name in a box will not capture them.
Konstantinos Bellis opens fifteen minutes into a production crisis, with the org chart open on screen and nothing to contribute. The fire is put out in a chat window by three people with no titles, no instructions and no line connecting them on paper: a technician, an account manager from another floor and someone from contracts. They skip three levels of approval because asking would take longer than the problem could wait. When a new hire asks who set it up, there is no answer, because nobody did. Bellis compares it to an ant colony finding the shortest path to food: the shortest trail is reinforced before it can fade, and the longer ones die from disuse rather than any decision. Pinned at the top of the thread sits an official three-step, three-signature crisis document that nobody uses. His point is that the most trusted part of the operation was never built; it was chosen, over and over, until the choosing looked like the way things are done.