The leaders who improve the fastest tend to share a simple habit: they study their own results with the same care they bring to studying their market, their competitors, and their customers. That habit is easy to lose after twelve months shaped by inflation, shifting trade policy, and rapid changes in technology, when the pressure to move on to next year’s plan crowds out any real look at this one. When it slips, the same mistakes tend to reappear in new forms, and the hard-w

The final weeks of the year have a way of compressing everything into a short window. Budgets are due, teams are tired, and leaders are trying to close out results while also planning for a year that already looks uncertain. In the third-quarter AICPA and CIMA Economic Outlook Survey, only 36% of senior executives felt optimistic about the U.S. economy, and 46% said it was already in a recession or would enter one by the end of 2026, with inflation, rising costs, and geopolit

Most of us grew up hearing about two kinds of intelligence. Book smarts belong to the person who masters the material, remembers the research, and can explain a concept cleanly on demand. Street smarts belong to the person who reads a situation quickly, notices what is going unsaid, and knows which rules can bend and which will break something if touched. The distinction has endured because it captures something most of us have seen firsthand: knowing a great deal and knowing

Few leadership decisions carry as much weight as a hire, and few have changed as quickly in recent years. Across industries, executives are hiring, preparing to hire, or recovering from a hire that did not work out, and in nearly every case the question of artificial intelligence now surfaces early. Leaders want to know how much of the recruiting process they can responsibly hand to a machine, and the answer becomes clearer when the process is viewed in three distinct phases,

Most executive coaches have worked with a leader who sincerely wants to change and somehow cannot. The commitment is real, the plan is sensible, and the leader can often describe exactly what needs to happen. Months later, the same behaviors remain firmly in place. Harvard researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey spent years studying this pattern, and their findings reshaped how many coaches understand resistance. What looks like a failure of will, they argue, is usuall

Executives rarely lack answers. They are surrounded by advisors, direct reports, board members, and increasingly capable tools, all eager to tell them what to do. What they lack far more often is someone who will ask the question that changes how they see the problem. The quality of a coaching engagement tends to rise and fall with the quality of the coach's questions. The quotes below, drawn from management thinkers, scientists, philosophers, and coaching practitioners, each

In the spring of 2023, engineers at Samsung's semiconductor business pasted confidential source code into ChatGPT while looking for help with routine tasks. Within weeks, Samsung barred staff in one of its largest divisions from using generative AI tools on company devices and networks (Gurman, 2023). The episode became a cautionary tale, yet the behavior behind it has only spread. In Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index, 78% of people who use AI at work said they b

In a recent article, I made the case that the most useful prompts now run to several hundred lines and read more like a briefing for a new hire than a quick question. The first response I usually hear is a practical one: who has the time to write all of that? The instinct behind the question is understandable. When a busy executive sits down at the keyboard, the prompt tends to shrink to whatever can be typed before the next meeting, and the model is left to guess at everythi