Attention, Focus & Distraction 60

If you’re reading this from a nice office, a Zoom-safe background, or a business-class lounge, you are not “safe.”

Exposure isn’t destiny. But it is a forecast. And ignoring a forecast doesn’t make the storm miss your house.

Yesterday’s cars eliminated horses, today’s cars are eliminating drivers.

Yesterday’s software eliminated accounting, today’s AI is eliminating accountants.

Fear is data, and your job is probably in the machine’s digital crosshairs.

Cynicism is the laziest form of intelligence.

AI won’t replace “Managers” or “Analysts.” It replaces tasks.

White-collar immunity is a comforting myth.

AI isn’t a magic wand you wave over your existing habits. It’s a power tool. If you hold it like a hammer, you’ll blame the tool for your bruised thumb.

Doubt, cynicism, apathy, and laziness: the four horsemen of the AI apocalypse, dressed up in professional language.

If someone gave your competitor your brain plus AI, what part of your job would still be uniquely yours?

If you were to go in for heart surgery, buy a new car, or say your wedding vows to someone knowing that there was an 84% chance of failure … would you even bother?

“Our new UI is so intuitive that users won’t need to have their fears addressed and their hands held through the transition,” said no successful DX project owner, ever.

Your tech is fine, it’s the people that are getting in the way.

AI isn’t the second coming of great leadership. It’s a tool, not a coach.

If great leadership was just about getting the right data, we’d all be phenomenal leaders by now

But knowing what you’re doing wrong isn’t the same as knowing how to fix it.

AI won’t help you build trust, repair relationships, or navigate the emotional complexities of leadership.

Where AI shines is in diagnostics—identifying patterns, tracking behaviors, and holding up a mirror to how leaders communicate.

AI doesn’t make unethical decisions—CEOs do. If your AI is biased, it’s because you fed it garbage. AI is a tool, not a scapegoat.

If you don’t have an AI governance strategy that’s as robust as your financial audits, you’re already behind.

Hackers aren’t your biggest threat—your own employees are. The weakest link in any system is human error.

AI isn’t a job killer; it’s a skill amplifier.

The smartest CEOs aren’t afraid of AI—they’re augmenting their leadership with it. The ones who resist? They’ll be studied in business school as case studies in obsolescence.

Transformation is roughly 80% soft skills and 20% tech.

Fix executive capability first. Not a briefing deck; hands on the tools.

A chief executive who has redesigned their own workflow around AI, made beginner’s mistakes in front of the team and kept going has done more for the transformation than any town hall.

And in today’s economy—where AI is automating competence—you better believe human leadership will be the premium skill.

The worst source of distraction though are the 10,000 engineers with their military grade super-computers that lurk behind the screen of your smartphone, which let’s face it, has become an appendage.

Each of those engineers spends all day, every day, working on ways to break your focus. And they’re smarter than you. It’s not your fault.

Throw out your “smart” watch. Seriously, those things are wrist-borne breeding grounds for distraction.

Focus is the most profitable skill in business

There are 10,000 engineers with 10,000 computers incentivised to break your focus as often as possible, to advertise to you

Martech skills are non-negotiable. There is no future in marketing for those without them.

Your level of distraction is why you will be disrupted

Focus and discipline are often missed because they look a lot like talent.

Distraction and laziness are addictions.

Happiness is a distraction from fulfilment.

Meetings are the most expensive hours in a company’s day.

Mindfulness is the ability to be aware and to control your awareness. It’s tougher than it sounds and much more powerful.

Mindfulness leads to less stress, better sleep, a stronger immune system, easy transition into flow at work, and fewer cognitive biases.

The good news is that you are fortunate enough to exist in a time of unprecedented opportunities. The bad news is that you weren’t born with the tools you need to adapt to an abundant world like the one we live in.

Your brain is conscious of a lot of things you’ll never be aware of, and you want it that way, trust me.

The pressure for increased connectivity and productivity, combined with the sheer volume of opportunities and threats that our minds are attuned to attend to has driven us into a kind of complexity-addiction that is resulting in busyness over productivity.

Switching away from one concentrated activity to another minor task, no matter how small, reactivates the pre-frontal cortex, and prevents us from entering into a flow state.

Remember, every distraction is a minute lost.

Schedule your flow time 2 – 3 weeks in advance, and protect it.

Do not accept a weeklong schedule that does not have at least 8 hours blocked off for your flow activities at work.

It’s a pretty good bet that you are living a hopelessly distracted life.

The reticular activating system is an opportunity addict.

It looks like luck from the outside, but it’s actually just focus and hard work.

On Monday morning, DO NOT open up any of your emails before you identify opportunities for flow in your calendar

Focusing on one thing for a long time is more productive than focusing on many things for a short time.

Never let tasks sit in your mind.

If you’re with your family, be 100% with your family. No distractions.

So if you make an appointment, don’t steal little bits of someone else’s life to assert your dominance.

Walk into meetings declaring your “hard exit” in 15 minutes, forcing the team to rapidly download what you need to know.

And contrary to popular belief, there’s no such thing as multitasking. Humans can only focus on one thing at a time.

Multitasking is a myth. While rapid task switching might feel efficient, it’s really just more busyness for your brain, and often leads to errors and half-baked results.

And lose that “smart” watch, it’s a purpose-engineered distraction factory.

Coaching & Development 119

Well-meaning consultants inevitably pull out the dull and rusty mid-1980’s multi-tool of job cuts and begin hacking away at the organization in an attempt to save its life

I’m more of a boulder-mover than an arm-cutter. I think the courageous thing is not to focus on the arm, but on the boulder.

Your coach can’t address what they can’t see.

Remember, you’re not paying for an hour of coaching, you’re paying for the 80,000 hours of your coach’s life that came before.

Anyone can call themselves an executive coach in Dubai, regardless of their training or qualifications

The growing popularity of ICF certification is making matters worse, as ICF certification requires ZERO hours of business experience and ZERO business acumen to achieve

What do you call an Olympic athlete without a coach? Retired.

Boards approve capital expenditures with weaker expected returns every quarter, for millions of dollars more.

One of the most persistent governance myths is that coaching is for underperforming leaders. The evidence shows the opposite.

In medicine, aviation, elite sport, and military command, coaching is standard precisely because the cost of failure is high and the margin for error is small.

Since consultants are often measured solely on the weight loss of the company, they can have a tendency to remove vital organs and to stretch the resources of others in order to achieve more weight loss

The consultant, like the doctor, should be looking to save as many of the people in the company as possible, rather than cut as many as they can.

A good business doctor values the body’s ability to heal itself, and tries as much as possible to leave the core units intact.

Remember that there is trauma, as well as recovery and rehabilitation time, from most consulting interventions.

Rather than attacking the company with a scalpel in order to achieve a weight loss goal, the best and brightest consultants are the ones that protect the integrity of the company.

AI can improve how you talk, but only the best coaches can help you communicate in a way that builds trust, aligns teams, and inspires action.

If you’re trying to achieve your 10-year vision on your own, let me be blunt: you’re lying to yourself.

No Olympic athlete trains without a coach. No Fortune 100 CEO excels without a coach.

I’m not your cheerleader. I’m your Chief Executive Coach.

A coach often makes the difference between a talented amateur and a world-class player

Every top player in every game on the planet has a coach.

Take any world-class athlete and strip away their coaching staff.

So why is coaching mandatory for athletes but optional for executives?

And we’re still treating executive coaching like an expense, an L&D luxury item, or a punishment for remedial performance?

Perhaps it’s time we strengthened our corporate wellness programs, boardroom mindfulness sessions, and executive meal plans with something the data says works better… good executive coaching.

The demand is there. The evidence is there. The gap is a failure of organizational competence, not of available science.

The data doesn’t just suggest a comparison here, it shows, rather compellingly, that coaching occupies the same evidence tier as a performance differentiator regardless of whether the arena is a stadium or a boardroom.

If you wouldn’t send an athlete to the Olympics without a coach, don’t send your executives to compete in the market without one either. Unless, of course, you’re not that bothered about winning.

Congrats on the kombucha fridge, BTW. Now who is coaching your CEO?

Let me guess: your CEO is too talented for coaching? Too experienced? A coach can’t help them at their level?

Of course, the sports team and its captain always have a coach. And yet, Amateur CEO, you think you’ll play better without one?

Athletes have coaches because talent is not enough. Executives need coaches for the same reason. Intelligence is not enough. Experience is not enough. Charisma is not enough.

A good coach interrupts the loop.

We do for the team what can only be done by a non-player member.

Coaches are on the team and off the field, in sports as it is in business.

Training gives you knowledge. Coaching gives you application. The gap between the two is where performance lives.

Who is helping the founder separate conviction from stubbornness before the market does it for them?

Be annoyingly helpful.

You’re sitting on a mountain of potential income, but chances are—you’re too distracted, too risk-averse, or too comfortable to climb it.

Executive coaching is not about “feel-good moments” or “finding your inner unicorn.” It’s about measurable performance gains.

If you don’t pull the lever, someone else will, and they’ll leapfrog you on the comp sheet.

I didn’t make him smarter: I made him ready.

Coaching upgrades your leadership identity. You stop thinking like a department head and start acting like a market-maker.

Motivation gets you to the starting line. Discipline gets you to the finish line. Coaching keeps you running the right race at a winning pace.

If you’re responsible for tens of millions in revenue and you won’t invest $30K in your own decision-making? You’re managing like a bus driver, not leading like a CEO.

Your company pays for performance. Coaching increases performance. You do the math.

Don’t ask if it’s worth it. Ask if you’re ready to earn it.

You can pretty much throw a rock and hit a coach anywhere in Dubai

I’m not the kind of coach that just asks you questions and makes you solve your own problems.

No one gets to the top without a coach. The world’s top surgeons, musicians, and athletes all have coaches.

It’s tough to lose money on a good external speaker.

I’m going to be hard on you. I’m going to challenge you. And I’ll do it out of love.

You never fully know what you’re good at until you receive the right feedback.

We need other people to tell us that our behaviors line up (or not) with what we think our values are.

Good questions are almost always more fun for me than good answers.

All of my clients will tell you that I don’t rent my time; I rent space in my head.

I completely understand why it makes sense to present non-advisory coaching as the definition of coaching, though: you’ll sell more books.

The gold standard is gold for the coaches. But it’s not gold for the clients.

Internal coaching at the executive level is an organizational myth we all wish were true, but here’s the hard truth: it doesn’t work.

If you’re serious about driving executive performance, internal coaching isn’t just ineffective, it’s a waste of time and resources.

If a company is not ready to invest in external coaching at the executive level, it might be better to skip the coaching program altogether.

If you’re an internal coach, you shouldn’t be coaching your executives.

Sometimes the most arrogant, egotistical, self-serving executives in the region feel that their leadership style would be better validated if they had an EC to tell them what they want to hear.

My issue with executive coaching today is simple: no one seems to know what qualifies someone to call themselves an “Executive Coach.”

Executive coaching isn’t the same as coaching; it’s a subset of coaching and a niche.

There are three huge obstacles in the way of good executive coaching: arrogant executives, underqualified coaches, and a lack of definition.

Coaching isn’t something you get because you’re broken and need to be fixed.

Coaching is something you get because you’re talented and you think you might be a world-class competitor in your domain.

Executive coaching is a co-creative process in which a coach and an executive elicit insights and actions from each other to optimize the mindset and skillset required for the executive to perform at their personal best in their executive role.

When you’re coaching a CXO, you’re not just influencing one person; you’re influencing the direction of entire organizations, industries, and economies.

When coaches present non-advisory coaching as the only “true” form of coaching, many executives opt out of the service altogether.

Observations are not advice.

If surgeons aren’t well coached, people may die, and good surgical coaching is clearly defined as advisory in nature.

Coaching is a big discipline, and executive coaching is a niche.

Don’t walk in with a plan. Walk in with a closed mouth, an open mind, and a warehouse of tools at your disposal.

You need to stop asking questions and start doing what Olympic coaches do for Olympic athletes: recommend new plays, prescribe new exercises, and suggest new mindset shifts.

Non-advisory coaching isn’t the definition of coaching, it’s a category of coaching.

When an Olympic athlete asks their coach, “And what else can we try?” the Olympic coach always has an idea. That’s their job.

Having someone on the sidelines who knows you well and is telling you that you’re capable of more than you think you are, is a massive strategic advantage.

Executive coaching is art and science, psychology and strategy.

But once a coach, always a coach.

Very often the executive coach is quite literally the only person in their lives they can talk to about something that’s both emotionally isolating and yet requires executive competency.

Actually, I just looked at my current coaching roster and figured out that I regularly hug more than 50% of my clients.

The external coach’s relative ignorance, unbiased objectivity, and curiosity become catalysts for innovation.

You’re not in the company, and that’s exactly why your CXOs need you.

Here’s what I do with the limiting beliefs of all of my clients: I call bullshit.

Olympic coaches don’t just train their athletes; they’re right there, enabling them during competition.

Olympians are a particular kind of athlete, requiring a certain kind of coach.

Executives are a particular kind of manager, requiring a certain kind of coach.

The competent executive coach should not walk into their client’s office with a roadmap, but with a ring of keys to a warehouse of potential toolkits to employ.

My job is to provide mindset and skillset tools that improve performance on the field in the present context and moving forward.

Your coach needs to hold their objectivity, and you need to hold your authority.

If you want to become a CXO coach, stop looking for a roadmap to wayfind with. Instead, start filling your competency warehouse with a broad range of wizard-like toolkits.

I do not accept that an executive can ever perform better without a coach than they could with one.

In the high-stakes world of executive leadership, one-size-fits-all coaching is like showing up to a sword fight with a butter knife.

CXOs need wizards, not wayfinders; they need coaches who bring an arsenal of skills, strategies, and perspectives.

Connect deeply or get out of the way.

If the coach doesn’t push an athlete outside of their comfort zone regularly, they’re the wrong coach.

If an athlete doesn’t get frustrated with their coach from time to time, they have the wrong coach.

Olympic athletes need Olympic coaches, and even though gold medal coaches can’t play the game as well as their athletes can, they can all coach at their athlete’s level of play.

Executives will never know their potential unless they have a coach equipped to help them reach it. And as the executive goes, so goes the company.

To be a good critical friend is to tread the fine line between unwavering support and fearless critique.

Instead, you should be embracing the role of provocateur, by challenging assumptions and questioning their biases. That’s your job. You’re their most critical friend.

My dilemma: tell them what they wanted to hear or tell them what they needed to hear.

Remember, you’re choosing a critical friend here, someone you like as a person but also has the courage and competency to call you out on your bullshit.

Most humans, most of the time, don’t need to be agreed with as much as they need to be understood.

If you’re curious about what the other person is saying and what it means to them, and you care about them as a person, then active listening is a natural byproduct of your closed mouth.

At the top there are no mentors left – yet executive coaching research shows that mentorship, along with a solid ego check, are exactly what CXOs both need and value.

Improving your performance at the highest levels entails less skill development and more psychological recalibration.

In any high-performance domain, it’s internal interference that poses the greatest threat to success, yet these kinds of feelings are often magnified by external pressures and expectations.

Basically, if we say something optimistic about ourselves that we don’t believe is true, there’s a part of our brain that calls “bullshit,” and it causes more pain than positivity.

We now live in a world of unfathomable abundance, a world our ancestors could not have imagined and have not prepared us for.

Whether in sports or business, the greatest challenges are very often psychological.

Their perception of reality is indistinguishable from reality as they experience it, so it’s the only one I need to work with as their coach.

At the CXO level, it’s not you who should be asking, “And what else?” of your clients. They should be asking it of you.

Over a year, the ROI on my coaching is regularly over 30x, often as high as 70x, and in one major group of companies with 80,000+ employees, the ROI was a staggering 900x this year.

It’s stunning to me that shareholders don’t insist on executive coaching more often.

The first and the best thing you can do is tell people that they can do something that they’ve never done before.

Very few people are the best in the world at something. For the rest of us, there are two dominant strategies for becoming amazing at something: strong competition and strong coaching. Either will help. Both are better.

Communication & Words 24

Understanding > Agreement

Curiosity is a gleeful lack of respect for the unknown

Numbers don’t lie, but they tell great stories.

Most of the bad words that you use to criticize yourself didn’t come from you. They came from someone else.

If you ask questions you genuinely don’t have answers for, then you are relying on your curiosity and their honesty. It’s an opportunity to build trust.

What’s in a name then? Well, you are.

We humans have packed a lot of meaning into certain words, and in the right combination, even a handful of words can mean something powerful.

If a boss calls his employees idiots, they will tend toward idiocy. If a mother calls her son the devil’s child, he might very well become one.

We not only need meaningful words to keep groups of humans organized, we also can’t get very far without them.

Humans need meaningful words. We love them. They bring us together and help us to align small and large pieces of our lives.

Words are meaningful.

As a rule of thumb, use as few words as you can without leaving out something meaningful.

HEARD = INCLUSION + ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

UNDERSTOOD = HEARD + ECHO

People feel understood when they hear their voice echoing back to them accurately

If what you hear back doesn’t sound like what you meant, it’s not an echo, it’s a misunderstanding.

Active listening only starts after someone has been acknowledged.

The more time we spend talking, the less we have for listening.

Being heard is not enough: we need to be understood, and to understand each other.

Active Listening = Care + Curiosity

ACTIVE LISTENING FOR VALUE = CARE + CURIOSITY + LEARNING

Ghosting someone is not an acceptable form of communication. It is an act of violence.

Listening is almost a lost art among most managers and leaders.

As a rule of thumb, if you want to build trust with someone, you should aim to spend 70 percent of your conversational time listening.

Confidence & Courage 33

In the AI era, your CV matters less than your portfolio. Can you show workflows, decisions, and outcomes? If not, you’re asking people to trust you on vibes.

It’s a 1% problem, but if it happens to you, it’s devastating. Don’t wait until someone else owns your name.

When an internal leader delivers a speech, employees subconsciously categorize it as “business as usual.”

Confidence is a skill, not a talent

Confidence is a product of risk-in-context

Credibility is the courage to know yourself by your behaviours alone

If we judge ourselves to be commensurately competent and capable as those we are looking at, we are more likely to have the confidence to attempt that kind of success.

If you’re looking to build confidence, make sure you’re filling your mind with the stories of people who have done something similar, with similar resources to those that you have.

Self-confidence comes from success, experience, and the organization’s environment. There’s no such thing as innate confidence.

And let’s be honest, most coaches aren’t ready to handle the weight of the corner office.

ICF certification is not irrelevant, just insufficient for the executive coaching niche.

The coach doesn’t have to be able to play the game as well as their executive, but they must be competent enough to coach at their executive’s level of play.

You don’t need to be able to play the game as well as your CXO can, but you do need to be able to coach at their level to provide value – and justify your fees and their time.

What made a mentor-coach successful a decade ago is unlikely to be as valuable to their client as innovative input from cross-functional, multi-disciplinary, or multi-industrial experience in their coach today.

If you can’t coach an Olympian, you have no business calling yourself an Olympic coach.

A coach’s past credentials and results earn them the right to start coaching, but it’s the application of their experience and education in service of their current client that qualifies their “coaching” as “executive.”

The fact is that being a competent executive coach requires a surprising amount of hard work, a ton of reading, and a lot of experience.

I know great executive coaches without any executive experience at all. And I know others without a master’s degree. However, I don’t know any great executive coaches who have neither.

Are you the multi-dimensional wizard your clients need, or just a wayfinder with a slick roadmap?

There’s no regulatory body qualifying Olympic coaches either, because at the top level of human performance, only the top performers, their competitors, and their coaches know what they really need.

If you’re still unsure whether you’re ready to coach at the top, then you probably aren’t.

If you want to coach CXOs, you’d better be ready to add serious value. No excuses, no half-measures. Because at this level, there’s no room for average.

But, trust me, you can do more than you know.

Confidence is your assessment of your abilities in relation to the requirements of a specific task.

Confidence is a matter of actual capability.

Certainty is a luxury of the arrogant.

You can change your view of yourself by building up a pattern of small wins.

Besides, people who expect to fail, more often do.

Humans can do only what they first believe they can do, and, often, they need to be convinced.

The only way confidence is built in any human being is when they take on a challenge with a reasonable chance of failure and they succeed.

Confidence without competence is arrogance.

I do know that you can accomplish way more than you think you can. You are smarter, faster, stronger, and emotionally fitter than you give yourself credit for.

When people around you say that you are capable of more than you think, they’re absolutely right, and you need to start believing them.

Decisions & Risk 33

As we skydivers say, the only thing that will definitely kill you, is panic.

If the CEO has a bad night’s sleep, or a fight with their spouse before work, it impacts input seeking behavior and decision-making quality for the rest of the day.

So the sorting rule is critical. Never “which letter could fix this?” Always “which letter broke first?” Get that wrong and you’ll fund a remedy for a problem you don’t have.

Coaching changes your decisions. Better decisions equal better outcomes. Simple math.

You choose your work for a reason. They choose you for a reason too.

Humans can and want to grow, and they will only do that if there is a low enough risk of failure or low enough cost of failure to make the attempt worthwhile.

You might not be able to choose to have your circumstance suddenly come to an end, but you can choose to face it intentionally and with a good attitude.

Every decision you’ve ever made has led you here.

Pull the trigger, nudge the bullet.

You are in the role you’re in (or not in) as a direct result of every decision you have ever made, both good and bad.

If you knew of a better way, you’d be doing that instead.

If you don’t like your role, or your boss, or your company, you have options. You can change your job, or change your mind. Your call.

CXOs aren’t sorting between important and unimportant anymore. Everything is important, and everything is urgent.

Finance isn’t governing decision-making the way it used to. Technology is.

However, the lack of diversity that strengthens relationships weakens decision-making.

Without a relentless pursuit of excellence in decision-making, a CXO isn’t just risking their company, they’re gambling with the livelihoods of thousands of families, including their shareholders.

I view decision-making through the lens of learning. The highest quality decisions are those made with the highest quality information. This requires a default learning posture.

Cognitive biases pose a risk in decision-making because they are internal functions in the CXO’s mind. They likely won’t even be noticed by the CXO, but they should be by their executive coach.

When you’re coaching a CXO, there’s no room for distractions or complacency – because the decisions they make can either build empires or burn them down.

The easiest path to success is to attempt nothing of consequence as a matter of choice. That’s not self-confidence; that’s cowardice.

The biggest mistake I see organizations making is hesitation in the face of an opportunity.

Spartans swim new waters and attempt new things instead of imagining new waters and dreaming of new things.

You are prepared for war, but live in relative peace. You are prepared for famine, but live in a constantly evolving buffet.

The number of interactions we handle each day has gone up by more than 10x from only 15 years ago

It’s a miracle we get anything done at all with this level of complexity.

The biggest challenge we face is not knowing when too much complexity, too much opportunity, and too much abundance will lead to our self-imposed demise.

We simply have no adaptive mechanisms evolved to warn us when we are about to reach our limits.

It’s in the frog’s nature to accept the rising heat as an opportunity, never knowing that there is an upper limit to the amount of heat it can tolerate.

We live in the most abundant time in history. There are many more good things to do than can ever be done

Adapting to abundance means you’ll need to learn to say no to good things

Only an idiot would be doing something that they know isn’t their best chance at success.

Make a deal between your present and future selves.

The challenge with the Eisenhower Matrix in today’s world is that everything feels important and everything feels urgent.

Discipline & Motivation 41

Discipline is a surgical expression of hope

No. Days. Off.

Discipline is the ability to choose what you do, regardless of how you feel.

You can be literally addicted to “not feeling like it”

Your goals at work aren’t really based on your KPIs, are they? Let’s be honest.

Employees acting out of fear will do what they need to for survival; employees acting out of love will do everything in their power to achieve their leader’s vision

All of your excuses are lame.

Start with a goal and then choose a discipline that will lead you to that goal.

Don’t be lazy. And don’t be fat.

Don’t avoid the work; avoid the shame of not working. Stay in front by being mentally fit.

To a real Spartan runner, there’s a big difference between getting to the finish line and finishing the race.

But I was determined to finish. Not motivated. Determined.

How did I do the next 220 wallballs? Discipline. That’s all. When times are hard, it’s the only thing that matters.

Hesitation is an opportunity for you to slip into either fear mode or autopilot.

Dreams are plentiful and cheap; every human has them, often passively. Goals are rarer, for they require clarity and intention. But disciplines—those are very, very expensive.

But you can’t think your way to a better life, no matter what the self-help books say. Only what you do will matter.

Remember, motivation gets you to the starting line; discipline gets you to the finish line. No days off is a discipline.

Spartan-level discipline is a matter of will—your will.

If you’re having trouble getting motivated to make a change in your life, you can hack yourself by hanging out with people who have already made that change.

You’ll know your motivation is over when you start arguing yourself out of doing what you motivated yourself to start doing.

The fact is you are literally, chemically, addicted to not feeling like it, and it’s a heroin-level addiction.

The sweetest carrot and sharpest stick are both powerless in the face of intrinsic motivation and self-discipline.

Money is a proxy reward; it’s a placeholder for food, security, and outsourced protection.

My past self, in all of his twisted sadistic wisdom, had sentenced me to this present moment.

I invest a considerable amount of my time in doing things that aren’t “fun” in the traditional sense, but they are fulfilling.

Setting an appointment with yourself and not showing up is a way of dishonoring your past self

It’s no wonder those who struggle to keep times they’ve set for themselves also typically struggle with a lack of self-esteem.

Discipline is the ability to choose your behavior regardless of how you feel.

If you want real change in your life, it will most likely depend on your ability to show up for yourself, consistently, on time

Intention and motivation are temporary, discipline is forever

Over time, as discipline becomes habit and habit leads to flow, discipline disappears.

Habits are things you just do. Disciplines are things you choose to do in spite of how you feel.

Once a task finds its way into your calendar, it’s set in stone. Respect your past decisions and stick to the schedule.

Resisting change is a million-year-old best practice for survival through stability and continuity.

You are the result of your average day.

You are what you do.

An intention that doesn’t produce an action is called a dream. And dreams are only valuable to the dreamer.

Good intentions by themselves produce a kind of mental-masturbatory neurochemical response, and they can be very pleasurable for the dreamer even without any translation into action.

Good is a measure of doing, not of being.

What you do is what matters most. Not what you intend. Intention is weak, action is strong.

The key is to create tiny manageable daily goals to lower the activation energy required to create a natural response.

Failure & Growth 48

When did professional development become something you outsource to HR? If your employability depends on a quarterly workshop, you’ve already lost the race.

Curiosity, competence, and courage … in that order.

Clearly we’re doing something wrong in Digital Transformation, yet we’re still willing to go through the motions knowing that it’s largely a waste of resources.

You can white-knuckle your way to decent.

Pat yourself on the back for doing things you don’t want to do, so you can accomplish the big goals you want to achieve.

Ultimately, it’ll be up to you to kick your own ass.

In order for me to be “better,” I would have to accomplish something that I had not accomplished before.

All of my experience was instantly inadequate.

Stronger happens when we endure a challenge or ordeal that we’ve never endured before.

In my 20’s, when my friends were on the beach, I was in the library.

Surround yourself with high achievers, not happiness addicts.

We need to stop confusing information with transformation.

The marginalization of the stakeholder groups most affected by the safety of an aircraft was a best practice in business for decades before the crashes of 2018 and 2019

It’s only an opportunity if you’re already prepared for it. If you’re not prepared, you won’t even notice when it passes you by.

You can coast on what got you here, or you can accelerate into what could get you 10X further

I collect competencies

No one is omni-talented

Passion is the skill of valuing the outcome over the effort

You are an apex predator

Just as you are what you do (now), you will be what you will do (in the future).

What do we do when we fall down? Get up and try again.

I mean seriously, who does a PhD solely because they’re curious about something? Well, I do.

There are only two kinds of leaders at your level who make no mistakes: gods and cowards.

But if you’re not a god and you’re not making any mistakes, it’s probably because you’re not doing anything truly challenging, remarkable, innovative, or disruptive.

Two decades of industry and departmental expertise is often what earns you your seat on the C-suite – but unlearning it is what will help you succeed there.

Who will convince the specialist to abandon their core competency?

We select bark experts, but we need them to learn global forestry, fast.

Learning a new toolkit helps me to see the limitations in my previous tools.

The higher up you go in any domain, the more important ongoing development is for success.

Everything you know about coaching today will be roughly half as valuable in five years’ time.

Personally, I’m collecting competencies.

If you’re not coachable, then it’s all a waste of time.

If you’re not actively engaged in your own professional development outside of your coaching sessions, you should probably retire.

If you’re not getting sharper, you’re getting duller.

It’s change that communicates the value of feedback, not understanding. Understanding is just a step along the way.

You’ll learn just as much in the process of trying as you will from the success or failure.

I had trusted poorly, and I had escaped well.

You will fail from time to time, but it’s better to try and occasionally fail than to never try at all.

Failing at CrossFit taught me yoga. Failing at yoga taught me to breathe. Failing at breathing taught me mindfulness.

I have felt that I’m at my finest when I am challenging myself to do things that I’m only 80 percent sure I can do.

So start with small increments. 2 percent faster, 2 percent stronger, 2 percent better.

I didn’t get tired of losing because I knew I was always getting better.

For a rival to be an effective performance influence on you, they don’t have to be a nemesis.

Great rivalries make players stronger than they can be on their own.

Whatever infinite game you are playing, identify a rival and use their performance to energize your own.

Whether personally or corporately, socially or professionally, you are limited by your choice of rival.

Respect your competition. Don’t play the game to win, play the game to get better, faster, and stronger than you were yesterday. Your competitors are keeping you sharp.

Pushing against someone strong will make you both stronger.

Fitness, Rest & Flow 41

In the physical sense, our muscles get stronger when, through the strain of use, they break. The healing is what makes them stronger.

Burnout equals game over.

Humans love routine. Too much routine is boring, but too little is what leads us to become mentally overwhelmed.

Humans forget to breathe too often.

You are living in the most incredible time in human history, and most of what you face in your life is manageable, and very little of it is a real threat to you or your wellbeing.

I mean, how serious is it that you have a deadline to meet? Is anyone going to die? Not likely.

We’re simultaneously increasingly isolated, choking on the volume of Zoom meetings, and gasping for clearer communication on collaborative projects.

How about I make myself proud, and you can join in?

The goal here is for you to get to the place where whatever you’re doing every day makes you proud. Then others, if they choose, can join you in being proud of you.

Profit is a reward for creating an environment where employees care for their customers

Fitness and weight loss are very different organizational goals

Your profit margin is made in the dark, when no one is looking

Run to win.

I’m smart, I lift heavy, and I can run forever… I’m the one I want to hang out with during an apocalypse.

You’re as fit as your frenemies.

A flow state is active rest

Information is a kind of empowerment that flows upward in an organization

Sleep deficit has a bottom-line cost.

The body is nothing without the mind.

Run fast. Do it over and over again. Don’t be lazy.

Fit body, fit mind, fit community.

Athletes often describe their best performances as having been the most effortless.

Flow is addictive.

Most of our anxieties aren’t in the present, so when we lose track of past and future, we also lose track of our anxieties.

Only the discipline to repeat a learned behavior thousands of times earns you the right to rest while you do it.

Meditation is flow without an activity, and flow is meditation with an activity.

We are humans, not machine parts.

We need to intentionally slow down, or we risk not slowing down at all.

Working too hard and resting too little will kill you. You need balance. We all do.

Rest is a discipline, necessary not just for physical healing but for psychological well-being as well.

If our people aren’t resting enough, the owners of the company will ultimately pay for it.

Not resting is expensive for everyone. Spartans know this.

Breathe in. Breathe out. You’ve got this.

Spartans practice sleep and flow deliberately.

Spartans sleep seven or more hours a night, no nights off.

Sleep deficiency is compounded over time.

Anyone in the C-suite should be given a bonus for wearing a sleep monitor and protecting their seven-hour-a-night average.

The flow state is highly addictive, so once you train your brain to find it, your brain will work with you to find it again, and again, and again

In a flow state, your prefrontal cortex shuts down.

It’s in that margin between continuity and creativity that flow resides. Right on that line between the familiar and the novel.

Concentrating on your strengths makes flow much more likely. Strengths are a flow trigger.

Goals & Ambition 19

No one is going to do it for you, and no one wants you to accomplish your goals more than you do.

No dreams, only goals. Dreams are interesting, but ultimately useless.

Dreams are a tease. They make you feel good for thinking about doing something, but it’s not until you actually DO something that others will give you the same credit.

Lower the bar. Don’t make your goal to finish the report, make your goal to write 1 sentence.

No dreams, only goals

Destiny is knowing your steps have been ordered

Surround yourself with people whose influence will help you achieve a goal

I had set up a goal with a reasonable chance of failure, and I had succeeded.

If vision is why, mission is how, and values are who, then goal-setting answers the “what and when” questions.

A goal is an intention to complete a certain activity by a certain time.

I suggest having recurring and leapfrogging goals in multiple streams of achievement.

And just as diversifying one’s portfolio is good advice for the investor, it is also wise to avoid placing too many of your emotional eggs in any single goal basket.

But don’t overcompensate by making your goals too easy. It can’t be counted as a goal if it’s imminent.

If something is extremely likely to happen with minimal change in your level of effort, then it’s not worth citing as a goal.

Make your goals challenging and effortful but not unattainable.

It’s not helpful to write a goal over which you do not have control.

We tend to think of our personal goals and our corporate goals as mutually exclusive.

You won’t know what you’re capable of unless you are setting goals for yourself that you are a little unsure you can accomplish.

Why is it so easy for us to choose a clear and defined destination and yet so hard for us to take just one step in its direction?

Leadership & Management 201

Slide polishing. Status updates. Meeting notes. Congrats on your artisanal administrative labour! AI is already eating that buffet.

AI can draft, summarize, and generate. It cannot give you courage, integrity, or accountability.

The future belongs to people who can lead, influence, and ship under uncertainty.

Why do you keep putting engineers at the top of DX projects when what you really need are soft skills ninjas?

Stop promoting your technologists to their level of incompetence in the finance and soft skills needed to execute across a mosaic of stakeholder groups.

It’s far less costly and less effortful to teach a strong leader technology than it is to teach a talented engineer leadership

I was asked recently why after 20 years in business strategy, I never worked in restructuring with any of the big global consultancy firms. My answer? Well, I’d sooner cut off my own arm.

People in an organization are like parts of a body.

How long before the remaining staff spend 30% of their workday looking for a new job?

If you ever cut jobs for budgetary reasons, you will likely be measuring the long-term cost in missed opportunities and underperformance for years.

Let them know that cutting jobs is as serious as cutting off your own arm, and reinforce your commitment to wait until the 127th hour before even considering it.

The community will feel the sense of urgency when the executives change first, and the whole body will start to rally to move the boulder.

Don’t let the termination papers for your people even touch your left hand, until the insolvency papers are in your right.

Cutting jobs prematurely is not courageous, it’s leadership cowardice and employee cruelty. These are hard times, and our people deserve brave leadership.

What do you call an Olympic committee that allows coaching to remain optional for its Olympic athletes? Negligent.

When Boards fail to require Executive Coaching for their CEOs, they are knowingly tolerating avoidable productivity risk, cultural degradation, performance compromise, and value leakage.

CEOs carry the primary livelihoods of many thousands of families in one hand, and the generational wealth of many thousands of investors in the other.

In any enterprise, the biggest risks get the most Board attention, except the risk of an uncoached CEO.

A CEO is the most leveraged human system in the organization.

A Board that ignores CEO stress exposure is not protecting shareholder value. It is allowing predictable degradation of the very capacity it relies on to generate that value.

Boards often talk about “tone at the top” while failing to operationalize it.

A Board that wants values-based leadership but refuses to require coaching is outsourcing governance to personality.

Boards do not get credit for “not causing” these failures when they fail to prevent them.

Just as audits protect financial integrity, coaching protects leadership integrity.

Mandate coaching. Measure outcomes. Review annually.

Then explain to your shareholders, clearly and honestly, why you ever believed hope was an adequate governance strategy for your highest risk human capital asset.

The body, like the company, stores extra capacity in the form of fat. Not all fat is bad fat.

A good business doctor can identify the difference between extra capacity positions, and real freeloaders in the organization.

An idle person is often unfulfilled. Giving them a task that strengthens the company provides a sense of purpose.

Because leadership isn’t just about talking—it’s about connecting. And no AI is beating humans at that.

All meaningful organizational behaviour change starts at the top.

If you’re still arguing about remote vs. in-office, you’ve missed the point. The future of work is about outcomes, not attendance.

If cybersecurity isn’t a boardroom discussion yet, it will be—right after your first data breach.

Bosses are expected to be expert managers and perfect leaders, but the reality is that they’re all disappointingly human at the end of the day.

I led 40 families into unemployment, including my own. It was heartbreaking, and I never felt more alone in my life.

It’s lonely at the top, and risky too. Employees don’t really understand that part of an owner’s job.

Never, ever, meddle in management.

The division between ownership and management should be considered sacred.

The management should be employee and customer facing, with the owners facing the shareholders.

I know too many owners that are too lazy to be competent in the numbers.

Your management staff work for weeks, sometimes months, to provide clear and accurate information for you. You should honour that work by reading the reports.

When jobs are cut, those who lose their jobs lose their livelihoods. That means kids don’t get educated, and parents aren’t cared for. That’s a major cause of unhappiness.

Those left behind feel that the community to which they are dedicated, is not likewise dedicated to them.

Imagine spending half of your conscious life in an unsafe environment, as a part of a community from which you can be excluded at any moment and for any reason, to the detriment of your family.

Take the underutilised pool of human excellence that you are planning to throw away, and lock them in a room for a month to review expenses

The value of gender balance in leadership is not a recently discovered phenomenon. It’s not a breakthrough or novel invention of the modern age.

It has been a best practice of forward thinking leaders since early civilization that has been actively suppressed by patriarchies throughout the centuries

In a time and place when histories were written by men, for men, and about men, Gorgo takes a shining place among the heroes in Herodotus’ ancient Histories.

She was the daughter, wife, and mother of three kings of Sparta, but did not define herself by her relationships with the male leaders around her.

Her leadership was not ahead of her time, it was a feature of her time.

I get it, you’re offended already because I’m calling your uncoached executives amateurs.

I learned very quickly that the only way to make it through the Tough Mudder was to make eye contact.

The race was slower, because I couldn’t run at my own pace. I had to run at the pace of the team.

Too often, CEOs think of themselves like Spartans, running a course of challenges, using people along the way to accomplish things that they alone take credit for but could not have possibly achieved without the help of others.

What we need in our CEOs is Tough Mudders. We need leaders who will lift others up, slow down and reach back to make sure the team stays together, and use their strength and speed to set a pace that keeps the team moving without leaving members behind.

The natural instinct to help others is the same in business as it is on the obstacle course.

Good CEOs ask for help, and reach back to offer it to others, and bad CEOs stand on the shoulders of their people in order to run faster, alone, and finish, without either respect or admiration.

The data is starting to make the uncoached executive look rather exposed.

Or are we still pretending that the C-suite is somehow exempt from the rules of human performance?

Yet somehow the same board that will fund AI transformation, leadership retreats, wellness apps, psychometric assessments, offsites, dashboards, and catered strategy days will still hesitate to fund serious executive coaching for the people making the highest risk decisions in the company.

And uncoached execs are often underprepared leaders with impressive titles.

Except that Boeing isn’t an entity with a will. Boeing has never made a decision, ever.

Hidden behind the shield of corporate personhood, greedy and malicious leaders can lead the organization to provide bad products and services, even to the point of killing people

It makes sense for the owners and CEOs to be as greedy as possible, given their limited liability

A code is a combination. Miss one digit and the lock stays shut.

We promote brilliant technologists into roles that need leaders, and we seat accomplished leaders over technology they have never personally touched

You can’t point at a destination on a map you can’t even read. And you won’t own what you can’t defend in the room.

Watch any boardroom: the portfolios executives fight to hold are the ones they understand.

Most change budgets are spent downstream, treating symptoms manufactured upstream.

An organisation can’t score higher on the CODE than its leaders score personally

Humans are the problem. And the solution.

The first digit is under your own hand.

So: can the people at the top transform themselves? Because until that answer is yes, nothing below them will transform either.

He might be a micromanager, but he’s definitely a macro-leader, and he’s certainly not well-read enough to know what “macro-leading” means.

He refers to best practices from 2005 as “innovations.”

He outsources his social media accounts to make him look more ‘in touch’ publicly than he actually is.

People agree with him in public, and call him an idiot when he’s not in the room.

The intellectual capital bubble will burst, as executives with power fight with the real leaders of the future, those with the knowledge, capacity, and competencies to actually lead.

Unless those with power learn to empower others, those with real competence will leave to places like Silicon Valley, Tallinn, Beijing, Seoul, and Singapore.

Most of the time, we rebel by taking longer lunch breaks, checking Facebook, and getting away with doing as little as possible.

It’s not the market, Dubai, it’s our leaders

At the top, it’s not about your competence, it’s about your capacity.

We still have 70,000 years of momentum in the direction of asserting dominance among the members of our tribes

They assert their dominance like finely clothed apes trying to hide their archaic compulsions behind lame excuses, or worse, no excuses at all.

I have a close friend who loves her job and hates her boss.

The biggest problem is that the managers people are quitting think they’re doing a good job. It’s a tragedy.

Who decides if a manager is doing a good job? Their direct supervisor? No.

Stop looking up the organization chart for indications of how well you’re doing.

Your executives can tell you if you’re meeting your targets, but they can’t tell you if you’re a good manager or not.

Good managers eat feedback for breakfast

People hate being told what to do, but they love being asked for help.

Your margin is made in the dark, when no one is “managing” at all, and your team is deciding for themselves what to do with the information and resources at their discretion.

Let’s face it, you’re not managing your team most of the time anyway. You’re doing other things.

The speaker is your CFO, delivering the same message you heard last quarter, dressed up in different PowerPoint slides.

Internal speakers operate within the same strategic bubble. They reinforce existing narratives, which can be great for alignment but terrible for innovation.

And let’s be real—your Head of Compliance, no matter how brilliant, is unlikely to generate a standing ovation.

If you can do it now, do it now

The best things in life are already mine

Mentoring is a follower-led sport

The most important things are the ones that no one will ever make you do

300,000 years of evolutionary momentum is tough to stop with only 30 years of civility.

Don’t allow the world around you to decide what’s next for you.

Decision-making quality is an art

Management is the stewardship of existing resources. Leadership is the stewardship of potential resources.

A good king keeps a standing army.

Bad leadership happens when we take ourselves too seriously, and we don’t take our people seriously enough.

Own the possibility of both negative and positive consequences arising from the choices you are making now.

Performance management is a myth.

Employee engagement and artificial intelligence are this decade’s two most important investments

We dehumanized employees with a new set of terminologies, such as “human resources,” or worse, “human capital.”

It’s time to take ownership of your life, especially the half of it that you’ve invested in your current economic community.

You’re not a victim and you’re not a slave, so if you can’t find meaning in half of your life, then you need to either change your job, or change your mind.

You’re neither an idiot nor a victim. You chose your work for a reason. They chose you for a reason too.

After all, you were chosen to be a member of that community not just because of your CV, but because you’re the kind of person that would fit in.

It’s your values, who you are, that got you the job.

Your corporate community chose you for your role. You’re there because your community believes you are the best person for that job at this time.

Your CV doesn’t make you special … your unique character does.

Authority + Accountability = Empowerment.

When life throws something at a leader, they will respond with behaviors that reveal their true values.

Personal vision + Corporate vision = Meaningful Management.

Like Olympians, today’s business executives need more than someone to simply ask, “What would you like to work on today?” They need strategic advisors who know their game and can raise their level of performance.

Executives who don’t think they need coaching for performance are either ignorant of the craft or arrogant in their character.

The fact that some companies still don’t invest in tailored coaching for their executives and that some executives still don’t understand the value of coaching for their performance is monumentally stupid.

CXOs are supposed to be taking care of everyone, but who’s taking care of them?

The terrible truth is that the step into the C-suite isn’t a step at all, it’s a leap, akin to a footballer stepping onto a World Cup pitch for the very first time.

First-time CXOs are often the unwitting victims of an elaborate, hidden bait-and-switch plot.

The effectiveness of specialization quickly fades in the EXCO.

Wherever the challenge comes from, the sudden need to shift from an offensive to a defensive career posture is one of the most shocking and disappointing experiences an executive can face.

When your colleagues are the ones picking away at your imposter syndrome and challenging your leadership, that’s when it’s loneliest at the top.

It continues to shock me how many executives think they can play world-class economic games at their best without coaching.

Coasting in the C-suite is a fast track to disaster.

What high-powered professionals need isn’t a comforting rhetorical chat but actionable strategies.

CXOs who think they don’t need coaching are like Olympic athletes who think they don’t need coaching. They’re a joke, and worse, they’re gambling with their people’s livelihoods and their shareholders’ value.

Executives at the highest level don’t need vague questions but actionable insights.

The days of monolingual leadership are over. If you’re in the C-suite, it’s time to stop peacocking your specialized knowledge and start learning to speak the languages of your peers.

After all, being a great CXO is less about understanding the bark than it is about seeing the whole forest from above.

People management is probably the skill most needed in senior executive positions; unfortunately, it is often the most lacking.

Competition gets them to the top, but collaboration is what keeps them there.

Lone alpha wolves might be venerated in Hollywood movies, but not in the boardroom.

The CEO got their job by being a wolf, and a wolf they remain.

Wolves in the wild are tribal and protective.

Wolves in captivity are individualistic and defensive.

People will work hard for a leader they fear, but they’ll fight for a leader they respect, and they’ll kill and die for a leader they love, especially one who loves them back.

Although aggression might have gotten executives to the top, it’s collaboration and empathy that will keep them there.

People feel valued when their voice leads to some kind of meaningful change

If you’re looking for a quick fix for bad leadership, you’ve definitely come to the wrong author for advice

As leaders, we need to peer into the darkness to understand how badly we need the light.

Something needs to be done, and we’re the leaders. We’re responsible.

In the last fifty years of research on leadership and management, very few leaders have dared to use a word so rich with meaning and yet so unclear as the word “love.”

I used to think it was enough for us to describe leaders as caring, considerate, empathetic, understanding, vulnerable, transparent, humanity-driven, encouraging, emotionally intelligent, people-oriented, socially aware, inclusive, respectful, and patient, but I’m no longer satisfied by that vocabulary.

The more connected someone feels to you, the faster and more easily you will be able to influence them.

If you love your people and your people feel loved by you, you’ll all perform better.

You’ve evolved from inclusion to influence, and from listening to love.

If all of our organisational leaders were already adept at loving leadership and applied love in the workplace in a practical way, we wouldn’t have to talk about DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) at all

It’s no longer as valuable to be the smartest person in the room as it is to be the last to speak.

The wisest speaks last, and listens for understanding.

Love calls us as leaders to peacefully confront both forms of violence: attack and withdrawal

There’s no line between love and fear, there’s only a chasm defined by different measures of distance in the areas of trust, transparency, intimacy, reciprocity, positivity resonance, and unconditional positive regard.

Loving Leadership is the willingness of a leader to use their available resources, including time, effort, knowledge, and emotional intimacy, to improve the quality of life for those in their care.

I think the employees are there to serve the customers and stakeholders of the company. And if the employees are serving the customers, who is serving the employees? That’s right, their managers.

It is more profitable in the long term to be loved than feared in leadership.

I imagine board meetings where the decisions are steered by the guiding question: “Is this the most loving thing that we can do to balance the felt needs of all of our stakeholders?”

Start by expressing love towards those you claim to lead.

When in doubt about how to lead, let the instinct that guided your ancestors lead you in how to behave with those in your care. Ask yourself, “What’s the loving thing to do?”

But perhaps the most unloving thing we can do in our organisations is to remove people from them.

Management ideas such as human-as-resource, time-as-money, shareholder supremacy, and professional distance, are all thought to improve business efficiency. They don’t. These are the lies of cold economists and bad consultants.

What the consultant says is good for profit might be bad for people.

VALUED = UNDERSTOOD + MEANINGFUL CHANGE

Managers often hide behind a wall of professional distance because the risk of emotional and relational cost would be too high in the rare case that they have to fire one of their employees someday.

And let’s face it, we would all be great managers if it wasn’t for our employees, right?

We started calling our team members “human capital,” viewing employees as disposable assets and variable expenses.

Shareholder supremacy is an unloving management philosophy because it is by nature exclusive of all other stakeholder groups in an organisation.

I define leadership (in part) as the stewardship of unrealized resources and management as the stewardship of existing resources.

A leader is someone we choose to follow.

Leadership and management go hand in hand, but there are definitely times when one hand should be intentionally stronger than the other.

The fact is that people like to follow strong people, and you have the opportunity every day to become you at your strongest.

Poor mental fitness is just a recipe for lazy leadership and financial disaster.

Lower the cost of failure for your team and watch them attempt greater things.

If you are frustrated because you think of your staff as incompetent and weak, chances are pretty good that you’re leading them to remain that way.

A part of your job, as a leader, is to give away the credit for the things that go right and take the blame when things go wrong

All-star leaders also aren’t known for how fast they climbed the ladder or how high they jumped alone but for how many people they pulled up behind them.

What we need in our leaders are Tough Mudders.

Good bosses ask for help and reach back to offer it to others, and bad bosses stand on the shoulders of their people in order to run faster alone and finish without either respect or admiration.

So we have long engagements with bad managers and short engagements with bad leaders.

A consultant with a single metric for success, cost cutting, is a bit like a surgeon with a single metric for success, weight loss.

Forward thinkers and business leaders: if you let enough of your staff go, statistically, some of them will die from it. Chew on that for a minute.

When you cut people out of the community that has been supplying their family, they die too.

If an outside consultant is prescribing job cuts as a weight-loss solution, he or she is probably just a bad surgeon. There are better ways to get fit.

It is never acceptable in management to threaten someone’s livelihood as a motivational tool.

Carrots and sticks have been the dominant tools in employee motivation theory for a very long time, but if you treat people like donkeys, don’t be surprised when they start acting like donkeys.

There’s nothing more frustrating than working with a boss who’s not empowering.

We all know that your team won’t do it as well as you can, whatever it is, but their 80 percent quality is much more efficient than your 100 percent.

What if performance management is an oxymoron?

Real performance isn’t managed at all. It can’t be.

No one’s life is worth more than any other person’s life.

Your ability to show up on time has nothing to do with your time management skills, and everything to do with the value you place on the life of the person with whom you’re meeting.

Time is a dominance game, and many of us are aware of it now.

Leaders eat feedback for breakfast.

Not every task requires your personal touch. You should only be doing what only you can do.

The open-door policy is shit.

Time is the tapestry upon which the art of executive leadership is painted.

Love, Empathy & Relationships 63

Oxytocin is the most profitable chemical in business

Every human on the planet experiences happiness in exactly the same way: Dopamine, Serotonin, Oxytocin, Endorphins, Norepinephrine, and Anandamide.

Sell performance, deliver empathy

Generosity is the skill of giving until it heals

Empathy is a strategic advantage

Love is the highest form of psychological safety

Love@Work is profitable

If you’re leading out of fear instead of love, it’s because you value something more than your net profit.

True generosity is giving until it heals.

Helping behavior among humans is both contagious and addictive. Humans can’t help but react favorably to small acts of kindness.

Every human is a little bit insecure on the inside.

Everyone in your company is dedicating half of their lives to an economic project with no guarantee of lifetime success.

See your colleagues as people with hopes and fears just like you, and with personal visions for their own lives that they are also struggling to achieve.

We tend to judge others more harshly than we judge ourselves, and we tend to judge our companies even harsher than other individuals.

We need to be more patient and forgiving if we’re to live harmoniously in community.

Don’t try to connect with the company, just connect with the people that you work closely with.

There’s been a lot of talk about empathy in leadership in recent years, but it doesn’t quite scratch the itch of love.

A leader can be compassionate and understanding of their employees yet still lack that deeper emotional connection, that warmth, belonging and true affection for those they lead.

Most people, most of the time, do what they feel works for them and what they think is right, and relatively few people ever have enough malintent towards another person to wilfully cause pain.

Remember, you can’t read their minds any better than they can read yours.

I love you, all of you. Now let’s review our KPIs from the last quarter.

There are eight billion voices wanting to be heard in the world, and yours is just one of them. There are also eight billion opportunities for you to love, and to feel truly loved.

There’s absolutely nothing “soft” about love. As you’ll see, love is challenging. It requires effort. It takes a considerable investment of time and energy to achieve and can be devastating when lost.

It never felt quite right to me that the richest, most meaningful, most powerful form of human relationship (love) is something that we actively exclude from a domain of relationships that occupies so much of our lives (work).

I think we should respond to the darkness with the brightest light we have.

Presumably every office romance began at some point with a single intrepid over-the-line toe-step into consent, and there are millions of true love stories that grew from this terrifyingly rocky soil.

We can’t learn to love each other if we can’t even begin to talk about love, however platonic, because it might somehow be in breach of policies and procedures

We’ve kicked the word “love” out of our professional spaces because of the potential mix-up with sex and romance.

Like immature little school kids, we fear hearing “I love you” in the office, and having to immediately sort out whether or not it’s intended as anything romantic.

Love is perhaps the most imprecise word in the English language.

Love is the willingness to reduce my quality of life in order to improve the quality of someone else’s life

LOVED = VALUED + RECIPROCITY OVER TIME

People feel loved when they recognise that their voice is an integral quality of the relationship.

I’m perfectly comfortable saying that I love someone I don’t agree with; agreement isn’t a pre-requisite for love, whereas understanding is

You can love someone you disagree with.

Guys on factory lines don’t tell each other they love each other unless it’s late on a Friday and we’ve had too many beers to know better.

In spite of the potential for confusion, love is already present at work.

If encouraging love at work is a profitable best practice, then why is love at work an almost totally avoided subject?!

Love seeks to understand, confronts violence with truth, and actively pursues reconciliation

Love is the willingness to reduce one’s own quality of life in order to improve the quality of someone else’s life.

We can start by loving the individual in front of us today, and we can do that with little to no expense if we speak their love language.

I imagine executives walking out of the boardroom with a casual “I love you” to each of their colleagues.

My hope is that you, as a leader, will recognise that love isn’t something that needs to be taught at all.

You don’t need a manual. You just need to be told that it’s okay to pursue love at work. It’s the most natural thing.

You might find yourself recognising that you love your team – perhaps less than you do your children, but far more than you do your favourite candy bar

Because love has always been at work. We all know it. We’ve always known it.

Love is powerful, but it’s not simple.

Professional distance encourages people to hold each other at arm’s length instead of in each other’s arms

In order to know how to treat someone, we need to know them personally.

Love is certainly opposed to the manufacturing of distance in human relationships – and professional distance is exactly that: manufactured

As every married person knows, understanding is not the same as agreement.

Understanding is more valuable than agreement because being together is more important than being right.

For you to know that you value another person, you need to let what they say and do influence what you say and do. And for you to feel valued by another person, you need to see that what you say and do influences what they say and do.

We are a social species, and we naturally gravitate to people who add value to our lives, and to whose lives we add value.

Our employees share a good deal of life with each other every day, and that’s what social animals do together in professional cages: they get close. It’s natural and inevitable.

We can be together instead of being right, and we can understand one another without needing to agree on everything.

Companies don’t exist in the sense that they are independent entities. They are collections of representatives.

Make eye contact but don’t be creepy.

After all, you can only become as fit as those you train with.

Water is thicker than blood in terms of social behavioral influence, and one of the most powerful influences is a spouse.

Helping people is both rewarding and contagious.

Your life is a race that you cannot win alone

Be grateful for your frenemies and intentional about selecting them.

Meaning & Purpose 54

People say they want to live more meaningful lives, but they avoid the hard work associated with what makes life meaningful.

The biggest milestones in our lives are often achieved when we’re alone, tired, underappreciated and overworked, pushing through the fatigue.

I can tell you after having spent 26 years of my life as a husband, there’s no “long term committed relationship” without the “long term” and the “committed.”

My companies, books, degrees, everything of my life that is celebrated online, has not come easily, conveniently, or cheaply.

Living a highly fulfilling life means you’ll often be putting in effort alone, without a cheer squad, a marching band, or even a Like on Facebook to encourage you.

All humans experience happiness in exactly the same way. It’s a combination of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. That’s it. That’s the happiness cocktail.

We can get happy by procrastinating, gossiping, buying things we don’t need, or eating things that aren’t good for us.

Perhaps we need a new focus: not happy, but fulfilled.

Everything I’ve done in my life that is fulfilling has not made me happy.

Pretty much anything that’s been fulfilling in my life, whether raising a child or submitting a PhD thesis, has been about 20% joy and roughly 80% really hard work.

Happiness is a distraction from fulfillment.

Happiness is easy. Fulfillment is effortful. If you want to be happy, order a Big Mac and watch Netflix.

If you’re going to spend half of your life everyday doing anything, I think it should be as meaningful to you as possible

You’ll never have enough. Money, promotions, cars, gadgets, friends, territory, influence… you’ll never stop wanting more.

Most people, most of the time, don’t care what we do for work nearly as much as why we’re working and who we’re working with

You don’t have to change your job, but you will have to change your mind.

It’s like life, we only truly value the life we have when we embrace the inevitability of its eventual end.

Each member of your team has a life outside of their work, and improving the quality of that life is the real reason they show up to work every day.

Your work is how you add value to the world in exchange for a share of the world’s resources.

Work is how you express gratitude for being born into the most abundant time in all of human history by participating in the society that provides it for you.

We take them personally because they are deeply personal.

It’s not a job, it’s half of your life!

Personal Goals + Corporate Vision = Meaningful Management

I’m not willing to waste half of a human life today.

What if your job was the most meaningful half of your life?

If you are going to spend half of your life at work, it should be a meaningful half.

Remember, half of your life is spent in relationships with people you work with.

Meaninglessness at work is like a cancer that can grow unseen in your heart over time, slowly reducing the quality of your life, until one day, the cancer metastasizes: you wake up and hate your job.

But it’s never “just a job”, is it? It’s half of your life.

And when people hate half of their lives, well, that’s just not acceptable to me.

It’s a well-known fact now that people who describe their lives as meaningful live longer, are healthier, and happier.

Happiness is a good thing but not the best thing.

Fulfillment is the satisfaction of doing the right things with the required amount of effort to achieve something truly meaningful. And it’s very different from happiness.

There’s no right or wrong answer to the question of what you find meaningful in your community’s vision. It’s entirely up to you.

The quality of half of your life depends on your ability to find meaning in your work.

Humans are highly skilled at finding meaning in things, and it’s a low hanging fruit for you to find meaning in your own life.

The only important meaning is the one that’s created in your head.

Humans are remarkably talented at creating meaning for themselves.

Every bit of meaning in life counts.

You deserve to know with great clarity why you are in the job you’re in.

Whether you love your job or hate it, it’s a big part of you, and it is leading you in the direction of your personal vision for your life.

Finding one’s passion isn’t necessarily about doing something different with your life; rather, it’s about discovering and connecting passionately with what you are already doing with your life.

Every corporate community is the composition of the personal visions and goals of its members.

Every author has their own twist to what is essentially the same concept: your personal description of your future best-life scenario.

The only person to whom your vision statement needs to be meaningful is you. Long or short doesn’t matter.

You don’t have to use the words vision, passion, purpose, or calling to describe your vision. Call it whatever you like.

Your vision is a description of the kind of future you would like to live in if everything goes well for you.

You have a limited number of days on this planet, so anything that comprises half of every day should be as meaningful as possible

If we can agree that gratitude is an appropriate starting place for being alive, then perhaps love is a more accessible and attainable goal for living.

Darkness only exists where light is absent. All the light needs to do is shine, and the darkness has no choice but to run away.

Imagine your life surrounded by people who are convinced that your voice in their lives is integral to the quality of their human experience.

I believe that each person on this planet has a sacred responsibility to our human community to add value through our work. Work is an expression of gratitude for the abundant world in which we were born.

I learned that motivation is weak and that success doesn’t come from how I feel about something but from whether or not its completion would be meaningful to me and to those around me.

What is the job description of the Spartan CEO of your life?

Money, Profit & Strategy 56

Stop buying cool things that don’t have a solid business case for implementation! Stop it!

You don’t get to the top by playing defense. You get there by rewriting the rules.

If you’re still waiting for stability before making bold moves, you’ll wait forever. Adaptability isn’t optional—it’s survival.

The best CEOs cannibalize their own business before competitors do. The moment you stop disrupting, you start dying.

No, your company is not likely to last a hundred years. Few do.

Imagine waking up one morning to find that you no longer own your name.

Your social media accounts are gone, your brand erased, and your identity held for ransom—legally.

I’ve personally dealt with copycat accounts, but what’s more alarming is that I know of influencers who have lost not just their accounts, but the rights to their own names.

When someone sees potential in your brand, they can register your name as intellectual property (IP).

You’re left with two choices: fight a costly legal battle or buy back your own name.

I played the game in reverse—but only because I knew about the game.

Passenger-centricity is very often diametrically opposed to shareholder supremacy in aviation.

Ask twelve VPs for the destination and you’ll get twelve different headings

The reason we can’t afford to retain talent in Dubai is that we are spending too much money on the salaries of high level managers who don’t have the capacity to self-assess.

In China as of now, there will never be another time, ever, when petrol cars outsell electric cars

EV means low maintenance costs, but AI means low labour costs too.

How long will it be until all major global cities are swarming with driverless electric taxis? 5 years? 3 years?

So, what will your last car be?

Sex isn’t a distraction from life. It is an essential part of it, however you express yourself.

The problem with sex is, that if you want to include someone else, you’re going to need to improve the quality of their life as much as they are improving the quality of yours.

You get who you pay for.

Practice doesn’t make perfect, nothing makes perfect. Practice makes done, and done makes money.

Strategy without story is just work; and story without strategy is just rhetoric

AI won’t replace your business model in the next 5 years. But businesses that integrate AI well will definitely replace those that don’t.

Curate your competition

Adapt. Innovate. Disrupt.

If you’re not winning, change the game

Business is an elegant social game

You are the product of 10,000 generations of successful survival and adaptation

You have a million years of survival and adaptation in your head. You’ll be fine.

You can’t aim to be rich if you do not already value monetizing your work.

Unprofitable happiness is just as unfavorable of an outcome as profitable unhappiness.

Strategy without a story is just work; and a story without strategy is just rhetoric.

The mission statement is the most difficult and most confused concept in corporate strategy.

Your vision statement brings into words a picture of what you want to achieve in the future, and your mission statement brings into words the means by which you plan to achieve it

Vision is an idea of a destination, and mission, the means of transportation.

Sometimes, our intentions crash into an iceberg of life and sink.

A changing reality can have a significant impact on our ability to reach our goals, and even on the wisdom of keeping them.

My vision and mission provide the destination and the mode of transport, my values govern the kinds of decisions I will make and behaviors I will exhibit.

I find strategic goal-setting more than a year in advance to be a bit restrictive.

Your mission is a description of the dominant methodologies for reaching your vision. It is how you will make progress.

Fitter organizations make more money.

The bottom line is fitter leaders make more money, for themselves and their shareholders.

So if you want to improve your net margin this year, how about you start by dropping a couple of inches on your waistline?

Your margin lies in what your people are doing when they aren’t being managed.

You can lose weight by chopping off a leg, but it’ll impact your fitness a great deal as well.

Liposuction is a fool’s path to fitness. Fat is stored energy.

Business is football, not basketball.

We upgrade our weakest links because business is a football game, not a basketball game, and our rivals are waiting for us in the middle of the field.

Competition drives innovation.

Microsoft needed a rival as much as Apple needed the cash.

The wonderful thing about infinite games such as business is that the rules are constantly changing.

One of the most ridiculous measures of success is the year-end annual report.

The referee is your market.

So it’s not enough to just identify your competition; you must also identify disruptors that are eroding your field.

Sometimes your competitors in one game can be your allies in another game.

Mortality & Legacy 5

The cold truth is that whether employees are marginalised and devalued within their jobs, or cut out from their economic communities involuntarily, some of them will die as a result (directly or indirectly) of those managerial decisions. That’s the science of it. And it should make every CEO shudder.

Being made redundant can be fatal.

Loneliness and isolation are kinds of pain.

Long after my children’s children’s children have forgotten my name … I will still be heard.

We all have only 24 hours each day, and once those hours are gone, we never get them back.

Self-Awareness & Identity 95

Most professionals aren’t afraid of AI. They’re afraid of looking incompetent in public. Pride is a career tax.

But a mirror doesn’t make you stronger. It’s the work you do after seeing the reflection that creates real transformation.

But if you dig beneath the glittering surface of C-suite success, you’ll find something else entirely: accountability.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth most leaders won’t say out loud: motivation is BS.

Accountability drags your tired, overcommitted, perfectionist self across that finish line when motivation runs out of gas.

Weekly accountability allows you to course correct before the ship sinks. It’s like checking the oil before you blow the engine.

Regular reflection forces you to own your crap, fix it fast, and move forward.

When you waste time because of unclear goals and zero accountability, you’re not just misusing your time, you’re squandering the company’s future.

I often remind myself of how empty and hollow my life would be if I only did things that I wanted to do.

When I have hit my personal records, all of them, it was a matter of discipline. I intentionally chose behaviors that led to my personal success.

You are what you do, not what you intend.

No one in your entire life has ever seen a single one of your intentions

Most of the rules by which business games are played, we invented as kids, on a playground somewhere.

Those who stopped wanting, stopped having, and stopped surviving.

You can quit anytime you want. Of course you’ll need to bear the consequences of that, but you’re not a slave.

If there was a better, faster, more effective way for you to improve the quality of your life, you’d be doing that instead. But you’re not, you’re doing this.

It’s amazing what a task force can do when armed with Google, a whiteboard, and some old-fashioned leadership.

I had to be humble enough to ask strangers for help. I had to admit to myself that I could not do it alone.

Humans haven’t evolved to live and work in isolation from each other.

There’s no one to notice the micro-patterns the athlete can’t see, because they’re too busy being inside their own performance.

Even a strong track record is not enough, because yesterday’s success can become tomorrow’s cognitive bias or aging heuristic.

The brain is not designed to see itself clearly under pressure. It protects identity. It justifies decisions. It edits memory. It confuses confidence with accuracy.

If you want to know where the expanded margin of your company is really hiding, try checking the shadow of your executive’s ego.

I had written the same article twice and not noticed.

Ownership follows, because competent leaders claim what they can defend, and each layer holds what it watches the layer above it hold.

Those that need to hear this are generally arrogant, and due to their insecurities, avoid self-reflection.

The second question most people will ask you after meeting you for the first time is, “what do you do?”

For a million years of evolutionary history, humans have banded together to play economic games so that we can provide for each other and protect each other.

The world doesn’t owe you anything. Karma is not going to save you. And the only way you’ll find yourself in the quality of life you aspire to be in is if you get your shit together.

Hanging in there is exhausting! No one can get through it if they “just hang in there”. That’s a lie.

Believing in yourself is over-rated. Getting things done is a much better path to success.

Maybe you’ll stop treating God, or karma, or the universe, as some kind of eternal Santa Claus whose nice list you need to remain on in order to get your pile of presents

Eat, Pray, Love was a terrible book, and an even worse movie. It was a monument to selfishness and indulgence.

No regrets, only memories

We are what we do. And our work is a huge part of that. Business is personal.

No one is in your head with you. No one can ever know your intentions or your motives. To everyone else on the planet, you are a collection of your words and deeds.

Your intentions are meaningful only to you. To everyone else, you are what you do, regardless of what you intend.

The truth is, you’re exactly the kind of person that does what you do.

Just own your behavior. If there are behaviors that you don’t like about yourself, you have a choice: you can either change your behavior or change your view of yourself.

If we tell ourselves that we are fat, ugly, and stupid, then science shows that we will make decisions that lead us in the direction of fulfilling those descriptions as prophecies.

Humans are weird. But hackable.

You will end up becoming what you describe. We can’t help it. We’re human after all.

Our tendency is to be generous with ourselves unless we receive feedback from someone outside of us that we respect.

Fact is, your internal view of yourself is pretty strong, until you allow others to change it for you. And if it can change once, it can change again.

We are what we do.

Regret is to the past what worry is to the future. But worry is worse, because it’s like regretting something that hasn’t even happened.

As I get older, I’m becoming clearer about who I am and what I stand for.

You’re not a machine, not a victim, and not an idiot.

Valuing your work starts with valuing yourself.

Sometimes we’re good at things we don’t recognize in ourselves.

I am not perfect, flawless, or untouchable. Just ask my wife!

We often don’t see ourselves clearly, since we can judge ourselves by our intentions rather than our behaviors.

The words you use to describe yourself are powerful enough to subconsciously influence the decisions you make.

People feel betrayed when they find out their tiny gods are just humans wrapped in high expectations.

No one is a god, no matter how good their hair looks!

All the rules are made up by people not smarter than you. And you’ve earned the right to make up a few rules yourself.

CXOs spend their entire careers becoming experts, and it’s their niche competence in their area of discipline that earns them their seat at the EXCO table. They are the most competent they’ve ever been, yet at the same time, they can feel the most stupid and inadequate they’ve ever felt.

Executives have mastered the bark, but staying in their lane can result in blindness to the tree in which the bark is wrapped, and too careful a study of the tree, too, risks complete ignorance of the forest in which it sits.

I often feel just as human, just as vulnerable, as the CXO clients I coach.

Authenticity at the top is a double-edged sword.

Leaders are told by gurus like Simon Sinek to be authentic for the sake of their leadership, but what if authenticity is precisely what they need to conceal for the sake of their leadership?

Let’s face it: CXO authenticity is often unwelcome in the business world.

Who can CXOs be authentic with when that very authenticity is a threat to their performance?

I didn’t realize how little I knew until I’d completed my second doctorate degree. I didn’t accept how powerless over the world I could be until I’d gone bankrupt twice.

I’ll be the first to concede that my previous experience in entrepreneurship and corporate leadership has long since passed its best-before date.

The fact is, we all have things we are unconsciously incompetent in. We don’t know what they are because we are unconscious of them.

Humans are social animals, and our survival throughout history has been based on belonging to tribes that will provide for us and protect us

Claiming to love someone else while hating yourself isn’t love, it’s worship. The love you have for yourself is what makes the love you give to others meaningful.

Our brains are hard-wired to experience social isolation as pain, to tell to us that something is wrong with the world – and that something needs to change in order to ensure our survival.

Love is your native language, and the suppression of it is foreign, not the other way around.

You, like each of the other leaders in your organisation, are the product of a million years of successful survival, adaptation, and collaboration.

Pain is the brain’s way of telling us that something is wrong with the world, that we are being harmed.

Here’s the truth: although curiosity is one of my core values, care is not. People can be really irritating to me; what they’re talking about can seem irrelevant.

Keep in mind that the way you feel doesn’t have any bearing on your actual abilities, only on your perception of them.

People with an internal locus of control see themselves as the directors of their lives.

Your attitude is the low-hanging fruit.

No matter how dire the situation, your attitude about how you face it is in your control. Make a choice for optimism.

Gratitude is the antidote for anger.

It’s neuro-chemically impossible for humans to remain angry and grateful at the same time.

Ah, the lies we tell ourselves to look important. Humans can be pretty stupid sometimes.

In order to succeed, I’ll need some very new tools to manage some very old problems.

We are all in one way or another that terrified modern ape, shuddering and swearing on the ladder of our lives as we try to climb it.

My fear of heights was a best practice for survival for my ancestors, who lived in a world that no longer exists for me.

Too much order is just as bad as too much chaos.

There’s truly no upper limit to human wanting. So get used to your dissatisfaction, it’s not going away.

If you hated someone the last time you saw them, it’s likely that you’ll hate them again the next time you see them, even if years have gone by in between

I’m not what I intend. I’m what I actually do.

There’s altogether too much emphasis on being these days.

The problem with being yourself is that you’re the only person who will ever know who that is.

It’s only in the echo you receive from the world that you will be fully aware of who you are.

To everyone else in your life, you are a collection of words and deeds.

To everyone else, you are a “human doing,” not a “human being.”

Time and money reveal your values

Your brain is hardwired to concentrate on your weaknesses because they are a threat to your survival.

You think of your weaknesses as something you can change, but your strengths as something that’s fixed.

Teams, Trust & Culture 102

Your wizards are being hunted by companies willing to pay them better, and let them work from home at 2am on a Friday night if that’s what they want.

It is not right that one member of the community should suffer totally, when every member can chip in just a little.

Culture does not start with policies. Culture starts at the top. More precisely, with the CEO’s nervous system.

Stepping into the CEO role often feels like ascending a solitary peak. The vistas are expansive, but the trails are scarcely marked, and the air is thin with isolation.

Humans are not resources. We are messy and wonderful creatures looking for meaning and purpose in our economic communities.

People don’t just work for salaries; they work for communities they resonate with. Make yours worth joining.

Humans love rituals, so have some fun designing them for your team.

You can throw all the perks you want at them, but if they don’t see meaning in their work, they’re gone.

Leadership isn’t a solo mission. It’s a co-op game.

You’re probably not in your job because you are passionate about the product or service that your company delivers. That’s perfectly ok, neither is anyone else in your company.

Being selfish on a team is how you are getting it done for yourself.

There’s no “company” out there to get mad at. The company doesn’t think, doesn’t have opinions, and doesn’t want anything, ever.

We can be tempted to think of our work as something uber-serious or sacred, but it’s not. It’s just a social game.

Instead of treating your boss like a jailor whose orders you need to follow, try to see them as a human whom you are responsible for helping.

You weren’t chosen because of your qualifications, you were chosen because you are a “good fit” and a “kind of person.”

When a manager is truly caring for the interests of the owners, without compromising the interests of the customers and employees, then the owners can sleep well.

You might own the company, but the people work for themselves.

Companies are communities, and each employee has dedicated half of their conscious life to a community that they are trusting to take care of them. The contract is reciprocal.

Gender parity in leadership has been a feature of strong cultures like Sparta for more than 2500 years.

Everyone is a bit selfish. Knowing what your contacts want to achieve in their lives gives you a strategic advantage.

I often try to add so much value that whoever I’m talking with can’t help but want to do the same for me.

Employees won’t tell you if they’re struggling with loneliness, depression, or isolation, so you’ll need to ask.

The person leading the team (let’s call them: Team Captain) is one of the most impactful variables in performance outcomes. Not the mission statement. Not the laminated values poster. Not the espresso machine in the innovation lab.

I think the leaders of Boeing were doing exactly as they had been taught to do, and in the managerial culture of the United States, the crashes were arguably inevitable.

Boeing is a brand name placed on the collective wills of a group of humans that are all dedicating half of their lives each day to the economic game of aviation.

Reducing humans to resources allowed for executives and consultants to think of cost cutting as a reduction of the labour budget rather than the dramatic and painful exclusion of thousands of humans from their economic communities.

Employees were marginalized, culled, ignored, and excluded at Boeing.

In a culture of self-preservation like Boeing’s, no one was left to consider the pilots, or the passengers

Engagement fails last and everywhere, because engagement is the organisation’s verdict on everything it has watched the top three layers do.

Engagement is a byproduct of modelled Capability, visible Ownership and consistent Direction.

You still owe people the honest answer to what changes, what stays and what happens to them.

No one likes being treated like a number, a target, or a KPI.

Your team’s targets are your targets. And you can’t control their level of discretionary effort.

For people to do well when they’re not being watched, they need to feel connected and cared for.

I only coach people I’d hang out with socially.

Every employee shows up to work, not out of love for the brand or the product, but out of dedication to their own families and personal goals.

No one is hired because of their CV.

Remind them that they were chosen to play on your team because of who they are, not just what they’ve done in the past.

You’re not a machine part, and you’re not a set-and-forget robot

There are no “companies,” only economic tribes

Being together > Being right

There is no individual without an organization, and there is no organization without the individual

My point is that humans bond in groups over collections of words that their groups find meaningful.

There is no “company,” only a corporate community.

Business is personal.

We used to compete with each other in military contests, literally killing each other over land and resources. We humans have a violent history.

Our shift from military to economic competition has led to a paradox: while there are more humans alive to compete than ever before, fewer and fewer of us are raping and pillaging our way to success.

If you continue to take up space in a community that you’re not aligned to, then you’re robbing someone else out there of a potential place in a community that is meaningful to them. And that’s mean. So, don’t be mean.

You’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of individuals all judging themselves by their intentions and each other by their behaviors.

And the better we are at finding alignment between our individual and communal roles, the more holistically, healthily, and happily we will live together.

Humans have evolved and adapted to survive and reproduce, and our best resource for doing both is our community.

As humans, to survive, we need to be in a community, and we all have an innate desire to make meaningful contributions to our communities.

As humans in economic communities, we rise together and fall together.

Humans are wonderful and powerful social creatures. We need each other.

You’re here because teaming up with other humans is an evolutionary imperative.

Transparency builds trust, and trust builds transparency.

At 110 degrees Celsius (230 degrees Fahrenheit), the Estonian sauna is a perfect environment for encouraging transparency and trust.

In a room of naked men, it was appropriate to bare our souls.

Regardless of what you call your HR department, humans are not resources, nor do they behave like capital.

Sometimes conflict resulting from a defensive posture reveals less about the wolf than their cage.

Sometimes it seems like the CFO thinks being a finance expert makes them an automatic expert in everything else, too!

Smooth is not profitable.

No leader is omni-talented, but in my experience a well-curated EXCO can get pretty close.

The fact is, your executives don’t trust each other.

They’ll lie to you. Your executives. They’ll look you straight in the eyes and tell you they know what they’re doing, they’re confident in their decisions, and they have no exit plans.

Disputes, like misunderstandings, aren’t evil.

“We’ve come to an understanding” means that we have agreed to disagree, but that what we do agree on is that our relationship is more valuable than our disagreement.

All forms of attack, whether physical or verbal, passive or direct, digital or IRL, are forms of violence.

The road to exclusion and social isolation is paved with two kinds of violence: attack and withdrawal

The loving response to violence isn’t to attack back, or to withdraw further. Love confronts both attack and withdrawal with truth, and openness to reconciliation.

All sincere pursuits of forgiveness and reconciliation are indistinguishable from love

There are two kinds of unlove: attack and withdrawal.

Businesses are just modern forms of economic tribes, from a group psychology perspective.

We need to be careful not to outlaw natural human connection because of a few members’ social sensitivities.

INCLUSION = PRESENCE + PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY

Inclusion is not enough. It’s just the beginning.

We know inclusion works on the bottom line. Love is where I think it should take us.

I translated DEI from something that was just and fair into something that might hit you right in the KPI, profit.

What makes us different makes us money.

We’re living in fear of a rumour that isn’t actually true.

Sex between co-workers is on the rise, but sexual harassment is in decline.

Whether you call yourselves a company, community, tribe, or family, you should work towards love.

I’m afraid that “love” might just become the next big fad. That love, like happiness, empathy, and servanthood, will become commoditised.

Proper distance is defined individually, through a swift negotiation by both parties in an interaction, and it fluctuates based on the level of trust in the relationship.

The trust and transparency that comes with loving others, which can be so difficult to build, is unfortunately very easy to break

Is it really love? Maybe not, but it’s probably not other-than-love either. It’s trust and respect, and it was earned in a relationship.

Psychological safety is when an employee feels the freedom to speak up whether they think their voice will be listened to or not.

When people feel cared for, their health improves, and productivity goes up.

Those who survive become survivalists.

A community that learns together grows together.

Pursue fun as a critical success factor in your business.

Your team members are with you for a reason. They are there because they fundamentally believe that being with you is their fastest, most effective route to achieve their personal life goals.

You can’t run the Tough Mudder like a Spartan, but you can definitely run the Spartan like a Tough Mudder.

Male and female humans may be equal, but we are definitely not the same.

Everyone can do this, and no one can do it alone.

In other words, people who belong more perform better. Inclusion has a direct positive impact on group performance.

The weakest link is the most important player because they are holding back the average performance of the organization.

In business, you’re not as strong as your strongest players; rather, you’re as weak as your weakest team members.

The most effective strategy in business is still the same one that humans have honed over 300,000 years of evolution: find other humans that you trust and work together.

Oxytocin is the most valuable currency on the planet.

Ensuring that we are surrounded by other humans we can trust is the single most dominant activity in our lives. Not convinced? Check Facebook.

The social ties that bind us to each other are what keep us loyal to each other when no one is looking.

Time & Productivity 70

If Executive Performance can be measured, then it can be coached.

Goals + Accountability + Time-Bound Reflection = High Performance.

I schedule time for the hard things at least 3 weeks in advance in my calendar, and I make them sacred, to ensure that I’m always working on the meaningful things.

You can’t lead if you’re running on fumes. Your brain is your biggest asset—protect it.

CEOs who ignore their own well-being won’t be CEOs much longer.

If you can’t focus, you can’t lead.

If you can’t master your attention, your competitors will.

You, me, and Elon Musk have exactly the same amount of time each day. It’s the only fair resource.

Having a specific chair in your house that you only use for work is a great start to bringing your mind, body, and environment into sync.

Yet we run that exact experiment with executives every single day, and wonder why executive performance remains the number-one organizational bottleneck.

Because pressure doesn’t make people better. Pressure reveals the quality of their preparation.

Coaching weaponizes your time. Flow. Focus. Fatigue management. These aren’t nice ideas. They’re income-generating neurological tools.

Now we play an elegant game of economics so that we can compete for resources without killing each other.

Since it’s not acceptable to pick a fight with other people in the office, or to physically steal from them in order to show them who’s boss, we do it in a new, more subtly terrifying way. We steal tiny bits of each other’s lives.

Try to manage your distractions and interruptions to ensure that whoever you are with (even if it’s just you spending time with yourself), gets absolutely all of you for that period of time.

If they’re more productive at night, wouldn’t you want them to work when they’re most productive?

Let go of the “time on chair” metric and start paying attention to “time on task.”

When you are at work, are you actually at work, or are you low-key checking Facebook and chatting with your friend?

Interruptions are external intrusions on your focus. Distractions are internal ones.

Motivation is a weak force. When the clock strikes 8:30 and it’s time to sit at your desk and get to work, the initial motivation only lasts about 30 seconds in your brain.

Meetings are the most expensive hours in an organization’s day

If you’re not failing from time to time, you’re not trying hard enough

I don’t charge for my time, I rent space in my head

Imagine being 500% more productive while having the time of your life.

Bending time is a learnable skill.

Busyness is not a measure of productivity.

Momentization, Mindfulness, and Flow are the neuroskills required for bending time.

Imagine yourself 5 times faster.

You don’t know how many days you will get, but you know that once today is gone, you’ll never get it back.

We’re living in the most abundant time in human history.

Leadership and management go hand in hand, but there are times when one hand should be intentionally stronger than the other.

Well-rested humans perform better work.

In truth, most worthwhile things are not a matter of happiness, they’re a matter of fulfillment, and fulfillment requires discipline.

The talents and skills that make up your best methodology for achieving your personal vision are the same ones that make you successful in your career.

The whole point of a KPI is to focus individual efforts on corporate goals, which flow from the corporate vision, mission, and values.

Time spent is not a measure of productivity.

I give the hardest things my best time.

High-performance athletes train 90% of the time and compete 10% of the time.

In the realm of peak performance, business is no different from football.

Peak performance is unsustainable, by definition, because it’s “peak.” No one can sprint at their highest speed for more than a few seconds.

I advocate optimum performance. It’s not your top speed I’m interested in, but raising the level of your average day.

Get up. Get going. Game on.

Nearly all high-performance athletes have high-performance coaches: that’s how they got there, and that’s how they stay there.

There is no upper limit to what our brains think they can handle, which is why everyone who burns out from overwhelm at work is surprised

What you are capable of (supply) will rise to meet what you require of yourself (demand).

Fear is tension, and tension is your worst enemy in freefall.

Panic is the worst possible choice.

How would your life change if you could get done on a Monday what would usually take you all week?

Work is not an imposition on your freedom

Work is your expression of gratitude for being born into an abundant world that you did not create

Work is not the means to an end, it is its own end. It’s meaningful all by itself.

Slow down to speed up.

We accept significant increases in stress for marginal gains in productivity.

“Busy” is a swearword. It’s not correlated with success or progress.

I hear one complaint from my clients more than any other, and by far: there’s not enough time.

There are 24 hours in a day, for everyone, including me and Elon Musk.

A minute in freefall is an eternity on the ground. Time is very, very, relative.

Time ticks by at one second per second for every human on the planet.

Keep in mind that you, me, and Jeff Bezos all get exactly the same amount of time each day.

I generally call “bullshit” when one of my clients tells me they can’t make time, they don’t have enough time, or they wish they had the time for something.

Time is time. And you don’t have an unlimited supply of it either.

You don’t know how many days you’ll get in your life, you just know that once today is over, you’ll never get it back.

Like a currency it can be invested, spent, and wasted. But unlike a currency it can’t be traded, bought, or sold. You can’t buy futures in time.

And regardless of what your boss tells you, TIME IS NOT MONEY.

So never, ever, fall into the trap of trading something as precious and unrecoverable as time for something as common as money.

Honor your time by setting priorities and keeping them, setting appointments with yourself and showing up early, and investing in the quality of your human experience.

Time is the only fair resource, and the most precious asset you have.

All hours are equal when they begin, but they are definitely not equal when they end.

Every hour in your life comes with the requirement of utilization. It will go by. It will be used up. And then, it will be gone.

You can do a lot in 7 seconds when your life depends on it

Values & Character 45

There’s always a person, an individual, committing the crime on behalf of the corporation.

Input-seeking behavior is a skill

Values describe the kind of person you are and the kinds of decisions you make

Your intentions are only valuable to you. Everyone else knows you only by your actions

Loyalty: the ability to value being together over being right

Who are you and what do you stand for?

Leave in a way that you are proud of yourself. Don’t steal time or resources from your current community on your way out.

If the vision is why, and the mission is how … values answer the question of who. Who are you, really?

Values are underlying biases toward certain kinds of decisions. They lead to action.

If there’s no evidence of it in your behavior, it’s not a value, it’s an intention. Intentions are only interesting to you. No one else in your life will ever see your intentions.

Real values are espoused through consistent behavior that make them visible to others.

I agree with Sinek that values must be actionable, but I do not agree with him that they need to be expressed as verbs.

You can only say that you value honesty if telling the truth is already an identifiable and dominant behavior pattern.

I think it’s not possible to produce a vision for your life that doesn’t embrace your core values.

No one is perfect, and no one behaves with total consistency in anything all of the time.

At any moment, you can make a conscious decision to behave in opposition to your values.

Values should be both descriptive and aspirational.

Integrity is the quality of being untouched, or perhaps in the case of a value, untouchable.

You’re only human, so don’t expect your behavior to align perfectly with your values.

I have the greatest difficulty in convincing boards of directors to avoid the temptation of defining their values.

Once you have a meaningful set of value words, the least effective thing you can do with them is to define them.

Every bit of definition that the leadership adds to the words restricts the ability of the employees to create meaningful connections with them in their own minds.

If your intent is to govern behavior, use the Employee Handbook, but don’t steal away meaning from corporate values.

Your values describe who you are and the kinds of decisions you make. They are the foundation of your behaviors.

When attempting to raise the performance of already high-performers – such as Grand Slam tennis players, first-chair violin players, or high-performing executives – the coach is ethically required to know the game.

At the CXO level, you are ethically obligated to be prepared with enough education, experience, and contextual knowledge to provide good tactical advice and to offer it.

Only in complete confidentiality can total transparency be achieved – and with it, the highest quality of coaching.

My rule of thumb is that if I’m not willing to call a government regulator about it, then the secret stays with me.

I often joke that I carry billion-dollar secrets on my laptop, except when it’s not a joke.

Isn’t the surgeon obligated not only to know their craft, but to use what they know in service of their patient?

I think that the proper response to our existence is gratitude.

If I share my food with you today, maybe you’ll share your food with me tomorrow.

If you want people to add value to you, add so much value to them that it’s impossible for them not to respond.

I think we all need to be a lot more gracious with each other.

Asking for consent to flirt is not the same as flirting.

I hope I don’t have to defend what should be obvious to all of us: that workplace sexual harassment has nothing at all to do with love.

Sexual harassment is not love. It doesn’t come from a place of love, and it is not a genuine expression of love.

Sexual attraction is romantic when it’s mutual, but harassment if it’s only one-sided.

Asking for consent to flirt with someone is not the same as flirting with them, just as asking consent to punch someone in the face is not the same as actually punching them.

Asking is free speech, punching is assault.

What if they don’t want to be protected from your values? What if they value your values, even if your values are different from theirs?

Professional distance was manufactured right alongside the steam engine and the assembly line, so that our personal values don’t get in the way of our collective interest in our new economic tribes.

I think the majority of the world’s population is morally good. That’s a positivity default that helps me to love people I don’t agree with.

In a community, what’s good for us should be good for all of us.

Professional distance at its best protects others from our values, but love occurs when we embrace others in spite of our differing values.

Work & Life 51

Text is the lowest form of communication, so try using your phone as a phone instead and add some tone and cadence to your words

Suddenly remote work was not an exception to the rule, it was the rule.

There are only so many Zoom calls you can take in a day before the frustration of never being able to make direct eye contact starts to wear on you.

It’s a sad fact that the flexibility that comes with remote work is often accompanied by social isolation and disengagement.

People are not designed to separate work from life.

If your whole life is a series of experiences gained between birth and death, then half of those experiences will likely be work related

You check your Facebook at work and you read your work emails at home. That’s not bad work life balance, that’s just worklife blend

I think it’s high time we stop pretending like we have clear-cut boxes in our heads for work and non-work experiences. It’s psychologically untrue, and can be damaging for us when forced.

Are you any less a parent to your child when you are at work? No. You are 100% parent.

You are all of your social roles all of the time, and that’s a freeing realization.

I’m a father to 5 kids, and I’ve been their father the whole time I’ve been writing this article.

Stop teaching your employees to balance work with life. It’s silly.

There’s nothing to be balanced with life, it’s all just life – a good deal of which is work

The fallacy of work-life balance was born out of bad management ideas that sought to differentiate work from life so that when employees are made redundant, we can tell them that they’re not losing their lives, just their work.

Your work is your life, or at least roughly half of it.

Half or more of all of the experiences that make up a human life are gained at work.

Work is life. It’s not all of life, but it’s not other-than life.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. It’s a stupid idea.

If you are thinking about your work while you are actively parenting, you’re not parenting at your best. And if you are distracted by your kids while you are working, you’re not working at your best. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Kids don’t understand or respect the way the adult world works, so if they break through the boundaries to tap on your thigh for a hug… give them a hug.

Gender balance is a strategic advantage

Your job isn’t all of you, and it’s not other-than you

You have options. Change your job OR change the way you experience your job.

There was no division of work from life, because work was life.

We were what we did for work. Anything outside of that was leisure, and leisure too, was luxury.

In only 100 years, we devolved from work being your life to work being other than your life.

Being at work doesn’t mean we’re not living our lives. We are alive at work.

You are your job.

Your job isn’t all of you, but it’s definitely not other-than-you. In fact, it’s roughly half of you.

We are all of our roles, all of the time. That’s why we check Facebook at work and check work emails at home.

As humans, we fundamentally cannot maintain the dualism between work and life.

There is no such thing as work-life balance. There are no scales called work and life that need to remain at equilibrium.

There is only work-life blend. You are what you do.

Hating your job, psychologically, is a bit like hating half of yourself. It’s unhealthy.

But dividing your identity between work and life is a psychological tragedy. You are what you do (for work).

You are your job. It’s not all of you, but it’s not other than you either. It’s YOUR life, start by owning all of it.

Business is personal, and your business is personal to you.

It’s not a job, it’s half your life.

When your body is at work, your mind will be there too, because you have a clear goal for family time that you are protecting intentionally.

The fact is, none of us should be living dual lives.

So, stop trying to balance your work and your life, and just embrace the truth that work is a big part of your holistic life. You are your work.

Companies stopped “refreezing” altogether and “change” evolved from a phase to a constant.

Clients call because something in their life is broken and they want to know what to do to fix it. They want rapid behavioral change.

There can be no meaningful change without external input.

What your executives knew five years ago about management will be nearly irrelevant five years from now.

I tell all my coachees that I don’t rent my time, I rent space in my head.

Whatever was said has been said, and whatever was done has been done. But what it means is entirely up to you, because you’re the only person who experiences what something means to you.

It’s your choice – so try starting from the best possible interpretation and see if it changes the quality of your life and relationships.

What I wasn’t taught was this: when I grew into an adult, I was going to have to spend half of my life in a job, with people I wasn’t supposed to love.

We all need to be connected, and since half of our waking lives are spent at work each day, being connected at work is a necessary part of our human experience.

Work-spouses provide evidence that professional distance is often inefficient, and that work-life balance is a myth.