Allocation As The New Leadership Skill
A machine can now do the wrong things far more efficiently than any human. If you haven't figured out what the right things are, the tool just accelerates the misallocation.
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What's Left When The Machine Finishes
Analysis takes things apart. Composition puts them together into something that didn't exist before.
Taste Is A Leadership Skill
AI is excellent at generation. It can produce endless options, drafts, strategies, designs. But generation without discrimination is just volume. Someone has to look at the output and know what's good. That's taste.
The Skill That Can't Be Automated
Most of us are operating on more borrowed knowledge than we realize. The frameworks we've absorbed, the terminology we've picked up, the concepts we reference because we've heard them referenced—these give us fluency. Fluency is genuinely useful. But fluency isn't understanding, and the gap between the two is easy to miss because the fluency feels so much like comprehension.
The Conceptual Age Hit Leadership Teams First
Three forces—material abundance, automation, and global outsourcing—are rendering pure left-brain analytical work insufficient. The economy has shifted from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, where right-brain abilities would become the primary source of value. There are six senses exist for this new era: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning.
The Question That Changes The Room
We evaluate our past decisions under conditions that would be thrown out of any fair court. The defendant is your past self. The judge is your current self, armed with all the information the defendant never had. It's a rigged trial, and we run it on ourselves constantly.
Two Incompatible Things
The most useful definition of stress I've encountered is also the simplest: stress is the internal state of wanting two incompatible things at the same time.
Still Here
If you've reached out over the past two days—thank you. Whether I was able to express my gratitude appropriately or not, it really mattered and meant something to me.
The Long Game of Character
Character isn't a moral ideal. It's a filter. And over enough time, it's the most powerful one you have.
Forgive Yourself For Not Knowing
We evaluate our past decisions under conditions that would be thrown out of any fair court. The defendant is your past self. The judge is your current self, armed with all the information the defendant never had. It's a rigged trial, and we run it on ourselves constantly.
Borrowing Knowledge
Most of us are operating on more borrowed knowledge than we realize. The frameworks we've absorbed, the terminology we've picked up, the concepts we reference because we've heard them referenced—these give us fluency. Fluency is genuinely useful. But fluency isn't understanding, and the gap between the two is easy to miss because the fluency feels so much like comprehension.
The Focus You Fear
There's a difference between working on something and being in something, and I think the difference is time. It's not necessarily clock time, it's accumulated attention.
The Engine That Runs You
There's a question I've started using with clients that sounds simple but tends to land hard: What's actually driving you right now?
The Reputation You Have With Yourself
I've started thinking about self-esteem differently in that it is the reputation you have with yourself. Not confidence as a personality trait or positive self-talk, but something more structural.
Present In The Room
There's a line of thinking I keep coming back to: the idea that time isn't wasted by what you're doing, but by whether you're actually there for it.
The Operator's Guide to Morning Pages
I've been recommending something to the leaders I coach that sounds almost too simple to be useful: twenty minutes of longhand writing, first thing in the morning.