It’s August, and I’m bracing myself. This time every year, I start itching for change in a burn-it-all-down-and-start-over kind of way. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t taken any time off (yet! t-minus 12 days and counting) and I’m tired. Or maybe it’s just being 8 months into the year and increasingly clear about what is and isn’t working. Whatever it is, I’m getting restless. Is it just me? I share this as I’m writing chapter 7 in my book, which is all about the...
29 days ago • 5 min read
I watched the series finale of The Bear last night, and I know I'll be thinking about it for days to come. Have you been watching? The whole series is a study in how people come together to transform something—in this case, a Chicago beef sandwich shop into an elevated, innovative fine-dining experience. The arc of the business is mirrored in the arcs of the people who work there, both individually—in the journeys they take from doers to dreamers to leaders—and collectively. The Bear is many...
2 months ago • 5 min read
It was a real “oh $%#!“ moment. There I was, sorting through my inbox and scanning the headlines of various newsletters when a familiar phrase caught my eye. A group of BCG consultants had published a new book called How Change Really Works. Which, as you may recall, is the name of the book I’m currently writing. In a span of seconds, I had a whole range of thoughts and emotions: Sudden panic “Oh $%#!” followed immediately by… Surprising relief “Maybe I don’t have to write this book anymore”...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Any period of meaningful change—including this one right here—is defined by its liminal space. Liminal comes from the Latin limen meaning threshold, the space between what used to be and what will come to be. It’s the uneasy transitional period within a relationship dissolving, an organization merging, a technology emerging, a regime changing. Right now, many of us are living inside several liminal spaces at once. We no longer recognize the world as it was, and we can’t yet see what shape it...
4 months ago • 6 min read
I spent the first half of my career firefighting. Something would break, I’d fix it. Something would break again—usually in exactly the same way—and I’d fix it again. I thought speed was sophistication. I thought certainty was competence. It took me a long time to understand that I wasn’t solving problems; I was managing the most visible symptoms of complex systems I’d never sought to understand. Now look around. The systems we all depend on—organizational, political, economic, ecological—are...
5 months ago • 7 min read
She's a rising leader at a company you know well, whose products you use every day. She's been there the better part of a decade, and now she's done. "I can feel myself caring less and less," she told me this week. She's uncomfortable saying it—she's not the quiet-quitting type—but the vision she signed up for has been swallowed by her leaders' ambition. It's not enough for her anymore. In many ways, it's too much. Ambition is a tricky thing. It can be a motivating force, driving our growth,...
6 months ago • 7 min read
These are not business-as-usual times. And this is not a business-as-usual newsletter. Here, we know business doesn’t exist in its own hermetically sealed world. It is interdependent with—affected by and profoundly affecting—policy, culture, society, environment. The organizations we lead are not separate from the chaos and promise of this moment. They are of it. And yet, we see so many leaders trying to compartmentalize, heads down, hoping to ride out the turbulence by maintaining the status...
7 months ago • 7 min read
We got four inches of snowfall last night. As I walked Axl through the fluffy white morning, with powder underfoot and the lightest, dreamiest flurries dancing around us, I found myself marveling at the fact that the thick blanket covering everything in sight was created by the gathering and settling of one tiny snowflake after another. It seemed impossible. Magical. But I had to remind myself, this is the only way it ever happens. Out of current conditions, a new pattern arises. As it...
8 months ago • 4 min read
Happy Solstice. It may be the darkest day of the year (up here in the north anyway), but the solstice reminds us that the light is ready to return. To mark the occasion, here’s a little gift: The 2026 Leadership Intention workbook is here! Ready to find your 2026 intention? Grab the 2026 Leadership Intention Workbook and find the noble quality that wants to guide you—in leadership and in life—next year. I’ll share more in the January newsletter about why intentional practice is a gamechanger,...
8 months ago • 1 min read