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...

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,...

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...