Index
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Leadership
Vision, influence and the craft of leading people.
How Leaders Drive People Nuts
Imagine a person who drives you nuts. Realize you drive others crazy, too. Leadership magnifies your behavior. Even small irritations drive people nuts when you're the boss.
Leadership
Drucker on Decisions
Drucker said, “If you have quick consensus on an important matter, don’t make the decision.” Important decisions deserve rigorous debate. Constructive dissent makes them better. The purpose of dissent isn't disagreement. It's wisdom. 4 Ways to Improve Decisions
Leadership
The Most Dangerous Leadership Decline Looks Like Success
Leave a comment on this guest post by Dr. Denis Cronson to become eligible for one of 20 complimentary copies of his new book, The Executive Condition: The Hidden Health Crisis of High-Performing Leaders. There’s a blind spot in how we assess leadership performance. Dr Cronson's approach treats health as the foundational architecture for leadership. Click for a chance to win...
Leadership
The Go Slow Leader
Every generation feels life is more frantic than the one before. In 49 A.D. Seneca wrote, “Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present.” On the Shortness of Life Go slow to achieve what matters most.
Leadership
One-on-Ones Aren’t for You
Don’t ruin one-on-ones by making them about you. One-on-ones strengthen people. Set an intention before you open your mouth. You spend large amounts of time talking. Embrace the transformative power of one-on-one conversations. Click for more insights...
Author Talks: Why leadership intelligence matters in the AI age
Lessons from cognitive science can help leaders become wiser, more inspiring, and more resilient. McKinsey Senior Adviser Caroline Webb explains why human intelligence is a growing leadership advantage.
Leadership
When People Don’t Know
I love it when people say, “I don’t know.” Ignorance is the point of growth. Difficult problems are mirrors. “I don’t know” is a beginning. Stifle your need to solve. The solution people find for themselves is better than yours, even if it’s not as good.
Leadership
Is Childhood Running Leadership
I am – in many ways – the person I have been since childhood. My dad showed me how to love my wife. But otherwise, he rarely expressed emotion. I learned that emotions were private things. I have slowly learned how to show my heart. The value of looking back is insight, not blame.
Leadership
The Immaturity Penalty
Immaturity doesn't stay inside a person. It bleeds on everyone. One defensive person delays honest conversations. One hothead makes everyone walk on eggshells. An insecure leader turns talented people into threats. One leader who needs to be right keeps everyone working on the wrong problem. Gain insight into the immaturity penalty.
Team Management
Coordinating, delegating and getting the best from teams.
Winning: What the best athletes, teams, and coaches do differently
Eight disciplines for defining success, building the system to achieve it, and finding an edge when the margin between good and great is razor-thin.
The key to AI value is hiding in plain sight: Your operating model
New research shows that organizations undergoing AI transformation succeed not by adopting one “best” operating model, but by making intentional design choices and executing them effectively.
Team Management
Why Employees With Working-Class Roots Are Better at Getting Their Ideas Heard
Nimble Made/Unsplash Getting manager buy-in for a good idea is harder than it should be. Our research points to a communication style that reliably breaks through this wall — and that is disproportionately exhibited by white-collar employees with working-class origins. We studied how employees present ideas to their managers by conducting a field survey of […]
Team Management
Develop Your Team’s Social Capital, Not Just Their Skills
Leigh Wells/Ikon Images Leaders may prioritize executing strategy and driving organizational performance, but they are also responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Traditionally, leadership development has focused heavily on performance — an understandable emphasis, given that leaders themselves are evaluated and rewarded based on execution and results. However, as organizational strategies increasingly rely […]
Team Management
Organizational Culture
Values, workplace climate and company DNA.
How to Reinvent Your Company Without Starting Over
Grundini/Ikon Images How does a fossil fuel company become the world’s largest developer of offshore wind? How does a software company written off for missing the mobile revolution become one of the world’s most valuable companies in the age of AI? Ørsted and Microsoft have faced a puzzle familiar to many leaders: When...
Organizational Culture
When AI Disruption Never Ends
Phil Bliss/theispot.com A vice president of product opens her laptop on a Monday morning to find that the AI model her team had worked with for the past six weeks to build a customer workflow has been leapfrogged by a cheaper, faster alternative. Again. Her Slack feed is blowing up with links to the announcement. […]
Organizational Culture
How Leadership Anxiety Derails Transformation
Rob Dobi The Research This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of a professional services firm whose leaders initiated a major transformation to reverse declining performance. The research involved nearly 760 hours of observation across leadership and project team meetings, more than 300 interviews, and analyses of internal documents spanning the full life of […]
Organizational Culture
What Kind of Chief Purpose Officer Does Your Company Need?
Rob Dobi The Research The authors identified 56 individuals with purpose leadership roles who were representative of a variety of industries, company sizes, and regions. Of the CPOs interviewed, 60% identified as female and 40% as male. They conducted semi-structured interviews online from 2022 to 2025 to explore participants’ role experiences, strategic practices, and key […]
Organizational Culture
Dethroning Loyalty
Rob Dobi What’s wrong with loyalty? Isn’t it a virtue to display steadfast allegiance to something or someone other than oneself? After all, loyalty has been celebrated as a virtue across many cultures for millennia. As economic headwinds and a tough job market appear to be empowering more authoritarian styles of leadership, it’s a good […]
Organizational Culture
Tying Purpose to Performance
Photo courtesy DHL John Pearson has been CEO of DHL Express and on the DHL Group board of management since 2019. He joined the global logistics and courier company in 1986 and has held senior management positions in its divisions in the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S., and Europe. MIT Sloan Management Review […]
Organizational Culture
Spot New Tech Skills Emerging From the Workforce
Matt Chinworth Across industries, companies are investing unprecedented sums in reskilling programs to prepare employees to use emerging technologies.1 The programs are typically built around forecasts of which skills, such as data literacy, digital fluency, systems thinking, and adaptability, will matter most. Each year, when the forecasts are updated, training courses — and their related […]
Organizational Culture
Greenhushing: When Firms Do More Than They Say
Some companies downplay their environmental efforts, a practice known as greenhushing. A new working paper co-authored by Wharton’s Serguei Netessine finds that this gap between what firms say and what they do is associated with higher subsequent abnormal stock returns.…Read More
Productivity
Focus, habits and time management for leaders.
Wendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life
Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with ... Read more The post Wendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life appeared first on Cal Newport.
Productivity
A Routine that Changes Everything
You don't rise to the level of your intentions. You rise to the level of your routines. Don’t fall in love with bold decisions. Drama corrupts judgment. Win with daily routines. A universal principle of success: Don’t wait for motivation. Build a routine that makes meaningful work inevitable.
Strategy
Decisions, business and long-term thinking.
Strategy in the age of arenas
A group of fast-growing industries is reshaping the competitive landscape. Their rise requires business leaders to rethink strategy in two important ways.
Your budget is killing your strategy: four imperatives for CFOs
The traditional annual budget process is broken. It is rigid, backward-looking, and not operationally fit to keep up with today's fast-moving markets. Top-performing companies are outpacing peers by budgeting differently. Matthew Maloney, Karen McLoughlin, and Michele Tam join us to discuss their recent article on how top-performing companies are transforming the budget from a control mechanism to a dynamic road map for driving growth. They share how leading CFOs are more closely linking the budget to strategic priorities, and how harnessing AI enables a data-driven, forward-looking approach.
Strategy
The FDNY’s Transformation After 9/11
Gregory P. Shea, Wharton adjunct professor of management and co-author of 'Rising from Ground Zero,' discusses how the FDNY transformed its leadership, training, psychological support, and disaster response after 9/11.…Read More
Author Talks: What the world’s best owner-CEOs get right
How do exceptional leaders create enduring institutions? Three McKinsey authors reveal the leadership core behaviors and mindsets behind Asia’s most successful founder-CEOs—and how leaders everywhere can apply them.
The AI economy: Interconnected forces, feedback loops, and speeds of change
AI is shaped by forces far beyond the technology itself, and its effects reach just as widely. Mapping how the pieces interact helps us see what could influence its course and where hurdles and opportunities may emerge.
Strategy
The Business of Shared Scooters
Gad Allon, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, explains how shared bikes and scooters make money, why cities regulate them, and what their future looks like in urban transportation.…Read More
Strategy
Archer Roose Is Making Canned Wine Mainstream
Conley Downing, CMO of Archer Roose Wines, explains how the brand is building demand for premium single-serve canned wine through trial, distinctive branding, and consumer insight.…Read More
Personal Growth
Growth, mindset and the habits of a leader.
Tobi Lütke: AI Agents, Better Decisions, and the Future of Work
Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke joins Shane Parrish to discuss AI agents, better decision-making, and the future of work. He explains how he uses an AI council to examine his hardest decisions and why taste, judgment, and responsibility become more valuable as AI becomes more capable. They go inside Shopify’s work w...
Personal Growth
A Compelling Story Can Disarm Even a Skeptical Negotiator
Ivan Diaz/Unsplash Human beings are not good at separating fact from fiction. But surely hard-nosed B2B professionals are different? Our research suggests otherwise. In two experiments with 622 B2B sales professionals, we gave participants a negotiation scenario in which a buyer either lied or told the truth. We then gave half the participants a story […]
Personal Growth
Ask Sanyin: How Do I Communicate That I’ve Grown and Changed?
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Unsplash, Fotos After receiving some challenging feedback about my management style, I’ve done a lot of introspection, taken responsibility, worked with a coach, and I believe I’ve made real changes in how I work with others. But I don’t sense that others’ perceptions have changed accordingly. What else do I need […]
Personal Growth
Steve Jobs in Exile
We all know the Steve Jobs who came back in the late 1990s and saved Apple from becoming a footnote. And we’ve all heard the story of how, in 1985, he was pushed out of the company he’d created. What we don’t know is what happened in between. Public Release: September 1. Members have access … The post Steve Jobs in Exile appeared first on Farnam Street.
Personal Growth
What I’ve Learned: Kenneth Shropshire
In a wide-ranging conversation with Wharton Dean Erika James, Kenneth Shropshire reflects on his unconventional path to academia and how the business of sports has evolved over his career.…Read More
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Index
Tap a section to jump to it
Leadership
Vision, influence and the craft of leading people.
How Leaders Drive People Nuts
Imagine a person who drives you nuts. Realize you drive others crazy, too. Leadership magnifies your behavior. Even small irritations drive people nuts when you're the boss.
Leadership
Drucker on Decisions
Drucker said, “If you have quick consensus on an important matter, don’t make the decision.” Important decisions deserve rigorous debate. Constructive dissent makes them better. The purpose of dissent isn't disagreement. It's wisdom. 4 Ways to Improve Decisions
Leadership
The Most Dangerous Leadership Decline Looks Like Success
Leave a comment on this guest post by Dr. Denis Cronson to become eligible for one of 20 complimentary copies of his new book, The Executive Condition: The Hidden Health Crisis of High-Performing Leaders. There’s a blind spot in how we assess leadership performance. Dr Cronson's approach treats health as the foundational architecture for leadership. Click for a chance to win...
Leadership
The Go Slow Leader
Every generation feels life is more frantic than the one before. In 49 A.D. Seneca wrote, “Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present.” On the Shortness of Life Go slow to achieve what matters most.
Leadership
One-on-Ones Aren’t for You
Don’t ruin one-on-ones by making them about you. One-on-ones strengthen people. Set an intention before you open your mouth. You spend large amounts of time talking. Embrace the transformative power of one-on-one conversations. Click for more insights...
Author Talks: Why leadership intelligence matters in the AI age
Lessons from cognitive science can help leaders become wiser, more inspiring, and more resilient. McKinsey Senior Adviser Caroline Webb explains why human intelligence is a growing leadership advantage.
Leadership
When People Don’t Know
I love it when people say, “I don’t know.” Ignorance is the point of growth. Difficult problems are mirrors. “I don’t know” is a beginning. Stifle your need to solve. The solution people find for themselves is better than yours, even if it’s not as good.
Leadership
Is Childhood Running Leadership
I am – in many ways – the person I have been since childhood. My dad showed me how to love my wife. But otherwise, he rarely expressed emotion. I learned that emotions were private things. I have slowly learned how to show my heart. The value of looking back is insight, not blame.
Leadership
The Immaturity Penalty
Immaturity doesn't stay inside a person. It bleeds on everyone. One defensive person delays honest conversations. One hothead makes everyone walk on eggshells. An insecure leader turns talented people into threats. One leader who needs to be right keeps everyone working on the wrong problem. Gain insight into the immaturity penalty.
Team Management
Coordinating, delegating and getting the best from teams.
Winning: What the best athletes, teams, and coaches do differently
Eight disciplines for defining success, building the system to achieve it, and finding an edge when the margin between good and great is razor-thin.
The key to AI value is hiding in plain sight: Your operating model
New research shows that organizations undergoing AI transformation succeed not by adopting one “best” operating model, but by making intentional design choices and executing them effectively.
Team Management
Why Employees With Working-Class Roots Are Better at Getting Their Ideas Heard
Nimble Made/Unsplash Getting manager buy-in for a good idea is harder than it should be. Our research points to a communication style that reliably breaks through this wall — and that is disproportionately exhibited by white-collar employees with working-class origins. We studied how employees present ideas to their managers by conducting a field survey of […]
Team Management
Develop Your Team’s Social Capital, Not Just Their Skills
Leigh Wells/Ikon Images Leaders may prioritize executing strategy and driving organizational performance, but they are also responsible for developing the next generation of leaders. Traditionally, leadership development has focused heavily on performance — an understandable emphasis, given that leaders themselves are evaluated and rewarded based on execution and results. However, as organizational strategies increasingly rely […]
Team Management
Organizational Culture
Values, workplace climate and company DNA.
How to Reinvent Your Company Without Starting Over
Grundini/Ikon Images How does a fossil fuel company become the world’s largest developer of offshore wind? How does a software company written off for missing the mobile revolution become one of the world’s most valuable companies in the age of AI? Ørsted and Microsoft have faced a puzzle familiar to many leaders: When...
Organizational Culture
When AI Disruption Never Ends
Phil Bliss/theispot.com A vice president of product opens her laptop on a Monday morning to find that the AI model her team had worked with for the past six weeks to build a customer workflow has been leapfrogged by a cheaper, faster alternative. Again. Her Slack feed is blowing up with links to the announcement. […]
Organizational Culture
How Leadership Anxiety Derails Transformation
Rob Dobi The Research This article draws on a four-year ethnographic study of a professional services firm whose leaders initiated a major transformation to reverse declining performance. The research involved nearly 760 hours of observation across leadership and project team meetings, more than 300 interviews, and analyses of internal documents spanning the full life of […]
Organizational Culture
What Kind of Chief Purpose Officer Does Your Company Need?
Rob Dobi The Research The authors identified 56 individuals with purpose leadership roles who were representative of a variety of industries, company sizes, and regions. Of the CPOs interviewed, 60% identified as female and 40% as male. They conducted semi-structured interviews online from 2022 to 2025 to explore participants’ role experiences, strategic practices, and key […]
Organizational Culture
Dethroning Loyalty
Rob Dobi What’s wrong with loyalty? Isn’t it a virtue to display steadfast allegiance to something or someone other than oneself? After all, loyalty has been celebrated as a virtue across many cultures for millennia. As economic headwinds and a tough job market appear to be empowering more authoritarian styles of leadership, it’s a good […]
Organizational Culture
Tying Purpose to Performance
Photo courtesy DHL John Pearson has been CEO of DHL Express and on the DHL Group board of management since 2019. He joined the global logistics and courier company in 1986 and has held senior management positions in its divisions in the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific region, the U.S., and Europe. MIT Sloan Management Review […]
Organizational Culture
Spot New Tech Skills Emerging From the Workforce
Matt Chinworth Across industries, companies are investing unprecedented sums in reskilling programs to prepare employees to use emerging technologies.1 The programs are typically built around forecasts of which skills, such as data literacy, digital fluency, systems thinking, and adaptability, will matter most. Each year, when the forecasts are updated, training courses — and their related […]
Organizational Culture
Greenhushing: When Firms Do More Than They Say
Some companies downplay their environmental efforts, a practice known as greenhushing. A new working paper co-authored by Wharton’s Serguei Netessine finds that this gap between what firms say and what they do is associated with higher subsequent abnormal stock returns.…Read More
Productivity
Focus, habits and time management for leaders.
Wendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life
Wendell Berry died last week at 92 at his home in Port Royal, Kentucky, where he farmed his land using traditional techniques and wrote with ... Read more The post Wendell Berry and the Promise of the Deep Life appeared first on Cal Newport.
Productivity
A Routine that Changes Everything
You don't rise to the level of your intentions. You rise to the level of your routines. Don’t fall in love with bold decisions. Drama corrupts judgment. Win with daily routines. A universal principle of success: Don’t wait for motivation. Build a routine that makes meaningful work inevitable.
Strategy
Decisions, business and long-term thinking.
Strategy in the age of arenas
A group of fast-growing industries is reshaping the competitive landscape. Their rise requires business leaders to rethink strategy in two important ways.
Your budget is killing your strategy: four imperatives for CFOs
The traditional annual budget process is broken. It is rigid, backward-looking, and not operationally fit to keep up with today's fast-moving markets. Top-performing companies are outpacing peers by budgeting differently. Matthew Maloney, Karen McLoughlin, and Michele Tam join us to discuss their recent article on how top-performing companies are transforming the budget from a control mechanism to a dynamic road map for driving growth. They share how leading CFOs are more closely linking the budget to strategic priorities, and how harnessing AI enables a data-driven, forward-looking approach.
Strategy
The FDNY’s Transformation After 9/11
Gregory P. Shea, Wharton adjunct professor of management and co-author of 'Rising from Ground Zero,' discusses how the FDNY transformed its leadership, training, psychological support, and disaster response after 9/11.…Read More
Author Talks: What the world’s best owner-CEOs get right
How do exceptional leaders create enduring institutions? Three McKinsey authors reveal the leadership core behaviors and mindsets behind Asia’s most successful founder-CEOs—and how leaders everywhere can apply them.
The AI economy: Interconnected forces, feedback loops, and speeds of change
AI is shaped by forces far beyond the technology itself, and its effects reach just as widely. Mapping how the pieces interact helps us see what could influence its course and where hurdles and opportunities may emerge.
Strategy
The Business of Shared Scooters
Gad Allon, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, explains how shared bikes and scooters make money, why cities regulate them, and what their future looks like in urban transportation.…Read More
Strategy
Archer Roose Is Making Canned Wine Mainstream
Conley Downing, CMO of Archer Roose Wines, explains how the brand is building demand for premium single-serve canned wine through trial, distinctive branding, and consumer insight.…Read More
Personal Growth
Growth, mindset and the habits of a leader.
Tobi Lütke: AI Agents, Better Decisions, and the Future of Work
Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke joins Shane Parrish to discuss AI agents, better decision-making, and the future of work. He explains how he uses an AI council to examine his hardest decisions and why taste, judgment, and responsibility become more valuable as AI becomes more capable. They go inside Shopify’s work w...
Personal Growth
A Compelling Story Can Disarm Even a Skeptical Negotiator
Ivan Diaz/Unsplash Human beings are not good at separating fact from fiction. But surely hard-nosed B2B professionals are different? Our research suggests otherwise. In two experiments with 622 B2B sales professionals, we gave participants a negotiation scenario in which a buyer either lied or told the truth. We then gave half the participants a story […]
Personal Growth
Ask Sanyin: How Do I Communicate That I’ve Grown and Changed?
Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Unsplash, Fotos After receiving some challenging feedback about my management style, I’ve done a lot of introspection, taken responsibility, worked with a coach, and I believe I’ve made real changes in how I work with others. But I don’t sense that others’ perceptions have changed accordingly. What else do I need […]
Personal Growth
Steve Jobs in Exile
We all know the Steve Jobs who came back in the late 1990s and saved Apple from becoming a footnote. And we’ve all heard the story of how, in 1985, he was pushed out of the company he’d created. What we don’t know is what happened in between. Public Release: September 1. Members have access … The post Steve Jobs in Exile appeared first on Farnam Street.
Personal Growth
What I’ve Learned: Kenneth Shropshire
In a wide-ranging conversation with Wharton Dean Erika James, Kenneth Shropshire reflects on his unconventional path to academia and how the business of sports has evolved over his career.…Read More
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