Category: Business
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The Leader’s Crucial Transformation Ally
Why Leaders Need Honest Feedback in Transformation In transformational assignments, leaders are often lauded for their decisiveness and confidence. Yet the same qualities that secure promotion or high-stakes mandates can become liabilities when they mute honest feedback. The paradox of senior leadership is that the higher you rise, the less candid input you receive—and the…
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Resilience Under Pressure
Sustaining Energy in Prolonged Transformation Transformation is not a sprint. For senior executives, the initial burst of urgency and focus can give way to long months—or years—of uncertainty, political friction, and relentless demands. What begins as a high-profile mandate to “fix” or “modernize” soon becomes a test of endurance: keeping yourself, your team, and the…
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Confidence in the Fog of Transformation
Leading Through Ambiguity Without Pretending Certainty Transformational assignments are rarely neat. They are more often fog than roadmap—shifting conditions, unclear end-states, multiple stakeholders, and moving constraints. For senior executives accustomed to providing clarity, this can be disorienting. The instinct is to manufacture certainty: to declare a fixed plan, to over-specify, to project more confidence than…
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The Transformation-Created Confidence Dip
Why Strong Leaders Doubt Themselves in Transformation For many senior executives, confidence is not optional—it’s the currency of leadership. Staff, boards, or ministers look to you for steadiness, especially when the path ahead is unclear. Yet even the most capable leaders experience a dip in confidence when they take on transformational mandates. This isn’t weakness.…
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Losing Your Grip on Mastery
Why Old Habits Fail in Transformational Leadership One of the hardest moments for an experienced executive isn’t the steep learning curve of a first job. It’s the sudden realization, often years into a career, that the habits and instincts that carried them this far no longer seem to work. The reliable methods—the quick reading of…
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When Strong Leaders Suddenly Feel Unsteady
The Hidden Challenge of Leading Transformations For seasoned leaders, the most surprising professional challenge often doesn’t arrive at the start of a career but after years of achievement. It comes in the form of a new mandate: a complex transformation, a high-stakes organizational bet, or an ambiguous problem that refuses easy answers. Sometimes this assignment…
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Transformation lessons from the Double Lift
At sheepdog trials, which I’ve written about before, there is a challenge called the Double Lift. The trials test shepherd and sheepdog to run a herd of sheep through a course and into a pen. The Double Lift is the challenge for champions that requires two groups of ten sheep be acquired from different parts…
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Be a transformation shepherd
My wife’s love of animals occasionally takes us to a sheepdog trial. This is a competition for shepherds and their border collies entailing the herding and moving of sheep through a course, splitting the large group, then penning the smaller of the two new groups. It always strikes me as eerily similar to transformation and…
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AI Will Probably be a Productivity Bust
Before we get to the bold productivity prediction, know where I’m coming from… I am of two minds on Artificial Intelligence: the large language models of Chat GPT and so forth. Like some of those eminent in the field, I think AIs may represent a mortal threat to humanity. Even if the computers do not…
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Productivity: the no. 1 digital transformation shortfall
I have nothing against digital transformation imperatives or the millions of dollars and hours put toward it over the past decade. It was and remains an essential foundation of 21st-century value production. Picking up on a recent post, I will say that if anything the job is not done. Productivity Recognition: Digital Transformation’s final frontier…
