Strategy is one of those words that everybody loves and that almost nobody can accurately define. A former professor of mine once joked that “Strategy is what you put in your job title when you want a raise” and I think that’s about as far as many leaders understand the concept.

If leadership were easy, everyone would love their boss and every business would succeed.

Then why does everyone hate their boss and why do most businesses fail?

Because good leadership is rare and becoming a good leader is one of the great challenges in human history.

One of my favorite leadership paradoxes is summed up in these two popular statements about professional growth that are almost always taken as gospel, are almost never defined, and best of all, which contradict each other…

(Note: This essay was first published in December 2023)

It’s the end of the year and (hooray!) we’re all doing performance reviews. This is a tough year to define what “high performing” means because of the incredible pace of change that we’re all navigating and I find myself reevaluating the types of thinking that are going to be valuable in the future. As I look ahead and try to define "high performance", these are the recurring themes I’ve been coming back to in recent conversations: