What's on Your Mind?

Executives and managers are traditionally reluctant to express any tender inner feelings from their teams and peers. Yet leaders who are willing to tap into the power of vulnerability are seeing benefits to their ability to connect, motivate, and lead teams. The experience of vulnerability might feel weak to some, but researchers like Brené Brown have reframed the expression of vulnerability as an act of courage, a superpower that can boost psychological safety and foster a culture of innovation and creative risk-taking. Leaders and managers who share experiences of uncertainty can also create personal connections that can help motivate and inspire others. However…

Let me set a scene for you: A manager at a tech company pings his team at 6:01 p.m., asking for a “quick favor before morning?” The millennial responds instantly with “Sure, give me a sec” while texting their partner to warn they will be late for their kids’ game. The Gen X employee gives a thumbs-up emoji and plans to do the work after the kids are asleep. The Gen Z parent has a different vibe altogether, responding, “I’m offline for day care pickup and will handle in the morning,” then logging off. It’s a move that likely stuns most millennial and Gen X colleagues, but this is what happens when boundary-setting appears in a workplace built around p…

“The apocalypse will start having vermouths and tapas,” a friend told me yesterday. Just a day before, the electricity shut down for all of Spain and Portugal, trapping thousands in subways, trains, and elevators for hours, forcing people to walk miles back to their homes, putting hospitals on backup power, and turning off traffic lights, phones, and credit card readers. It shut down everything. Officials are still calculating the economic costs, but it will be in the billions. As this was happening, I still saw the people drinking in bar terraces too, as I was walking up the street to pick up my son early from school. They were joking and making fun. Others were…

Many leaders view employee activism as a disruption or threat. They see it as something to contain, avoid, or manage behind closed doors. This perception isn’t surprising because activism challenges established hierarchies, questions the status quo, and introduces unpredictability into organizational life. Yet a 2007 study has shown that employees who feel heard are more engaged, innovative, and committed to their organization’s success. In contrast, when employees feel ignored or dismissed, trust and morale decline, and disengagement is likely to set in. Activism is one form of voice, and is often the last resort when other channels have failed. The business case…

Every morning, after Richard J. Davidson meditates, he opens his calendar and sets an intention for each meeting. He brings each person into his mind and heart, expresses gratitude for their work in the world, and considers how he can best support them. I was inspired to try this practice. I reflected on the people that I planned to see that day and chose one thing that I’d like to thank them for. I was surprised that a simple “thank you” caused them to visibly light up. Davidson was right: It not only transformed our conversation, but the entire nature of my day. This is an example of microdosing well-being and its impact on ourselves and others. It’s also the heart…

In the classic rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, there’s a moment when a band member demonstrates an amplifier that goes to 11—one louder than 10. While it’s a cheeky metaphor, I’ve often thought about how leadership can adopt a similar ethos, pushing beyond boundaries to foster exceptional teams. It’s definitely easier said than done. Yet one thing that really pushes us to 11 is moving from a set of individual leaders to a distributed leadership. But building a global team of self-starters isn’t just about ambition or delegation. It’s about cultivating a culture of teamwork that empowers independence, ownership, and creativity at every level. I’ve found the follow…

Effective leadership isn’t a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It requires adaptability, self-awareness, and a deep understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Leaders often struggle to find the right balance between empowering their teams and maintaining strategic oversight. But there’s a way that you can do both. By adopting the practical 2×2 leadership framework that I’ll get into in this article, leaders can assess their approach based on two critical dimensions: Degree of Empowerment and Degree of Strategic Altitude. The leadership quadrants When you map out leadership approaches across these two dimensions, four distinct quadrants emerge. Each …

Year-end performance reviews can be time-consuming. Yet the end and start of the year is when employees and managers are inundated with a heavy workload. Emotions range from elated to angst-ridden. After all, performance evaluations directly impact professional reputations, salary increases, bonuses, and promotions. The importance of revisiting objectives This reality begs the question of just how effective performance evaluations are and what employees can do to balance the scales. A recent SHRM study indicates that roughly 50% of companies employ traditional annual performance evaluation processes based on whether they achieve the goals that they set at the sta…

It feels like a “hit-the-brakes” economy, with warning lights flashing everywhere: inflation pressures, AI disruptions, upside-down business models, and a persistent sense that some new market surprise or geopolitical tempest is waiting around the corner. Given these congested, conflicting signals, the instinct for many business leaders is to slow investment, tighten spending, and wait for more clarity. But how companies slow down can make the difference between paying a performance penalty and gaining a performance premium. Our research shows that organizations that keep transformation moving during peak uncertainty significantly outperform their wait-and-see pee…

In a general sense, workplace leaders are trained to focus on what can be seen and measured. They’re taught to pay close attention to employee performance, productivity, and efficiency—often without realizing that some of the most important aspects of work will never appear in any of these metrics. What too often goes unseen is how people experience their work. Whether they find meaning in what they do. Whether they feel connected to it and to the people around them. Whether their work aligns with who they are. To some, these may sound abstract or insignificant. They are not. They are core drivers of human well-being—and therefore of employee motivation and achiev…

In a correctional facility just outside of Silicon Valley, a Goodwill store operates inside the prison walls. And the women who are incarcerated there are both the employees and the customers. This Goodwill store, which opened in October 2024, is the first of its kind, and the team behind it hopes that the program will help incarcerated women get back on their feet—whether it’s with a new job or new clothes—as quickly and easily as possible. [Photo: Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department] The shoppers are women who are about to get released; typically about three people come in each day. Traditionally, when a woman is released from Elmwood Facility, she is gi…

​​Recent breakthroughs in generative AI have centered largely on language and imagery—from chatbots that compose sonnets and analyze text to voice models that mimic human speech and tools that transform prompts into vivid artwork. But global chip giant Nvidia is now making a bolder claim: the next chapter of AI is about systems that take action in high-stakes, real-world scenarios. At the recent International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025) in Singapore, Nvidia unveiled more than 70 research papers showcasing advances in AI systems designed to perform complex tasks beyond the digital realm. Driving this shift are agentic and foundational AI mode…

Has an event outside of work ever made you stop and realize that work has taken over more of your life than you realized? These events are called crossover jolts. They often sneak up on us after we’ve been in a job for a while. When we begin a new role, we start by mastering the tasks in our job description. But then we start taking on more responsibilities. There’s a name for this phenomenon—job creep. Tasks that were once above and beyond our job duties slowly become the norm. Imagine working toward the deadline on a big project. During the final week, we respond to emails at night after the kids have gone to bed (even though we promised ourselves we would never be…

In 2017, Uber’s executive team reached a critical turning point. The world saw headlines about leadership changes, valuation drops, and cultural upheavals. Beneath the noise, however, lay a deeper issue. It wasn’t rogue culture or aggressive expansion. It was misalignment at the very top. An all-too-familiar scenario had taken root: Executives were operating in silos. They weren’t facing challenges to key decisions, and they overlooked red flags. The result? A $20 billion valuation adjustment and a leadership overhaul that forced Uber to rethink how alignment works at the highest levels. And that’s where the real story begins. Instead of crumbling, Uber recali…

With more than 30 years in digital transformation, I’ve seen technology cycles come and go. And the latest wave I’m seeing is AI-powered automation. It promises sweeping gains in productivity, but without ethical guardrails, it risks undermining the trust leaders depend on to grow. That’s why leaders can no longer treat ethics as an afterthought. Automation isn’t just a technical upgrade. It is a human, cultural, and reputational challenge. The choices that leaders make today will determine whether automation drives sustainable progress or fuels mistrust and inequity. The promise and the peril Automation has a lot of benefits. It can free workers from repetitiv…

Ask most leaders to describe a high performer, and you’ll hear some version of the same profile: sharp, resilient, and relentless. Ask those same leaders what they mean by resilient, and the answer almost always collapses into two dimensions: mental toughness and physical stamina. We have built entire leadership development industries around cognitive acuity and physical wellness. What we have largely ignored is the third pillar: emotional recovery. This is not a soft argument. It is a structural one. And the science, along with a growing body of evidence from the workplace, suggests that overlooking emotional recovery is not just a wellness gap; it is a strategic one…

Appointing a chief of staff is a critical first step for any CEO looking to make impactful leadership decisions. But an executive who merely utilizes their chief of staff as an administrative extra set of hands risks missing out on meaningful transformation opportunities. The critical decision to position a chief of staff as a true executive partner, when executed well, can be a bold investment that impacts a CEO’s legacy. Based on my own experience as a chief of staff for a Series A unicorn-to-be and my current work coaching and placing these professionals, I’ve seen firsthand that today’s chiefs of staff act as leadership amplifiers. They occupy a unique position at…

I’m obsessive about my to-do lists. Everything I need to get done goes on my list so I don’t lose sight of it. But as a solo business owner, I ran into a problem: when do I have the time to actually work through my list? Anything urgent, I’d work on. Anything non-urgent, well… Stuff that keeps a business running gets perpetually pushed to “later.” However, “later” can eventually cause problems – like your website is out of date, your files are a mess, or your inbox is chaos. You can’t ignore the small, boring, non-billable tasks, or they’ll compound. Why you need a dedicated admin hour The default solopreneur mode is often reactive. You deal with admin t…

For the past two years, artificial intelligence strategy has largely meant the same thing everywhere: pick a large language model, plug it into your workflows, and start experimenting with prompts. That phase is coming to an end. Not because language models aren’t useful, with their obvious limitations they are, but because they are rapidly becoming commodities. When everyone has access to roughly the same models, trained on roughly the same data, the real question stops being who has the best AI and becomes who understands their world best. That’s where world models come in. From rented intelligence to owned understanding Large language models look powerf…

If you’re searching for a job, you’ve probably heard about how important it is to tailor your résumé and cover letter, showcasing your measurable achievements, and incorporating relevant keywords from the job description. These elements can make a big difference in catching a hiring manager’s attention. But beyond these essentials, there’s one powerful sentence that can truly set you apart from the rest: the one-liner. According to Sam DeMase, career expert for Zip Recruiter, this line in your cover letter is important because it highlights exactly what employers want to see. “Employers are looking for relevant work experience and aligned skills. So if you’re…

Even if you use a calendar app to organize your life, the paper calendar is far from being obsolete. Write something down on a printed calendar, and it becomes a persistent reminder of important events. You don’t have to dig through any screens to write things down, and you don’t have to perform any complex sharing maneuvers to set up a communal calendar for family members or colleagues. But even the paper calendar could benefit from some digital enhancements. With a few minutes of setup, you can print a custom calendar to your exact specifications while also making it small enough to fit on a single sheet of paper. This tip originally appeared in the free Coo…

There’s a surprising amount of science in a bag of potato chips. Researchers have spent decades developing potatoes for chip makers that can grow in all kinds of climates, avoid diseases and pests, sit in storage for months and still deliver a satisfying crunch. They’ve also kept an eye on consumer trends; a shift to snack-size portions has increased the demand for smaller chipping potatoes, for example. “The potato industry is dynamic,” said David Douches, a Michigan State University professor who leads the school’s Potato Breeding and Genetics Program. “The needs change, the costs, the pressures that they have, and the markets change. So we have to adapt to that with …