Category: Leadership & Teamwork
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The Problems with Unicorns
Author’s Note Yes, “unicorn” is a ridiculous word. So are “guru,” “ninja,” and “wizard”—and we’re not here to glorify them. These labels get tossed around too casually in tech and corporate slang, usually as buzzword shorthand for undefined brilliance or vaguely heroic productivity. We’re using “unicorn” here not because it’s the most accurate, but because…
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Clearing the Rubble: The Pre-Work of Real Culture
Dawn spills across the studio’s worn floorboards, dust motes drifting like slow sparks in the angled light. At the easel stands a painter—sleeves rolled, palette forgotten—taking stock of a canvas already heavy with other beginnings. Cracked pigments buckle in ridges; clots of color sit where inspiration once outran intention. He raises a palette knife and,…
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Designing for Trust: A Blueprint for the Organizations Worth Building
Designing for Trust: A Blueprint for the Organizations Worth Building Author’s Note If trust were visible, most org charts would look like seismic reports—fissures everywhere. That’s what the last five articles have made plain. We started by tracking where teams falter—authority hoarded instead of shared, incentives that reward performance theater over progress, systems that bury…
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Resourceful Humans: Why Loyalty Can’t Be Outsourced
A Quiet Exodus—The Anatomy of One “Small” Decision When Jessica resigned, the exit interview lasted six polite minutes. HR dutifully recorded “better compensation” and “career growth” as the official reasons, yet the subtext was louder: You noticed every email praising my extra hours, but not the real-world cost of those hours. Inflation had eroded her…
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All Good Management Is Logistics
You’ve heard the stories, memorized the quotes. We all have. The battle‑scarred Navy SEAL who now delivers keynotes in a crisp polo shirt. The consultant quoting The Art of War before a slide titled “Market Domination.” The executive coach who hands out The Book of Five Rings like it’s a pocket manual for quarterly planning. Somewhere in the background,…
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On Leadership: Earning Respect, Exercising Authority
Author’s Note There’s a moment in the film Annapolis that has stayed with me, long after the rest of the story faded. During a training exercise, a Marine instructor brings out a body bag, lays it before the cadets, and orders one of them inside. As the young woman struggles to stay calm, the instructor…
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The Cult of Metrics: Measurement vs. Meaning
In the early days of my career, I joined a workforce management team that was absolutely fixated on operational metrics. We had beautifully designed dashboards, daily “scorecards,” and meticulous trend lines for everything from employee occupancy rates to how many minutes each person spent in an offline state. We tracked schedule adherence down to the second,…
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Why We Celebrate Firefighters but Forget the Architects
A Meeting for a Colleague’s Promotion David sat in the company’s all-hands meeting, waiting for the big announcement. The CEO beamed at the podium, congratulating Eva—a project manager from the operations group—on her well-deserved promotion. For months, Eva had led a frantic effort to fix performance and integration issues following the launch of a new…
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Undefined: The Role of Jargon in Team Communication
Picture this: You’re seated at a conference room table, the faint hum of a projector in the background as the team dives into a heated discussion about the upcoming quarter. The project manager leans in, adjusting their glasses, and says, “Let’s circle back on the KPIs to ensure we’re hitting our north star.” A few…
Abstract Foundations 