A chairman once asked me why every COO he hired turned out to be political. Three appointments in five years; each arrived a straight shooter and left a schemer. “Why on earth do I keep attracting these people?” Wrong question. The right one: what is it in...
Boards keep shopping for the universal CEO. Every search committee writes the same fantasy profile: visionary yet operational, decisive yet collaborative, a wartime general with the bedside manner of a family doctor. No such person exists. What exists are leaders...
Healthy people rarely function as leaders. That is the opening line of the third chapter of my book, and it is the sentence readers argue with most. It sounds like cynicism. It is the opposite. Ask yourself: why on earth would someone who grew up securely attached —...
Four professions. Four different mandates. Most buyers conflate them, and the wrong choice costs more than the engagement fee. A clear framework for choosing well. Senior leaders looking for development support encounter a marketplace that has become almost...
The signals get reframed as drive. The cost is invisible until the body refuses to keep going. Burnout among senior executives is the most poorly diagnosed condition in modern business. Not because the symptoms are subtle — they are not — but because the people best...
