Everything here comes out of the same place the consulting does: thirty-plus years of operating responsibility, and the research that either supports what I saw or corrects it. Nothing on this page is held back for a paying client. If a piece is useful to you and you never call me, it did its job.
Read what applies to your week.
Every article opens in a new tab, so this library stays where you left it.
Four pieces on debriefing, inspection readiness, and the gap between what leadership is told and what is true.
The After Action Review is not a critique and it does not grade. That is precisely why it works.
Read the article →Most of what an After Action Review uncovers was decided, or left undecided, weeks before anyone showed up.
Read the article →The survey is not the test. The survey is a sample of an ordinary Tuesday.
Read the article →A board that believes ninety-two percent when the truth is fifty-five is not governing.
Read the article →Five pieces on stabilizing an organization, and why the first thirty days decide the next year.
Speed, experience you could not otherwise justify, and a cost structure that ends when the work does.
Read the article →Most failed turnarounds are diagnosis failures that were allowed to reach execution.
Read the article →Listen and assess, act and align, hard-wire and sustain.
Read the article →Strategy does not fail on the plan. It fails on the operating conditions underneath it, and those are measurable.
Read the article →Stop trying to fix culture. Start leading it.
Read the article →Eight pieces on how selection actually works, what a panel scores, and what the research says about the moves most senior leaders default to.
The two facts a senior resume is built to display are among the weakest predictors of performance in the entire literature.
Read the article →Not whether you can do the job. Whether the room can see itself in you, and what to do about that.
Read the article →A structured executive panel is not a conversation. It is an assessment instrument with a rubric that exists before you walk in.
Read the article →Three quarters of new hires negotiate. The approach most senior leaders default to is the one the research says returns nothing.
Read the article →You cannot analyze your way into a field you have not practiced. The research says you act your way in.
Read the article →A past unemployment spell does not follow you. An open one does, and most of the damage lands in the first eight months.
Read the article →The intelligence brief I wish someone had handed me before I stepped off.
Read the article →Your title is gone. Your character is not.
Read the article →Three pieces on the disciplines underneath the framework.
Direction before information, presence over platform, listening as intelligence.
Read the article →Three dimensions of trust, and how it holds under external scrutiny.
Read the article →Perseverance as a leadership discipline, and the book it produced.
Read the article →A seated executive with defined authority during a vacancy, a reorganization, or a recovery.
Open the practice →After Action Review, exercise and drill design, survey and inspection readiness, emergency program assessment.
Open the practice →For a new executive, or for the organization that just hired one.
Open the practice →Certified, registered, and eligible for sole-source award.
Open the practice →Every article on this page is free and stays that way. If one of them named something you are dealing with right now, that is usually the moment a conversation is worth having. What you send here reaches the principal, not a desk.
