Restructuring of the Leadership Contract in the Agentic Era
From my associate Grant Tate. Leadership has always resisted a clean definition. That’s not a failure of management science. It’s a feature. What philosopher W.B. Gallie called an “essentially contested concept” — one that generates genuine, irresolvable disputes — turns out to be exactly what leadership needs to be. A fixed definition would freeze it. […]
Leading Now: The Identity Shift Required in an A.I. Integrated Organization
From my associate Janice Giannini. A.I. is not just changing how work gets done. It is quietly changing what it means to lead. A widely circulated essay by A.I. entrepreneur Matt Shumer, “Something Big Is Happening,” argues that recent advances in generative A.I. represent a structural inflection point rather than incremental progress (Shumer, 2026). Whether […]
Foundations First: Why Sustainability Is Culture Before It’s a KPI
From my associate Janice Giannini. Leadership teams often approach sustainability backwards. Too many organizations begin with KPIs, dashboards, reporting frameworks, and audit checklists. But numbers don’t build sustainable enterprises — people do. Sustainability is, at its core, the ability to continue: to keep strategy, operations, customer relationships, and performance moving in the right direction over […]
Earning Trust in the Spotlight: How Great Leaders Shape Emotion and Momentum From Day One
The world often responds when a new leader enters the spotlight—whether in the Vatican, the C-suite, or a national government. Sometimes the reaction is grounded in hope, while in other cases it is marked by wariness, skepticism, or outright resistance. But why? In recent weeks, I’ve observed an outpouring of optimism in response to the […]