Strategic Agility

We were kiteboarding last weekend off Sullivan's Island, near Charleston. The wind was blowing hard, over 20 mph, and I was having a great time.

I first started thinking about the topic of this week’s newsletter as Rob and I watched Hurricane Ian approach Florida last week.

An executive I work with once told me: “We're pretty good at deciding which companies to acquire and we know how to pay the right price… but we're not good at integrating. We want them to adopt [...]

As someone who loves my profession, I genuinely look forward to each workday. In fact, there have been many times when it took me by surprise that others don’t feel this way.

Over the past weekend, someone said to me (quoting Upton Sinclair) that it's difficult to get people to understand something when their income depends on their not understanding it.

The world is always changing, but lately the changes have felt faster and more extreme. In times like these, your ability to manage risk and uncertainty can give you a huge competitive advantage.

Back when I was applying for admission to Harvard Business School, one of the essays I had to complete was “when did you confront an ethical dilemma and how did you handle it?”

Did you know that many “walk” buttons at intersections actually do nothing? Not because they’re broken, but because they were deliberately deactivated when computer-controlled traffic signals [...]

When someone says to me, “We’ve tried everything,” my first impulse is to test the validity of that statement, because experience has proven it is almost never true. A more accurate version of [...]

Every one of us knows well the constant tug-of-war between long and short-term thinking. You want to lose weight, but you also deeply desire that double chocolate cake. You want to put a new roof [...]