The headline version of the 2025–2026 layoff wave is simple: AI is replacing workers. Companies are automating, jobs are disappearing, and this is the beginning of a structural transformation in the labor market. The actual version is more complicated — and more strategically useful. Of the 1.2 million employees in the US who lost their…
The 70% failure rate for organizational change initiatives is one of the most quoted statistics in management consulting. It’s cited in McKinsey reports, taught in business school courses, referenced in board presentations. There’s only one problem: it may not be accurate. Mark Hughes, a scholar at Brighton Business School, spent more than a decade tracing…
The question Clayton Christensen said was most underexplored in innovation research: “What workarounds have people invented?” His reasoning was straightforward. When customers are struggling to get something done by cobbling together workarounds — using spreadsheets as a database, duct-taping two services together, building internal tools to compensate for gaps in yours — they are probably…
The companies that fared best through the disruptions of the past several years — the pandemic, the supply chain fracture, the post-ZIRP recalibration, the trade policy volatility of 2025 — weren’t, in most cases, simply lucky. They were prepared in ways that created structural advantage when conditions deteriorated. The preparation had a specific character: it…
The window for a strategic pivot is almost always shorter than it looks while you’re in it and longer than it looks when you’re past it. That temporal distortion is one reason pivots are so hard to execute well. When the signals are early, the pressure to stay the course is enormous — the existing…
Most companies think about innovation in the wrong place. They focus on the product — how to make it better, faster, cheaper. They invest in process improvement — how to deliver it more efficiently. Both matter. Neither is where the most significant competitive advantage lives. The businesses that create durable competitive advantage typically do it…
There’s a gap in most executive development programs that nobody wants to name directly: they prepare leaders to run excellent functions, but not to operate at the table where strategy is set, capital is allocated, and careers are ultimately decided. The boardroom isn’t another meeting. It’s a different medium — with different norms, different information…
The metaphor for business organizations has long been the machine. Like machines, most companies are designed for efficient, predictable outputs — minimizing variation, standardizing processes, maintaining control. For decades, this model worked well enough. In environments where the competitive landscape changed slowly and the primary challenge was operational excellence, machine-like organizations outperformed more chaotic alternatives….
Here’s a pattern that plays out more often than most organizations will admit: a leader with a genuine track record of getting things done starts generating organizational friction. The complaints are consistent — they’re too direct, too demanding, too disruptive, not collaborative enough. Leadership starts to see them as a problem. Sometimes they leave. Sometimes…
The average CEO of an S&P 500 company has been working for 24 years before taking the corner office. That number comes from a decade-long study of 17,000 C-suite executives, and it should reframe almost every conversation about career acceleration. Not because 24 years is discouraging — but because it tells you something about what…
