April 2026 - Prussia, a wine bottle, a cartel, and the fine print
The premise - Brendan McCord | Cosmos Institute
Prussia, 1809. Napoleon has just walked through it. The nation wants officers and engineers. The diplomat handed the education file gives them something else.
McCord traces what happened to that idea across two centuries and closes with the observation that the people using AI well right now are drawing on judgment formed before these tools became ambient.
“You can live on an inheritance for a while. You cannot educate a civilization on inherited judgment forever.”
My take: Every system eventually reflects what it optimizes for. The question is whether formation is on the list.
The friction - Elizabeth Weingarten | Time Travel for Beginners
A founder tells her that humans are always the bottlenecks and his project is to remove them entirely. The phrase stays with her. She goes looking for where it came from and finds Sir Kenelm Digby ( a seventeenth-century knight, alchemist, duelist), who in 1669 argued that the narrow neck was not a constraint on the wine but the condition of its quality.
“If the spirits be not well imprisoned, they will soon fly away and leave the body dead and insipid.”
My take: The founder wasn’t being careless. He was stating the operating premise of most organizational design. The etymology doesn’t refute him. It makes visible what he’s decided not to see.
The cost - Cat Howland | Human Doings Human Beings
Eric explains his working life through a jersey: name on the front is the team, name on the back is the person. Then he describes Danny: he treats the janitor and the CEO exactly the same, charming everywhere he goes, being quietly managed out of client-facing roles. “He doesn’t play the game. And for that reason, people are afraid of putting him in front of certain types of leaders.”
My take: The authenticity literature tells you to bring your whole self to work. Danny did.
The paradox - Jim Harter & Ryan Pendell | Gallup
Leaders report higher engagement and higher life satisfaction than the people they lead. They also report more daily stress, more anger, more sadness, and more loneliness… by substantial margins. The piece offers explanations. It does not try to resolve the contradiction. The two findings coexist.
My take: The leadership development industry sells the aspiration. This is the fine print.
The endpoint - Sy Boles | Harvard Gazette
Twenty AI agents, $500 each, a simulated year to run a vending machine for profit. Some formed a cartel and named it the Bay Street Triumvirate. When one member undercut the others, a fellow agent called it “a declaration of war.”
When deliberation became an operating cost, they stopped deliberating about refund requests altogether. “The agents come to the realization that ‘thinking’ about giving a refund is itself a cognitive burden.”
My take: Nobody told them to behave this way. And nobody told them not to.
And Now for Something Completely Different
At the risk of being one of those people who gets excited about space missions. I’m one of those people.
Artemis II is back and NASA has been releasing the crew’s photographs. Someone with good taste and an eye for cropping has made several of them available as iPhone wallpapers.
If any of this is useful to you, it might be useful to someone else. Feel free to pass it along.
In Case You Missed It
Leadership Under Any Name — Two high school banners, same word, different zip codes. What goes wrong when a word gets stretched until it covers everything and quietly flatters only some of the people standing under it.
The Gandhi Paradox — Gandhi had no title when he began. The essay asks what that means for the model of leading by example — and for those expected to do it from inside an organization.
The Signal and the Sorting — Every institution emits a signal through what it rewards quietly and what it punishes quietly. Culture change fails because it works on the surface while the underlying projection runs unchanged.
Whenever You’re Ready
Three ways to work together:
Facilitation — I work with teams and groups who need to think more clearly about a real challenge. I create the conditions. They do the thinking.
Thought Partnership — Ongoing one-on-one conversations, typically every other week, for leaders navigating something they can’t quite see clearly on their own.
Three-Day Leadership Development Program — An immersive program for managers who want to develop judgment, not just technique.
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