Newsletter
Welcome to the usual mix of the month: a handful of pieces that caught my eye over the past few weeks. Some overlap in theme, which I’ll let you draw your own lines on. 1. The reason your organization moves slowly, works in silos, and has too many meetings
Essays
This week I’m setting aside the regular essay to say something simple. A lot of people around you (family members, neighbors, colleagues) are affected by what’s happening in our country at the moment. Many of you are too. I am. If you manage people, you already know this.
Essays
A question for you about Field Notes I'm considering publishing my Field Notes—25 years of ethnographic observations from inside organizations around the world. I wrote these seriously, as organizational anthropology: what you'd document if you stumbled into an unknown tribe and tried to understand behaviors
Ling- English
Confidence isn't the same as clarity. Real agreement requires understanding someone's reasons, reasoning, and assumptions—but only if you hold reasons of your own. Without that foundation, you're not thinking. You're echoing.
Ling- English
Line and middle managers are the heart of every organization. Their daily decisions—what they say and do, and what they choose not to say and do—have immediate, unmediated impact on team members, families, and communities. Like teachers in a classroom, their influence is real and life-changing. Yet
Ling- English
When someone on your team becomes "indispensable," it might feel like you've found a star performer. But indispensability isn't value—it's a trap. It's organizational failure disguised as individual excellence. It means someone can't take vacation, can't disconnect, can't be fully present for their
Ling- English
When you do someone's performance evaluation, their survival in the company depends on your decision. So when they give you positive feedback, can you trust it? The structural asymmetry means you cannot know whether their praise reflects genuine experience or necessary performance. This isn't about
Essays
I keep seeing versions of the same claim: that trust is the natural result of psychological safety. Or that it can be engineered through a formula. That’s tidy. It’s appealing and it’s convenient. It’s also not true. Psychological safety may create the conditions where trust could
Ling- English
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has operated without a conductor since 1972, winning Grammy Awards through distributed leadership and collaborative decision-making. Their model challenges fundamental assumptions about management: what if coordination doesn't require a central authority? What if the pe
Newsletter
I’ve been noticing something in conversations with clients lately: a kind of exhaustion that’s different from being busy. It’s the exhaustion of trying to lead through conditions that keep shifting faster than anyone can adapt to. These pieces won’t reduce that exhaustion. But they might help
Beyond Management
In the early 2000s, a small group discovered what Nicholas Winton practiced for fifty years in silence: the best giving leaves no trace. They learned to improve specific circumstances for actual people rather than solving abstract problems. No foundations, no naming rights, no infrastructure—just re
Ling- Français
Every promotion asks you to surrender the capabilities that made you successful. The engineering manager coding at night isn't integrating technical skills—she's keeping a dead identity on life support. As you move from IC to manager to organizational leader, each transition demands you find meaning