January 2026 - Coordination is the Tax, Silence is a Choice, Culture is Behavior, Efficiency is the Enemy

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 is the same reason: coordination is expensive. The more people involved, the higher the cost. Meetings are real work, just the unsatisfying kind. Nobody gets promoted for attending them, but they keep happening because they have to. (Surfing Complexity)
2. NFL quarterback Sam Darnold’s career turned around when he adopted a single mental shift: think like a point guard. Stop being the hero. Put the ball in your playmakers’ hands. The argument is that when people stop centering themselves in their own narrative and focus on setting others up, their own performance improves and it reduces cognitive load for everyone on the team. (workfutures.io)
3. A junior engineer had quietly spent two weeks building a testing framework that was, by any measure, jaw-dropping. Rands’ instinct was not to accelerate it, not to champion it, not to reorganize around it. His instinct was to stay out of the way. The work spoke for itself. The harder lesson: many managers confuse the privilege of the job with the need to act on everything. Very often, the right move is to do absolutely nothing. (Rands in Repose)
4. And yet, new research found that even a single instance of perceived managerial inaction (a manager failing to respond to a harmful or disrespectful incident) can erode trust, damage well-being, and trigger withdrawal, gossip, and resistance. Employees don’t experience silence as neutral. They experience it as a choice. (The Conversation)
5. 72% of formal culture change initiatives examined by researchers at Henley Business School showed no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention: employees perceived them as cosmetic. What did move the needle is when senior leaders quietly changed how they ran meetings, gave feedback, and made decisions, trust scores rose 26%, regardless of whether there was any official culture campaign. One leader put it thus: “We didn’t announce a culture shift. We just started acting like it mattered.” (Harvard Business Review)
6. Glassdoor’s 2026 Best Places to Work rankings included a car wash chain and a burger restaurant in the top three. The era of tech firms dominating the list is over. What the top-performing companies shared: strong culture, genuine career progression, autonomy, and flexibility. Notably, the best-reviewed companies weren’t perfect. Employees had plenty of criticisms. They just felt like they mattered. (Glassdoor)
7. A researcher spent time inside two companies studying how hybrid teams maintain culture. The finding: workers unanimously want to keep hybrid work, and they value the trust it signals. But fun cannot be forced. Mandatory team-building activities, virtual quizzes tacked on at end of day, fashion catwalk events, etc. land as tasks, not connection. What works: anchor days in the office, opt-in social rituals, and the simple acknowledgment that culture is a collective thing, not a management production. (The Conversation)
8. AI has won the optimization game. It finds patterns, maximizes output, eliminates waste better than we ever could. What it can’t do is be genuinely stupid as in stumbling into the restaurant without checking Yelp, building the thing that doesn’t scale, or taking the walk where you forgot your headphones. The argument here is that in an age of optimized everything, inefficiency is the last competitive edge. The random walk is a strategy. (Balancing Act)
9. 95% of AI pilots never progress beyond the experimental stage. 74% of companies fail to extract meaningful value from AI after two years of effort. The bottleneck is the culture. Fear, misaligned leadership, and the habit of treating AI as a bolt-on rather than a rethinking of how work gets done. The companies that got it right (H&M, Morgan Stanley, Airbus) led with trust. (Dialogue Review)
10. Most organizations’ talent management systems are still built on the “War for Talent” framework from late-1990s McKinsey research: narrow leadership prototypes, opaque processes, and practices that quietly replicate existing power structures. Three steps toward fairer talent management: reform leadership models to avoid bias, foster justice in everyday leadership, and develop inclusive leadership as a core capability rather than a side program. (MIT Sloan Management Review)

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