November 2025 - On meeting spec, knowing when to quit, why leadership feels harder, and what trust actually requires
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 you look at things differently.
Some of these challenge how we think about performance and persistence. Others expose what’s broken in how we lead and hire. All of them ask you to reconsider something you probably take for granted.
1. On meeting spec - Seth Godin
The most useful definition of quality: It meets spec. The hard part isn’t putting in enormous effort to somehow beat the spec. The hard part is setting the spec properly.
Three sentences that dismantle months of wasted effort. Godin’s provocation is deceptively simple: if you’re not happy with what you’re getting, the problem isn’t effort or execution. It’s that you haven’t been clear about what you actually need.
We’ve all seen it. A team works nights and weekends to produce something elaborate when what was needed was something simple and fast. Or they deliver exactly what was asked for, and it’s somehow still wrong. The failure isn’t in the work. It’s in the specification.
2. The Surprising Benefits of Giving Up - Nautilus
Sticking with impossible goals can take a real toll... But letting go and—crucially—reengaging with new goals, was found to restore purpose and well-being.
Management culture venerates persistence. Grit. Staying the course. We celebrate people who “never give up” and treat pivoting as a weakness. But what if that’s exactly backward?
This meta-analysis of 235 studies found that disengaging from unreachable goals significantly reduced stress, anxiety, and depression. More importantly, adopting new goals was strongly associated with higher functioning, a greater sense of purpose, and personal growth. The insight that matters: the ability to recognize when continued investment in a direction will only produce more sunk costs.
3. Agency > Intelligence - Andrej Karpathy
I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence... Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce.
A reframe of how to think about talent.
We interview for cleverness and problem-solving ability and we’re surprised when smart people don’t get things done. Karpathy’s observation cuts through it: agency (the capacity to identify what needs doing and do it without being asked, managed, or convinced) is rarer and more valuable than raw intelligence.
4. Hybrid Work Is Not the Problem — Poor Leadership Is - MIT Sloan Management Review
Leaders who are pushing for four or five days in the office are fixated on the wrong problem. Hybrid work is not a policy challenge—it’s a leadership capability challenge.
The return-to-office debate has consumed thousands of hours of management attention. But while leaders argue about badge data and attendance policies, they’re missing what actually matters.
The research is clear: companies succeeding with flexible work share four capabilities that have nothing to do with where people sit. They know their talent edge, they measure results instead of presence, they let teams lead the way, and they invest in getting better.
5. The Trust Equation: It’s Not Just Who You Hire, It’s How You Hire - Behavioral Scientist
When organizations fail to define roles and procedures, set unclear timelines, and communicate poorly, they erode trust with their potential employees all before their first day at work.
You claim to put people first. Then look at your hiring process, which is the first real touchpoint between your organization and potential employees. What does it actually demonstrate?
We treat the hiring process as a necessary evil rather than a trust-building opportunity. Then we wonder why new hires arrive skeptical or why talented candidates ghost us. This piece makes the case that how you hire is as important as who you hire. Every interaction, from the job posting to the rejection email, either builds or erodes trust.
6. The Power Portfolio: Six Levers You Already Have
Leadership power isn’t about volume or title. It’s about reducing friction so good work happens more easily, more often, with more people capable of doing it.
Most managers think they don’t have enough power to make things happen. They’re wrong. They have power. It’s just unevenly distributed across six levers that they haven’t audited.
The real work is running small moves that convert “power over” into “power with” and “power to”: making what you control visible and creating repeatable forums.
In Case You Missed It
This month I published:
Not All Conversations Are Transactions - Some conversations aren’t exchanges at all. They’re acts of creation. Each exchange establishes what’s possible in the next one.
The Columbo Advantage - When a culture invests heavily in a particular image of power, the blind spots become predictable. Go slow, talk slow, look unthreatening, and by the time they recognize you’re negotiating, you’re already behind them.
What You Lose Every Time You Get Promoted - Every promotion destroys your professional identity. The capabilities that made you successful become obsolete at the next level.
Beyond Management and Leadership:
Intellectual Loneliness - It’s about noticing how few people can stay with complexity. You start editing your thoughts before they reach your mouth, and slowly you become fluent in a second language, where your actual thinking gets compressed into something safer.
Quiet Giving - A small group asked: “How can we give without it being about us?” Nicholas Winton is the reference: he saved 669 children and never mentioned it.
Whenever You’re Ready
Here are ways we can work together:
Facilitation - I create conditions for teams to think more deeply about their challenges and discover their own ways forward. Whether you’re working through strategy, alignment, or complex decisions, I work with the purpose you bring and the energy in the room to help you do your best thinking together.
Thought Partnership - Ongoing one-on-one conversations (typically every other week) that help you develop effectiveness and find greater fulfillment in your leadership role. Not problem-solving or advice-giving, but collaborative inquiry into the challenges you’re navigating.
Three-Day Leadership Development Program - Experiential learning for managers focused on three domains: managing yourself, managing laterally, and managing teams. Participants work on their actual challenges through structured activities and reflection, developing judgment and authentic voice rather than acquiring techniques.
If you’d like to discuss how any of these might fit your current situation, reply to this email. I’m always happy to chat.