Leadership rarely falls apart because of strategy.It falls apart in the moments no one sees - the pressure, the politics, the slow erosion of clarity that eventually costs influence. 🎅 Santa brought me a very early gift - the wonderful opportunity to speak with the brilliant Cynthia Corsetti about what I’m seeing inside senior rooms right now: where influence slips, why decision traction matters more than ever, and how leaders can read the signals that tell them when they

I finally hired a housekeeper.😊 I've resisted for years. Not a single woman I grew up with back in Sweden has household help. I didn't have help when I was running a city and a law firm at the same time. I saw no reason to start now, when I am doing fewer hours and someone else is running my European companies. But I finally agreed. Mostly so I could spend more time doing things I actually want to do. After they...

She showed up with a list, and honestly, she read it to me like she was a little proud of it. It was a long list. None of it was her job. All of it had her name on it. I told her, none of the reasons you're telling me about why you do this is a reason that is to your benefit. Not at this level.

I started doing Pilates a week ago. I am 54. Former city manager. Have led organizations of 11,000 people. Negotiated with unions, navigated political crises, ran an EU law firm in my 30s. And last Wednesday at 6:30am I walked into a Pilates studio in Tyler, Texas, and told the instructor and 11 strangers, most of them 20 years younger than me, that I had told my husband over coffee that I felt like a first grader on his first day of school. I did not plan to say it. I was

Abigail was four minutes late to our session last week. When she came on screen she was flushed. A little annoyed. You could see her doing the quick reset, putting the work face away and the pleasant face on. She did it well. Most people would not have noticed. I noticed. A mentor of mine, a former CIA agent, once told me I read a room like I am running surveillance on it. He meant it as a warning. I took it as a compliment. So I said, "You were working on something righ

I had a call last Thursday with a client. Let's call her Jennifer. Senior leader. Big company. Head of a function with about 200 people under her. She got on the call buzzing. She had just walked out of a strategy meeting and was riding the high. Everyone agreed with her plan. No pushback. Her peer from the other function, the one she expected would push back, sat quietly and nodded. Her boss said it sounded reasonable. The room was warm. Jennifer said, "I think we are fi

No suits. No slides. Just dust, fire pits, bourbon - and conversations they’d been avoiding for a year. That’s what it looked like in Wyoming, where I brought one of the most high-performing yet misaligned leadership teams I’ve ever worked with. They didn’t need another strategy deck - they needed something real. And they let me take them there.

What if that confident silence you’re seeing isn’t a sign of trust… but a symptom of survival? I’ve coached inside many high-stakes...

A Chief of Staff in a national defense organization once asked me: "Why is it so hard to get people to take ownership? We have clear...

I watched the Astroworld documentary the other night. The chaos was horrifying - but what struck me most wasn’t what happened. It was what didn’t. Security was overwhelmed. Medics were begging for help. Audience members were screaming for the show to stop. And still - no one pulled the plug. That moment - when people know something is dangerously wrong but stay frozen in place - isn’t just a tragedy of poor logistics. It’s the consequence of a leadership culture that quietly