“By demonstrating the potential of a new style and eliciting positive feedback, small wins start to shift the leader’s motivation from necessity (“I need to be a better communicator”) to possibility (“I’m working on communicating better because it will help me accomplish my goal”) and identity (“I’m working on communicating better because that is who I want to be”). These...”

“One of the biggest complaints we hear about executive education is that the skills and capabilities developed don’t get applied on the job. This challenges the very foundation of executive education, but it is not surprising. Research by cognitive, educational, and applied psychologists dating back a century, along with more-recent work in the neuroscience of learning, reveals that the distance...”

“The further the learning space is from the doing space, the harder it is to internalize and put into practice. Ultimately organizing your documentation is about finding ways to shrink this gap and make it easier to discover and use the knowledge stored in your documentation when you need it most.”

“Organizations that learn to think strategically are those that treat it as a constant practice. That’s because strategy is not just a plan to win — it’s a process. Making strategy and executing strategy are two sides of the same coin. You don’t have a strategy. You do strategy. The trick is to build a management system for strategic discussion....”

“Classic Competitive Strategy theory assumes that advantage comes from operational superiority—that is, practices, processes, technologies and positioning that result in lower unit costs and/or superior product qualities. Attractive investment opportunities arise from these operating advantages. Cost or product quality advantages are the means to achieve competitive advantage. That implies, though, that the strategic horizon around such prescription is open ended;...”

“Ultimately the real point isn’t that execution is more important than strategy, but rather that they’re complimentary. Strong execution lets you test and validate bits of strategy before they become company-changing decisions. As you’re moving through life as a startup, there are tons of strategic questions to answer, and in my experience trying to figure those out from the bottom-up...”

“Executives are just ordinary people who were put in charge of enormous projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you have any idea what kind of responsibility that is, and the kind of stomachaches it gives me? Sometimes I felt that I just couldn’t fill this executive role anymore. I invested unbelievable efforts in denying my self-doubts and pretending...”

“The executives reported learning to grasp recurring difficulties as inherent to senior positions and not as a sign of managerial inadequacy. With the encouragement of their management consultants, the executives had also realized that managerial knowledge and skills, important as they may be, cannot substitute for their cultivation of an emotional capacity to contend with role distress, which is nowadays...”

“In his classic article, Michael Porter characterises strategy as the need to make difficult choices. He argues “with so many forces at work against making choices and trade-offs in organizations, a clear intellectual framework to guide strategy is a necessary counterweight” (Porter 1996). However, the evidence explored here suggests that an intellectual framework is not enough. Porter characterizes strategy as...”

“the 'amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals within organizations had increased by anywhere from 50% to 350% over a 15-year period.' And in the top 20% most complicated organizations? The managers in those organizations 'spend 40% of their time writing reports and 30% to 60% of it in coordination meetings.'”

“How would I approach my work differently if focused on growth and engagement, and if I measured eras not in equity and IPOs but instead in decades? I’d focus on a small handful of things that build together, with each making the others more impactful as they compound over time. I’d focus on pace, people, prestige, profit and learning.”