
Your Culture Is Measured in Silence
Your Culture Is Measured in Silence One of the most dangerous signals in any organization isn’t conflict. It’s silence. Leaders often chase disruption, thinking that’s where the problems lie. But a quiet room doesn’t mean alignment. It often means fear. Fear of saying the wrong thing. Fear of being punished for speaking up. Fear that nothing will change anyway. And when silence becomes normalized, performance suffers. Innovation slows. People disengage quietly — until they burn out or walk away. The mistake leaders make is assuming that politeness equals trust. It doesn’t. Culture is how work gets done. And if people aren’t being fully honest, your culture isn’t driving performance — it’s...
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Culture Captures the Cost Savings
Culture Captures the Cost Savings In this week’s CEO Daily Brief, I spoke with labor strategy expert John Frehse about the growing pressure leaders...
What Becoming a Death Doula Has Taught Me About Change Management
What Becoming a Death Doula Has Taught Me About Change Management After five years volunteering in UC Davis’s No One Dies Alone program, I recently...
You Have a Leadership Problem
You Have a Leadership Problem Accountability gets tossed around in every leadership meeting, but most companies still get it wrong. It often shows...
The One Question That Changed My Career
The One Question That Changed My Career This question—What is your boss’s boss worried about?—has changed the way I work, lead, and think. It’s the...
Good Leaders Lie
Good Leaders Lie We’ve all heard the phrase “good leaders lie”—and not because they’re malicious, but because they think they have to. To protect...
Why That Offsite Didn’t Fix Anything
Why That Offsite Didn’t Fix Anything You can spend a fortune on a company offsite, deliver inspiring keynotes, fill whiteboards with arrows, and get...
AI is Here. Three CEOs Responded—One Got It Right.
AI is moving fast. Some leaders are using that momentum to inspire progress. Others are hiding behind it to justify layoffs, confusion, or fear....
“On Second Thought…”
I’m currently reading Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About The Sixties, a memoir of ideological disillusionment by David Horowitz and Peter...
Houston we have a culture problem.
Last week’s Blue Origin space launch—featuring Katy Perry and an all-female crew—was marketed as a celebration of empowerment. But the public wasn’t...
Disruption Is So 2010s—Time to Move On
In the early days of my career at Oracle, “disruption” was a buzzword so overused it became almost meaningless. We talked about it like it was the...
A Culture for All Generations
Disrupting the way we think about generations to attract, engage, and retain all employees
There’s a real benefit in dismantling the perceptions behind Gen Z or X, or whatever the next trendy label is! Citing extensive academic research from her book, Unfairly Labeled, Jessica provides a refreshingly enlightening and data-driven perspective on how multi-generational organizations can strip away stereotypes and and biases that hinder performance and prevent progress toward a common purpose.