Writing.
A few arguments I keep returning to, mostly about deciding well when the evidence is not going to arrive in time.
They are not watching your delivery. They are checking whether you believe it
Most of what executives are taught about presence comes from a study about the word thanks. What actually determines whether a message lands, and the two interventions that survive contact with the evidence.
What twelve months buys that six weeks cannot
Short engagements produce plans. Retained relationships produce something else, and the difference is not effort or depth. It is whether the person already has the context when the call is urgent.
The succession question is not about your successor
Boards frame it as a staffing exercise. The reason it stalls is almost never the candidate, and the person who has to resolve it is the one who does not want to.
What would you do if you had just been hired?
The oldest question in management, and the reason it works is not the fresh perspective. It is that it separates the decision from the person who made it.
At some point you stopped being a person and became a signal
Everything you say at the top gets read as instruction. Understanding when that changed, and what it costs you, explains most of what feels strange about the job.
Nobody thanks you for the crisis that did not happen
Good judgment is invisible when it works. That has a career cost, a psychological cost, and one specific consequence for how you should keep records.
Nobody tells the chief executive the second half of the sentence
Information does not stop reaching you at the top. It arrives edited, by people who are not lying. Why the distortion is structural, and what actually works against it.
You are not indecisive. You are waiting for evidence that is not coming
Most decisions that feel stuck are not waiting on information. They are waiting on permission to be made without it. How to tell the difference, and what to do once you can.
Your calendar is the only honest document in the company
The strategy says one thing. The diary says another. When they disagree, the diary is right, and everyone below you is reading it rather than the strategy.
The person you have been avoiding for eleven months
Almost every senior leader has one. The conversation gets deferred, the cost compounds quietly, and the delay teaches the organisation something you did not intend to teach it.
The advice you get is priced by what it costs the person giving it
Every piece of advice you receive has a price attached that nobody states out loud. Understanding what each of your advisers is paying explains why the most useful conversation is often the one you are not having.
What Frontier Coaching is, and where it came from
A practice built out of eighteen years of being in the room when large organisations changed, and one observation about who chief executives actually talk to.