Writing.
A few arguments I keep returning to, mostly about deciding well when the evidence is not going to arrive in time.
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.