Leadership Superpowers
Join hundreds of leaders supercharging their careers. Each weekly issue of Leadership Superpowers will teach you battle tested leadership insights and tools to solve your toughest challenges. Earn more, deliver better and grow faster with Leadership Superpowers.
The AI Crucible: More Value, Less Grief
The AI Crucible AI makes producing results cheaper every day. Producing the right results is still the hard part. That distinction matters because it is easy to get pulled into an AI conversation about cheaper production. Better prompts. Better tools. Better models. Better hacks. All useful, up to a point. But if the work is wrong, unreliable, unreviewed, unsuitable for purpose, or pointed at the wrong target, cheaper production is not leverage. It is cheaper grief. Give an agent a vague...
AI Doom? No, But the Path is Narrow...
THE WAIT IS OVER. The Leadership Superpowers book is launched! And it hit #1 this week on Amazon! Thanks to everyone who participated in the launch and…. As promised, I have a VERY SPECIAL newsletter issue for you today. Let me know what you think… Everyone’s talking about keeping humans in the loop. They’re worried about AI replacing jobs, so the focus is on how humans can stay relevant by supervising, correcting, and improving AI outputs. Here’s what they’re missing: human-in-the-loop is a...
Why High Performers Plateau (And How to Break Through)
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. Why High Performers Plateau (And How to Break Through) You’re the senior IC everyone relies on to ship the impossible. The engineering manager who turned around that struggling team. The one who consistently delivers what others can’t. In your skip-level you hear you’re “director material.” Your peer reviews are glowing. You’ve been doing next-level work for over a year. And yet. The promotion to staff engineer never comes. The director role goes...
The Competence Paradox
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. The Competence Paradox The best leaders often feel like frauds. You just got promoted to lead your former peers. You’ve crushed every technical challenge thrown your way for years. Your new boss believes you’re ready. Your team expects you to have answers. And you’re terrified they’ll all figure out you have no idea what you’re doing. Here’s what nobody tells you: that feeling isn’t a warning sign. It’s a diagnostic. And what it’s detecting isn’t...
Don’t Dive Deep Until You Do This First
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. Don’t Dive Deep Until You Do This First Picture this: A brilliant VP spends three months analyzing supply chain inefficiencies. Her team produces beautiful dashboards, comprehensive reports, and detailed recommendations. The only problem? She’s solving the wrong problem entirely. The real issue is a pricing model that makes the product unprofitable regardless of supply chain optimization. This scenario plays out in organizations every day. In...
Human Factors Are Always the Largest Factors
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. Human Factors Are Always the Largest Factors The most expensive leadership development mistake isn’t what you think. It’s not picking the wrong training program. It’s not hiring the wrong coach. It’s not even choosing the wrong skills to develop. It’s forgetting that leadership problems are human problems. And human problems are always bigger than technical problems. In today’s newsletter, I’ll share why “soft skills” is the worst phrase in...
Systems Won't Save You
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. Systems Won't Save You When Monday morning hits, you’re fighting the same fires and stuck in the same patterns. Again. Maybe you’ve read Thinking in Systems. Or you’ve studied the Toyota Production System. You know about Feedback Loops and Leverage Points. Or maybe those terms are new for you. You are surrounded by systems you inherited or created. Here’s the uncomfortable truth I learned leading in organizations of all sizes and coaching leaders...
Find Your Flow
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. Find Your Flow “Water configures its flow in accord with the terrain; the army controls victory in accord with the enemy.” — Sun Tzu, The Art of War Jensen Huang didn’t see ChatGPT coming. Nobody did. But when cryptocurrency mining collapsed in September 2022—eliminating Ethereum GPU mining overnight—NVIDIA was ready. Not because they predicted the future, but because they’d spent 16 years building capabilities that could flow like water into new...
The Missing Link
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. The Missing Link Why Drucker’s 5 practices fail without Leadership Superpowers… You’ve mastered time management. You focus on contribution. You even make “effective decisions.” So why do 40% of new managers still struggle to support their teams? This week’s newsletter is inspired by the concluding chapter in Peter Drucker’s famous book The Effective Executive. It also marks the conclusion to our series on the book, too (email subscribers get...
Choosing Wisely
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. Choosing Wisely A whopping 74% of new leaders feel unprepared for high-stakes decisions in their first year. Harvard Business Review says the temptation to decide too quickly damages credibility and moving too slowly does, too. Every choice you make shapes your credibility. Whether you are an experienced leader stepping into a new role or managing a team for the first time, your decisions make or break your effectiveness and build or destroy...
Join hundreds of leaders supercharging their careers. Each weekly issue of Leadership Superpowers will teach you battle tested leadership insights and tools to solve your toughest challenges. Earn more, deliver better and grow faster with Leadership Superpowers.