When I started working with EOS teams, one of the first things I noticed was how many leadership teams talked about accountability but didn't practice it in the most visible place possible: their own schedules. The leader with no boundaries on her time is also the leader whose team never develops judgment about what's worth escalating. The owner who jumps into every interrupt trains the people around him to interrupt. Calendars are contagious. Protecting your time as a manage

The most common answer I hear when a leadership team brings an Issue to the table is some version of: "We just need more resources." More headcount to fix the fulfillment bottleneck. More budget to fix the marketing problem. More time to fix the product gap. I've heard this pattern across dozens of companies, and it's almost never the real diagnosis. The actual problem is that the Issue lacks two things: a constraint tight enough to force a decision, and an outcome specific e

Supercommunicators is one of my favorite books, and Charles Duhigg is one of my favorite authors. I have read most of what he has written, and this one stuck with me more than the rest. It gave language to something I had felt for years but never named: that the best conversations are not about being clever or persuasive, they are about connection. It also hit close to home. I teach listening and management skills for a living. Helping leaders hear their people, run better on

I just started reading David Epstein’s book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. I’m only a couple of chapters in, but it’s already so good that I couldn't wait to stop and share some of its core breakthroughs. The timing couldn't be better, because we live in a culture absolutely obsessed with optionality. We are told that total freedom, endless choices, and unlimited resources are the ultimate prerequisites for innovation. If we just had a larger budget, a blank