organizational culture

Companies run at room temperature by default. Founders are exothermic — they inject heat into the system. The job is to protect that heat from being politicked away.

Detect when weak governance is pushing an institution toward irreversible norm collapse

Bake effectiveness into your culture through shared language, democratized data, and learning from failure

Inspire action by starting with WHY you exist, then explaining HOW you do it, and finally showing WHAT you offer

Combine high demands with high support to build gritty cultures

Diagnose and upgrade your organization's culture through five tribal stages

Lead innovation as Architect, Bridger, and Catalyst instead of lone visionary

Close the gap between organizational values and daily practices to re-engage teams

Evaluate whether transparency culture is genuine or performative

Build the environment that turns ordinary people into heroes

Great leaders create environments of safety so people naturally trust and cooperate

Givers are at both the bottom and top of every success metric—the key is weeding out takers

The best leaders combine fierce resolve with personal humility

Build trust before crisis or it will not exist during crisis

Great leaders protect their people from internal danger to unleash external performance

Stop moving pieces on the board and start tending the ecosystem that allows your teams to flourish

Sixteen contrasting pairs of self-protective armor and courageous leadership behaviors that distinguish defensive from wholehearted leading

Shift organizational focus from the absence of failure to the pursuit of greatness

Two types of leaders and their dramatically different impact on team intelligence and capability

Free discussion, clear decision, full support

Freedom and responsibility within a framework, replacing bureaucracy with self-discipline

Build the organizational conditions where innovation becomes habitual

How societies confront collective participation in systemic wrongdoing

Create conditions where learning and excellence emerge organically

In a crisis, let go of the methods that got you here

Rehumanize work and education by making vulnerability the source of innovation

Every organization is a tribe of tribes, and each tribe's culture falls on a five-stage spectrum ...

Unlock group generosity by making requests visible and help freely available

People cheat just enough to benefit while still feeling honest about themselves