Insights

Most organizations don't fail at change because they lacked a plan.

Strategic planning season is the worst time to discover your leadership team isn't aligned.

A new plan is the most common way organizations avoid dealing with the fact that they need a reset.

Most transformation initiatives fail not because the strategy was wrong — but because no one accounted for the humans who had to execute it.

Your leadership team left the offsite nodding. Six months later, nothing changed. That's not a strategy problem. That's an alignment problem disguised as agreement.

Most founders don't lose their culture on purpose. They lose it one reasonable decision at a time.

Most nonprofit strategic plans are built to impress funders. The ones that work are built to drive decisions.

Most organizations treat symptoms. A diagnostic finds the source.

The open door policy is one of the most widely adopted — and least examined — leadership practices in modern organizations.

Some of the best decisions we've seen come out of leadership teams that insisted on full buy-in before moving. Some of the worst organizations we've encountered also insisted on full buy-in before moving.

There's a version of leadership busyness that is a genuine red flag.

Somewhere in your organization right now, there is probably a high performer who became a manager — and is quietly struggling.

Open-book leadership has become a marker of organizational virtue. Share the numbers. Explain the decisions. Let people see behind the curtain.

Every organization has a culture. The question isn't whether yours is good or bad — it's whether it's costing you money you haven't accounted for.

The nonprofit board is one of the most misunderstood structures in organizational life.

There is a stage of organizational growth that kills more companies quietly than any market downturn does loudly.