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04.02.26
Leading Thoughts for April 2, 2026
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Frank Barrett on Provocative Competence: “Leadership as design activity means creating space, sufficient support, and challenge so that people will be tempted to grow on their own. The goal is the opposite of conformity: a leader’s job is to create the discrepancy and dissonance that trigger people to move away from habitual positions and repetitive patterns. I’ve come to think of this key leadership capacity as ‘provocative competence.’” Source: Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske on self-awareness: “Developing your sense of Self-Awareness not only helps you gauge how you are likely to react in a given situation, but it can also provide some in-sight into the people around you. Having a stable sense of self can therefore ground you in situations when many other circumstances are beyond your immediate control.” Source: The Winner's Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index.   Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 07:05 AM
04.01.26
First Look: Leadership Books for April 2026
HERE'S A LOOK at some of the best leadership books to be released in April 2026 curated just for you. Be sure to check out the other great titles being offered this month.
Think about the last time you said, "I love that." Maybe it was about a product that exceeded expectations, a service experience that built instant loyalty, or a moment when your work brought out the best in you. That reaction isn't just emotional—it's electric. In the organization, it fuels engagement, strengthens performance, and drives lasting success. Yet most leaders don't even acknowledge it, let alone measure or make use of it. In Design Love In, leading researcher on human performance and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham reveals how love—the deep connection that makes people feel seen, valued, and inspired—isn't just a soft feeling. It's a measurable driver of performance and growth. He shows how leaders, as experience-makers, can intentionally "design love in" to everything we do: our interactions with team members, our company policies and practices, the products and services and experiences we create for those we lead and serve.
Increasingly today we find ourselves surrounded by chaos, turbulence and existential threats. We are at a destiny-shaped moment for humanity that calls for a next level of consciousness, courage and compassion from business leaders, who have a chance to contribute to the common good. In this context, and building on the main themes of Janni’s first book, he has come together with another pioneering leadership expert, Amy Elizabeth Fox to create Leading in Chaos, based on their mutual recognition of the unique demands the world faces today. Together, they encourage leaders to take one step further on the journey of self-discovery and self-mastery. Today’s fast-changing, uncertain times call for leaders to develop new capacities of consciousness and to view leadership as a sacred vocation – to become a blessing in the world through presence, coherence and deep human connection.
Can a manager really influence an organization’s culture, or do executives just try to impose a culture on their employees? Is the concept of culture too vague to measure objectively and improve? What happens to valuable employees who feel left out by the prevailing culture? Even if a “good” culture makes team members happy, does it actually affect the bottom line? This essential book answers the biggest questions about organizational culture, offering research-backed insights for leaders on shaping and managing an environment that spurs achievement. The authors draw on social-scientific findings to evaluate and debunk common misconceptions. They show how research on culture empowers managers to identify what really matters and deploy it productively. Chatman and Carroll also provide actionable levers to build and maintain organizational culture, from crafting a culture that supports strategic objectives to ensuring that it can adapt as conditions change.
Fearless Persistence is about the systems that quietly shape creative success and why so many talented people struggle without ever understanding why. Drawing on decades inside film studios, creative institutions, and leadership classrooms, Adam Leipzig reveals the hidden systems that support and constrain success-how power, pressure, time, belief, and structure shape whose work travels and whose work stalls, regardless of talent. Rather than offering inspiration or hustle culture, Fearless Persistence reframes persistence as design. It shows how creators and leaders build structures that allow their work to continue when conditions change, as they always do. Clear-eyed, deeply practical, and grounded in real experience, this book helps readers see the system beneath the story and redesign their creative lives for endurance, integrity, and impact. Creative success is shaped by systems. This book shows how to design a life that thrives inside them.
Every leader reaches a moment when skill isn’t enough.When the challenge cuts deeper and tests conviction, humility, and heart. The Core takes readers into that defining space, introducing us to Clint Smith and his mentor, Dr. Bill Jackson, and revealing that the foundation of lasting influence doesn’t come from power or position—it comes from the strength of one’s core. Through the journey of a young man whose plans are upended by tragedy, The Core blends a compelling story of mentorship with timeless principles of leadership. Under Dr. Jackson’s guidance—a hospital CEO who leads with quiet strength and deep conviction—Clint discovers that great leadership grows from the inside out.
Why do some of the most successful people in the world―from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey to Ralph Lauren―never finish college, while others with every academic advantage still struggle to find their way? For William R. Brody, a renowned physician-scientist and the former president of Johns Hopkins University, the answer lies in a truth higher education all too often overlooks: life, unlike textbooks, has no answer key. Most of the truly important questions we face rarely have a ready rubric and a simple solution. In Uncommon Sense, Brody distills lessons from decades in medicine, engineering, entrepreneurship, and academic leadership into a thoughtful, surprising, and often humorous exploration of how to think―and live―beyond the syllabus. Born from his popular Johns Hopkins seminar aimed at graduating seniors, the book exposes the gap between classroom achievement and real-world wisdom, offering readers a practical framework for navigating the unpredictable opportunities and sometimes contrarian decisions that define success and fulfillment.
   
“Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.” — Charles W. Eliot
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:54 AM
03.31.26
LeadershipNow 140: March 2026 Compilation
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Posted by Michael McKinney at 05:09 AM
03.30.26
Why Best Practices Hold You Back: When Yesterday’s Logic Meets Today’s Complexity
BEST practices are often viewed as the key to success in the business world. Certifications to prove practitioners are competent in accordance with a best practice make sense at the surface. However, they’ve become psychological cover that create mediocre results at best. It’s reassuring to be able to point at the protocol and say, “I followed the best practice. It’s not my fault.” Take project management, for example. Most project managers I’ve met (my younger self included) come from technical backgrounds who love best practices. I genuinely thought project management was about following the best practice and forcing people to follow my plan. Spoiler alert: That didn’t work. With today’s disruption and volatility, “business as usual” means little when there’s no “usual” anywhere in sight. Although Disruption and Volatility would make great names for a law firm, they require an adaptive approach to ensure survival and sustainability. Best practices bring a false measure of certainty for keeping threats at bay. However, they’re largely irrelevant as they’re developed by looking in the rearview mirror according to what worked under the conditions at that time. The solution is enhancing critical thinking to navigate complexity in real time. These days, to be successful, you need to be adaptable. This requires developing the critical thinking skills to solve the unique challenges your situation presents. To do so, follow these tips: 1. Don’t Mistake Motion for Mastery Attending endless meetings, always agreeing with leadership, escalating decisions, and “checking the boxes” that show you observed the best practice are all compliance-based behavior. You feel like you’re providing value but are really providing only a superficial benefit. Busy work consumes energy. It moves the needle little in terms of value delivered. This puts your organization and yourself at risk. Mastery comes from thoughtful distillation to what matters. Condense your work down to its essence — the 1 percent that really moves the needle. This involves having the important coaching conversation to shift the thinking of a team member, sharing the contrarian viewpoint that no one else sees, or carving out time for learning and growth to build new thinking. These are all leverage plays that return far more over time than they consume. 2. Understand That Best Practices Become So in Hindsight I started my career in engineering and realized early on that the work I did was a “good enough” approximation of the real-world physics my designs operated in. This allowed me to build things that consistently worked at a reasonable cost. Best practices are an approximation of what works in the real world. However, they’re only a snapshot of what worked at one point in time in the past. The business environment evolves rapidly at an ever-increasing rate of change. Best practices are backward-looking and largely irrelevant to the modern environment in which we try to apply them. This is why we talk of “better” practices and not “best” practices. You should always be getting better in the system in which you operate. Once you think you’ve arrived at the “best,” there’s no point to continue getting better. That leads to complacency. 3. Realize That Value Lies Beneath the Surface Understand what the organization you work within truly values. I often find when working with clients, whatever leadership thinks provides value in terms of outcomes are in tension with what leaders actually show they value day to day. For example, they may say the organization needs to be the top innovator in its industry globally. Then, leaders micromanage, reinforce compliance, and criticize mistakes. You can’t get to innovation if you value compliance, shame risk-taking, and make it intimidating for people to pursue efforts that might come up short. Success comes to those who are brave and can push back against the behavioral norms despite the daily rhetoric. Speak up when it feels uncomfortable. Have one high-leverage conversation tomorrow that you’ve been putting off. I rarely meet leaders who don’t value results when you show them you can achieve them. People who can do this write their own ticket. That means you need to be ready for some social discomfort on your journey to delivering the results your organization truly wants. Best practices are misaligned with the needs of the modern business environment because they’re rooted in yesterday’s logic and provide convenient psychological cover. In a world that previously rewarded compliance, many professionals were never required to develop strong critical thinking. That world has shifted. Leaders must move beyond the comfort those practices once provided and focus instead on the high leverage work that creates real outcomes. The willingness to think, question, and adapt is now what separates compliance from true leadership.  Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 09:46 AM
03.27.26
The Leadership Quality Nobody Talks About in the Boardroom
EVERY year, organizations spend billions of dollars developing leaders in strategy, finance, and operational execution. Organizations sponsor employees through MBA programs, leadership academies, and executive coaching. They teach how to read a balance sheet, build a competitive moat, and manage a P&L. What rarely makes the curriculum is the inner work — the cultivation of self — that actually shapes how leaders make decisions under pressure; how they treat people when no one is watching, The word "spirituality" makes most boardrooms uncomfortable. It conjures images of incense and meditation retreats, not quarterly earnings calls and market strategy. And yet, the qualities that spiritual traditions have long cultivated — integrity, empathy, hope, purpose, a sense of something larger than oneself — are exactly what research increasingly shows drives long-term organizational performance. These are not soft skills sitting at the margins of leadership. They are the foundation. The real question isn't whether these principles belong in business. The evidence has settled that debate. The question is why we have kept them out for so long — and what it is costing us. The Cost of Leading Without Coherence The numbers are striking. According to Deloitte research, three global companies lost a combined $70 billion in market value as a direct result of trust failures — not market disruption, not technological obsolescence, but the erosion of trust. Meanwhile, Gallup's 2024 data reveals that employee engagement has hit a ten-year low, with just 31% of workers actively engaged and approximately 8 million fewer engaged employees than in 2020. These are not abstract statistics. They represent organizations hemorrhaging talent, productivity, and competitive advantage. The pattern beneath these numbers is consistent: leaders who default to authority, control, and short-term metrics create cultures of disengagement and, eventually, cynicism. Innovation slows. Collaboration becomes transactional. The best people start looking for exits. This is the coherence gap — the distance between what leaders say they value and how they actually lead. It is where organizations quietly break down, long before the crisis becomes visible on a balance sheet. And it is, at its core, a spiritual problem: the failure to integrate who we are with how we lead. What High-Performing Leaders Do Differently In researching this question through extensive interviews with CEOs, investors, and senior leaders across sectors, four qualities emerged with striking consistency among those who built genuinely high-performing, resilient organizations. These qualities — Hope, Empathy, Abundance, and Legacy thinking (HEAL) — are not personality traits or leadership styles. They are practices. Disciplines. Things you cultivate, not things you simply have.
The Business Case is Settled For those who still need the data before the philosophy, purpose-driven companies outpaced the S&P 500 by 10.5 to 1 over a fifteen-year period. These are not the results of luck or favorable market conditions. They are the compounding results of leaders who chose to build organizations with coherence, trust, and genuine purpose at their core. The Choice Every Leader Faces Leadership begins in the mind. The way a leader thinks, what they attend to, what they believe about people and about their own purpose, shapes every decision they make. The inner work of cultivating hope, empathy, abundance, and a long-term view is not separate from the hard work of building organizations. It is the hard work. It is the work that determines whether all the other work blossoms or collapses. Every leader faces a choice, often unconsciously: to lead from default, reactive thinking — the accumulated habits of a career spent optimizing for the next result — or to cultivate the spiritual and moral qualities that create lasting impact. The first path is easier, at least at first. The second is harder, but it is the only one that builds something worth building. That choice defines not just your organization's performance. It defines your legacy. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:38 PM
03.26.26
Leading Thoughts for March 26, 2026
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: Jenna Nicholas on hope: “Real hope is not a spectator state of mind but rather a passionate mobilization to get up and join forces with the world around us. This kind of hope dares us to transcend fear and indifference by taking deliberate steps toward building a better future through our relationships and our work. Optimism is not just a nice feeling; it’s a courageous pledge to action, a belief in the possibility of change, and a summons to support solutions of hope-whether they’re grand and sweeping or just a tiny next step in the direction we want to go. This kind of hope keeps us going and inspires those around us.” Source: Enlightened Bottom Line: Exploring the Intersection of Spirituality, Business, and Investing Jane Goodall on hope: “Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen, but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement.” Source: The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 02:45 PM
03.20.26
I Stopped Wearing the Corporate Costume — and My Business Exploded
A former rancher turned finance leader explains why the “costume of conformity” is costing you clients, credibility, and the career you actually want. EARLY in my finance career, a client and I hit it off over the phone. We had a natural personality match — easy conversation, good rapport, real trust building in real time. When he came to my office for a face-to-face consultation, he saw me from across the room before we’d been formally introduced. He walked out. Didn’t say a word. He wasn’t going to trust the largest transaction of his life to what he saw as an immature individual who didn’t look the part. At the time, I was doing everything I’d been told to do. I’d come into finance from cattle ranching, welding, heavy equipment, truck driving, and underground mining — environments where you dressed for utility, not appearances. When I entered the corporate world, I was subjected to constant scrutiny: how I talked, how I groomed, how I dressed, how I stood. All of it presented as a necessity of success. So I conformed. I put on the costume. And I lost a client anyway — not because I was being myself, but because I wasn’t. That experience, and several like it, taught me something that changed the trajectory of my career: authenticity isn’t just a feel-good buzzword. It’s a business strategy. Here’s why. The People Who Told Me to Conform Didn’t Stick Around Not long after I started dressing and grooming the way I was told to, every single one of the people who insisted their way was the path to success had disappeared. They left the business. They weren’t successful. And there I was, sitting alone in an office, “dressed for success” according to the standards of people who had failed. That forced a hard question: if the people prescribing the formula couldn’t make it work for themselves, why was I following their playbook? The advice we accept about how to present ourselves often comes from people who haven’t achieved what we’re trying to achieve. Before you take someone’s word on what success looks like, check whether they’ve actually built any. The Costume of Conformity Creates a Mismatch — and People Can Feel It Here’s what I figured out from losing that client: the problem wasn’t that I didn’t look like a finance professional. The problem was that I looked like one on the outside and sounded like something completely different on the inside. My words and personality created one impression. My appearance created another. The mismatch made people uneasy, even if they couldn’t articulate why. I was essentially lying with my appearance. When your outside doesn’t match your inside, people sense it — and any trust you built through conversation gets undermined the moment they see the disconnect. Conformity doesn’t build trust. Consistency does. Authenticity Is the Fastest Way to Sort Through People When I finally made the decision to let my outward appearance match the person inside, something unexpected happened: I started saving an enormous amount of time and resources. If someone took issue with the honest representation of who I am before we ever discussed business, neither of us invested time that would result in a loss. No deep personal analysis across multiple meetings just to discover we weren’t a fit. No weeks of small talk built on a false first impression. Showing up as yourself is the most efficient filter in business. The people who can’t get past how you look were never going to be the right clients, partners, or colleagues anyway. Better to find that out in the first thirty seconds than the first three months. Walls Come Down When the Costume Comes Off The flipside was just as powerful. When I stopped conforming, the people who were a fit connected with me faster and deeper than they ever had before. Walls came down. Conversations were more open and relaxed. There was no scripted small talk, no rehearsed objection-handling techniques taught by industry trainers. Just two people having a real conversation. I’ve found that the greatest way to overcome objections is to develop an actual relationship with a person — to truly care about them. And the best way to evidence that care is by being authentically yourself. Any sort of fakeness, no matter how polished, brings everything into question. If someone suspects you’re performing, they’ll wonder what else you’re hiding. Being Yourself Is a Risk — Take It Anyway I won’t pretend this is easy. When you stop conforming, you will lose people. Some clients will walk. Some colleagues will judge. Some opportunities will close before they open. That’s the cost, and you have to be willing to pay it. But here’s what I’ve learned over decades in this business: the opportunities you lose by being yourself are always smaller than the ones you gain. The clients who stay are better clients. The relationships are deeper. The referrals are stronger. And you get to wake up every morning without dreading the performance you have to put on. If you’re going to be judged for your appearance either way, you might as well make sure what people are judging is actually you. Drop the Costume The choice is simple, even if it’s not easy: you can keep hiding behind the costume of conformity, hoping it earns you approval from people who may not even be around next year. Or you can show up as the best, most honest version of yourself and let the sorting happen naturally. Be authentic. Be kind. Be excellent at what you do. And if someone can’t get past the packaging to see the substance, that’s not a client you lost — it’s time you saved. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 12:13 PM
03.19.26
Leading Thoughts for March 19, 2026
IDEAS shared have the power to expand perspectives, change thinking, and move lives. Here are two ideas for the curious mind to engage with: John Kenneth Galbraith on power: “An important tendency in all modern political comment is to exaggerate the role of personality in the exercise of power. What rightly should be attributed to the property or organization surrounding them is thus accorded to their personality. Vanity also contributes to the exaggeration of the role of personality. Nothing so rejoices the corporate executive, television anchorman, or politician as to believe that he is uniquely endowed with the qualities of leadership that derive from intelligence, charm, or sustained rhetorical capacity—that he has a personal right to command. Divorced from organization, the synthetic personality dissolves, and the individual behind it disappears into the innocuous obscurity for which his real personality intended him.” Source: The Anatomy of Power Jeffrey Sonnenfeld on bouncing back: “William Shakespeare penned the immortal words ‘Some men are born great, some men achieve greatness, and some men have greatness thrust upon them.’ But perhaps what marks greatness above all else is the ability to be great again—to reachieve greatness when greatness, however initially gained, is torn from our possession. It is the ability to bounce back from adversity—to prove your mettle once more by getting back into the game—that separates the lasting greats from the fleeting greats.” Source: Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters Look for these ideas every Thursday on the Leading Blog. Find more ideas on the LeadingThoughts index. Follow us on Instagram and X for additional leadership and personal development ideas.
Posted by Michael McKinney at 04:25 PM
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Design Love In
Leading in Chaos
Making Organizational Culture Great
Fearless Persistence
The Core
Uncommon Sense
Here is a selection of 
