We were asked hard questions by our leadership not so they could demonstrate power but so they could give us room to be honest and vulnerable about what we did or did not know.

follows: I am part of an elite tribe made up of great individuals who are the best at what they do. Each of us needs to earn their place in this tribe every day. Each of us needs to exceed the expectations of our SEAL teammates, and we expect them to do the same for us.

A leader’s job, rather than appointing boundary spanners, is to create an environment where any individual in the organization can “connect the dots,” and choose to become a boundary spanner themselves.

But at its inception, and for a while afterward, Smith’s “One Intuit” didn’t take well—despite its being percolated through conventional, solid-line means and issued in press releases and corporate memos, teams were generally confused and unaware of the significance of the message and what “One Intuit” really meant across the different business uni

Every twenty-four hours, there was a new opportunity for cross-boundary ties to emerge, driven by a shared understanding of what was happening on the battlefield and reinforced by our organization’s recommunicated aligning narrative.

Honest, raw, ground-level truth is invaluable in a networked age, and so the slightest effort to clean up the data or round a sharp edge can quickly cover up some overlooked detail.

“I think the death knell of a company, or a leader in it, is when they think they have more answers than questions,” Smith says. “We therefore have to guard against intellectual certainty.”

“Most of our people were waiting for some big technological breakthrough at the firm level, that would ultimately infuse a sharing of information” across the teams. But gradually, they realized a technological silver bullet to solve the firm’s challenges just didn’t exist—it had to be complemented by an elite human element.

You’ve been provided the communication structures and operating rhythm necessary to maintain shared consciousness, and I will advise on actions that fall outside of your decision space; your job is to move as an interconnected team, leveraging your decision space to its fullest capacity, during periods of empowered execution.