CEO diary entry: control, accountability, whiplash & anxiety

Sound judgment, achieved through aggressive truth seeking, is your most differentiating and deterministic trait. Despite all the hard work you do and the good luck you garner, you can lose it all with a tainted decision—and compound your outcome with an enlightened one. It’s all about being honest. This was the founding core principle behind Bridge

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Complex is where the relationships between cause and effect are only clear in retrospect. It’s an emergent practice. This is the field that entrepreneurs frequently find themselves in. It’s not clear what to do next, because you exhausted the expertise you gained through education. The problem is solved, instead, by testing new solutions and seeing

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I distinctly remember at Microsoft in the late 90s, walking around campus and there was just all the folks sort of saying, God, we must be God's gifts to mankind because we are so good now that the market also recognizes it, except that it was obviously the beginning of the end in some sense, right? The day hubris takes over and you're not grounded... See more

A decade later, I had risen through the ranks to become the CEO of another company. I was that most senior of executives. The company would live or die by the strategic choices I made, or so I thought. I wrote the strategy or at least variations were presented to me and I would decide. But, something had gone terribly wrong in my journey. Somehow a... See more