Why Change Capability Is The Most Important Missing Competency For Today’s Leaders

As the former CEO of both Data Domain and ServiceNow, two successful tech companies in recent years, I am often confronted with questions: what did you guys do? What is the secret sauce? How did you do it? We never thought of ourselves as that different. We certainly didn’t think we had stumbled on a silver bullet. Did we just get incredibly lucky ... See more

In order to maximize positive outcomes, everyone, especially those in senior roles who have a disproportionate impact on organizational culture, need to (1) be more leader and less commander, (2) foster psychological safety, and (3) leverage the fact that product development and organizational change is emergent, not deterministic. There is a need

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Forgetting outdated assumptions is crucial for adaptability in leadership. We all carry mental models shaped by our education, experiences, and cultural contexts. While these frameworks help us navigate complexity, they can calcify into rigid beliefs that limit our perspective. Consider how we think of our AI implementation strategies. It is all to... See more

These are what we call adaptive challenges, gaps generated by bold aspirations amid challenging realities. For these the world needs to build new ways of being and responding beyond the current repertoires of available know-how. What is needed from a leadership perspective are new forms of improvisational expertise, a kind of process expertise that

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Most notably, strategy became more about formulation than implementation, and more about getting the analysis right at the outset than living with a strategy over time. Equally problematic, the leader’s unique role as arbiter and steward of strategy had been eclipsed. While countless books have been written about strategy in the last thirty years,

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