David Burkus Presents

Companies say they can't find qualified employees. Meanwhile, recent college graduates are sending out hundreds of job applications without landing a single interview....what's going on here? I'm taking a deep dive into the data around the job market and the economy from this year (2026) to hopefulIy provide some clarity for people on all sides of this equation. I'll explain the im...

When an idea doesn't land, most of us assume the explanation was the problem. So we find better words, add another slide, and say it again, slower. It's a reasonable instinct. Simon Bowen has spent thirty years building visual models for leaders, and he'd tell you the idea was never unclear. Nobody could see it. Simon is the person organizations call when the room has no intention of a...

If you feel overwhelmed as a manager, you probably already have the diagnosis. My team just got too big. Too many direct reports. And with companies flattening and widening the spans that are left, that explanation is about to get a lot more popular. It's a reasonable read — team size is the one thing on the org chart you can actually see. It's also not where the data points. Gallup's...

In the early 2000s, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London — one of the world's leading centres for children's heart surgery — had a problem that had nothing to do with surgery. It was in the handover that followed, when a child was moved from the operating theatre to intensive care. A human-factors researcher observing those transfers counted an average of about five technical errors and...

In 2017, Tesla set out to build a car factory so automated that people would barely be needed. The target was five thousand Model 3s a week. Across the entire third quarter, the line produced 260 cars. It remains the best-documented attempt we have at replacing people with machines at scale, which makes it the right place to start if you're worried about AI replacing jobs. The popular version...

AI might make management more efficient. But efficiency isn’t the same thing as leadership. In this video, I break down four parts of management I would never delegate to AI and why keeping them human matters more as artificial intelligence becomes embedded in the workplace. AI can summarize meetings, organize information, draft emails, analyze data, and take a lot of administrative work off your...

New team collaboration breaks for a reason that looks like something else. You inherited a team, or built one, or a reorg assembled one for you, and on paper it's the kind of group you'd point to in a leadership meeting. Six weeks in, the work is slower than it was when everyone was working alone. I've told myself the same thing you're telling yourself: they just need time. It'...

Making mistakes is part of leadership. Knowing how to own them and apologize for them is a leadership skill most people never learn. In this video, I break down nine (yes, nine!) apologies every leader will eventually have to make. From owning a bad decision or broken promise to apologizing for not listening, waiting too long to act, or handling a difficult situation poorly. We’ll also cover the h...

The obvious response to AI eating more of the workday is to get more efficient — learn the tools, move faster, automate what you can. Caroline Webb, who's spent twenty-five years coaching leaders using cognitive and behavioral science, argues something closer to the opposite: the tasks AI still can't touch are the ones that actually decide whether you're a good leader, and most of us h...

The people who lost their jobs are gone but that doesn’t mean the layoff is over for the people who stayed. Research shows that employees who survive layoffs often experience anxiety, guilt, lower morale, reduced productivity, and a loss of trust in leadership. And trying to rush everyone back to “business as usual” can make things worse. I’ll walk you through how managers can rebuild trust throug...

In 1998, Pixar lost two months of Toy Story 2 to a stray delete command. A dozen people gave up a weekend to claw it back. Ten weeks later, four colleagues watched what they'd rescued and threw away more of it than the computer had. The interesting part isn't the accident. It's that the verdict came from people with no power to enforce it — and that's the reason it worked. Feedback...

What happens when everyone on your team thinks the boss is wrong...but nobody says anything? That’s exactly what happened at Netflix. In 2011, co-founder Reed Hastings made a decision that cost the company customers, millions of dollars, and a massive drop in stock price. The surprising part? Dozens of Netflix leaders suspected the decision would fail before it happened. They just stayed silent. I...

Does it feel like every business has gotten worse? Longer hold times, endless bureaucracy, frustrating customer service, and workplaces buried under layers of process. In this video, I explore why so many organizations feel broken—and why the problem isn't lazy employees or bad leaders. It's the systems we've built. Drawing on research in organizational psychology, I explain how concep...

If you're managing under a toxic or chaotic senior leader, your job is more than just keeping projects on track. It's protecting your team. In this video, I share practical leadership strategies for managing up, shielding your team from unnecessary chaos, and building a healthy team culture even when senior leadership creates uncertainty. You'll learn how to act as a shock absorber ins...

A lot of leadership advice assumes everyone on your team actually works for you, but modern teams are often blended teams, full-time employees, freelancers, contractors, consultants, and fractional leaders all trying to move work forward with different schedules, incentives, and priorities. That can get messy fast. In this video, we’ll break down how to manage a blended team without wasting people...

Is your team always waiting until the last minute...all the time? You'd be surprised. It’s not about laziness. It's usually about stress, unclear expectations, vague milestones, and bottlenecks leaders don’t always see. Now, don't you procrastinate here, I'm here to help! In this video, I’ll show you how to handle procrastination without micromanaging or becoming the boss nobody wa...

Most leaders treat time management like a logistics problem. Not enough hours. Too many demands. A calendar that's already full before Monday starts. So they grind harder—and still feel behind. Laura Vanderkam has spent two decades studying how people actually spend their time, and her research keeps arriving at the same uncomfortable finding: most of us aren't as busy as we believe. We&#3...

Does something feel off at your job? The Sunday scaries creeping in harder and harder? Jealously bubbling up from other people’s work at other places? Or are simply bored? Well, it might be time for a career change. Before you make the leap to possibly brighter pastures that promise purpose and maybe even cure those Sunday scaries, take it from me, you’ll want to take a few strategic steps before...

If you’ve ever felt the “vibe shift” at work, fewer responsibilities, less communication, and more criticism...you may be getting managed out. No one wants to be in this situation. And if that sounds like you, I'm here to help. In this episode, I break down the subtle signs your boss or organization may be quietly pushing you toward the exit, and more importantly, what you can do about it. It&...

Most organizations are treating AI like a software upgrade. Buy the licenses, hand it to IT, measure adoption rates, call it a transformation. It isn't. Charlene Li has spent the last several years inside organizations actually leading AI transformation — not just talking about it — and her diagnosis is blunt: the problem isn't the technology. It's that leaders keep handing off a leade...

Perfectionism feels like a strength, but it’s often the very thing slowing you down. In this video, we break down the hidden costs of perfectionism and how it quietly sabotages productivity, decision-making, and team performance. Drawing on research and real-world examples, you’ll learn the critical difference between pursuing excellence and chasing perfection, and why that distinction matters mor...

Want to get promoted and land the high-profile projects? Just doing great work isn't enough. You need a strong internal reputation that speaks for you even when you're not in the room. In this video, I'm breaking down five proven strategies to build your workplace reputation without playing politics. I'll show you how to make yourself visible, how to make others look good (and in t...

Most leaders think creativity belongs to a handful of people on their team—the ones in marketing, R&D, or the corner office with the whiteboard. Everyone else executes. And that assumption, more than any lack of talent, is what's quietly killing your team's best ideas before they ever surface. Josh Linkner has spent years studying what actually happens when people create together at th...

Failure at work isn’t the problem, it's how leaders respond to it is. In this video, I break down how great leaders turn mistakes into momentum by building trust, reinforcing psychological safety, and creating a culture where teams actually learn. You’ll learn a simple, practical framework: acknowledge what happened, separate effort from outcomes, run effective post-mortems, and reestablish cl...

Most people think leadership comes with a title. A promotion. A team. But in reality, leadership starts long before any of that...and often without it. In this video, we’re unpacking what it really means to lead without formal authority. Because stepping up without the title isn’t just a career move, it’s a proving ground. It’s where you build the skills, relationships, and reputation that make le...