Beautiful Business

After a recent full-day workshop, the VP who hired us said something that stayed with me: it was the best day his team had spent together since they began working together. He didn’t call it productive. He didn’t talk about efficiency or ROI. He called it the best day. Organizations have become remarkably good at accounting for time—hours worked, meetings attended, deadlines met, revenue by quarte...

In today’s episode, I explore the stories that hide inside the labels we use at work. Words like “dysfunctional,” “infighting,” or “crazy” can feel like useful shorthand. But once repeated often enough, they can start to sound like settled facts. The problem is that a label can make us stop looking. We begin filtering every new experience through the story we already believe. I share examples from...

In today’s episode, I explore what makes something feel trustworthy in a world where polished communication is increasingly easy to produce. The idea begins with two signs that say the same thing: “Fresh Corn.” One is professionally made and built to last. The other is a rough piece of cardboard with hand-painted letters. When people are asked which one they trust more, they choose the cardboard s...

In today’s episode, I reflect on the life and work of Wendell Berry, the poet, farmer, and novelist who spent much of his life tending the same Kentucky land. His writing offers a way of thinking about work that feels particularly relevant to leadership: the things that impede us may also be the things that give our work its shape. Berry wrote about two muses. One gives us the vision. The other re...

In today’s episode, I reflect on a single word that stayed with me after Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, described finally getting five hours of sleep: finally. That word says something about the way many high-performing people experience rest—as something to earn, justify, or reach only after everything and everyone else has been taken care of. I see this often in the leaders I coach and...

In today’s episode, I explore a tension every leader eventually faces: when to look again, and when to trust the decision you’ve already made. There’s an important difference between checking the work and questioning the judgment. One can reveal an error. The other can reveal that circumstances have changed—or that we’re simply uncomfortable with committing to a choice. Using Apollo 11, the premor...

In today’s episode, I explore why a strong strategy can still struggle once it leaves the leadership meeting. Leadership teams often do the hard work of gathering data, debating trade-offs, pressure-testing assumptions, and arriving at a sound decision. Yet once execution begins, a different reality can emerge. Milestones slip. Priorities compete. Meetings multiply. What seemed clear in the strate...

In today’s episode, I reflect on a simple story about a Chinese farmer and the word “maybe”—a word that can sound like hesitation, but can also represent something much more powerful: a disciplined openness to what we do not yet know. As leaders, we are constantly surrounded by pressure to interpret events quickly. A missed target becomes a crisis. A new opportunity becomes a breakthrough. A compe...

In today’s episode, I reflect on a question a CEO once asked me after a leadership workshop: “Are you having fun?” It was a casual question, but it stayed with me. Over time, it became less about whether I enjoyed the workshop and more about what I was choosing to carry into every meeting, conversation, and difficult room. The word “sport” once meant pleasure—to be carried away. Long before it bec...

In today’s episode, I explore the difference between assigned opposition and genuine dissent. For centuries, leaders have created formal roles and exercises designed to challenge accepted thinking. Red teams, pre-mortems, and competitor role-playing can help a team notice risks that ordinary planning conversations often miss. Their deeper value, however, may be the temporary cover they provide. Wh...

In this episode, I explore what one of our oldest fairy tales can teach us about leadership, bias, and the invisible standards we use to judge ourselves and others. Drawing on the story of Snow White’s mirror, I examine the hidden assumptions that shape who we hire, promote, trust, and listen to. From the beauty premium and the myth of meritocracy to our ideas of culture fit and executive presence...

What if the answer isn’t to push harder? In this episode, Steven Morris explores why the most effective leaders focus less on applying force and more on creating the conditions that allow people to succeed. Using Buckminster Fuller’s trim tab as a powerful metaphor, Steven examines why small, well-placed interventions can produce significant change. He draws on research from Edwin Locke, Mihaly Cs...

In today’s episode, I explore a question that emerged while watching the World Cup: What happens when we know more about public figures, athletes, and strangers online than we do about the people living and working beside us? The question became harder to ignore after encountering two statistics. Only 26% of Americans know their next-door neighbour by name. Only 20% of employees are engaged at wor...

In today’s episode, I explore two of the most common phrases people use when they find themselves at a crossroads in life: "I'm stuck." "I'm lost." Whether it appears in our work, relationships, leadership, or sense of identity, there are seasons when the old way no longer fits and the new way forward remains unclear. Our instinct is often to treat this uncertainty as a problem to solve as quickly...

In today’s episode, I reflect on a deceptively simple question that sits beneath many of the most important leadership decisions: good for what? The question emerged from a conversation with a CEO who walked away from an acquisition that, by every conventional measure, appeared to make sense. The market fit was strong. The capabilities were complementary. The board was supportive. Yet something ab...

In today's episode, I reflect on a question that prompted an unexpected journey backward: Have I ever gathered my best essays into a book? While the answer is not yet, the question offered an opportunity to revisit the work and examine which ideas have stayed with readers over time. Looking back across several years of writing, patterns began to emerge. Certain essays continued to attract attentio...

In today’s episode, I reflect on a lesson that began long before I became a leadership advisor—sitting at a table as a child, sketching my own hands. What drawing taught me was not simply how to create an image, but how to see. When we look closely enough without rushing to label what is in front of us, familiar things begin to reveal themselves differently. Leadership often moves in the opposite...

In today’s episode, I reflect on the non-business books that have shaped how I think about leadership, humanity, and the inner life. These are not books about tactics or performance. They are books that invite a different kind of attention — toward meaning, reciprocity, self-awareness, spiritual depth, and the long work of becoming more fully human. Join me as I explore: Why leaders need wisdom be...

In today’s episode, I reflect on the gap between achievement and fulfillment, and why success alone often fails to resolve the deeper questions many leaders carry quietly beneath the surface. A promotion. A milestone. A long-awaited accomplishment. Sometimes we arrive at the thing we worked so hard for only to discover that the feeling we expected never fully arrives with it. Through the story of...

In today’s episode, I reflect on the subtle cost of politeness at work—and what it often hides beneath the surface. From the outside, many teams appear aligned. Conversations are civil. People are respectful. The work moves forward. But when uncertainty enters the room—when something isn’t working, when a decision feels off, when a concern begins to surface—something shifts. The conversation tight...

In this episode, I explore what it means to lead in a time of overwhelming information and increasing uncertainty. As AI becomes more embedded in core business functions, many leaders find themselves with more data than ever—but less clarity about what truly matters. The challenge is no longer access to information, but the ability to interpret it wisely and act with judgment. I introduce a distin...

In today’s episode, I reflect on a quiet tension unfolding inside many organizations: people are becoming more productive with AI, yet organizational performance often remains unchanged. Billions of dollars have been invested in new tools and capabilities, and the technical progress is real. But the results are uneven. The gap, I suggest, is not technical. It is human. The data tells a story worth...

In today’s episode, I reflect on the quiet reckoning many leaders eventually face: the moment when achievement no longer answers the deeper question of identity. It begins with a haunting image from Antonio Machado’s poem, where the wind asks the poet’s soul what it has done with its jasmine. The flowers are gone. The petals have withered. The poet weeps. Beneath the sadness is a deeper human ques...

In today’s episode, I explore the quiet but powerful role words play in raising people, shaping teams, and defining what leadership feels like in real time. It begins with a moment in a meeting. A senior executive pauses, looks directly at one of her leaders, and names something true in them: their instinct, their courage, the particular quality they brought that helped carry a project forward. Th...

In today’s episode, I explore a distinction that leaders often overlook but that changes everything once you see it clearly: culture and community are not the same thing. It begins with Michael Polanyi’s idea of spontaneous order, drawn from watching scientists solve an impossibly complex problem without a central coordinator. That image opens a deeper question for organizational life. What if the...