ISSUE 001
Q1 of 2026 revealed how much of our world was being held together by assumption. Across the companies we work with, there was a quiet belief that things would continue to hold. Decisions were delayed and tensions were tolerated. Then reality came crashing down. We wrote the 5 pieces in this first edition across that winter.
Each one looks at a company under a different kind of pressure, and together they ask one question: what happens when leadership drifts out of contact with reality?
We Are Drowning in Corruption
Organizational corruption rarely starts with fraud. It begins when leaders tolerate a gap between what they claim and what they do: a disruptor hired to signal innovation and then muzzled, credentials used as a mascot for sales, a launch celebrated while the unglamorous 90% of finishing and cleanup goes undone. The article names crisis theater, the cycle of dramatic starts and neglected finishes where firefighting becomes the operating system, and hygiene debt, the compounding cost of half-finished work that hides while technical debt gets tracked. The lesson for Boards and CEOs is that an organization that rewards conformity over contribution conscripts its talent into a corrupt equilibrium.
Succession Without Lawsuits
$14 trillion in business value changes hands in the U.S. over the next decade, and roughly 1 in 6 German SMEs needs a successor by 2027. Succession turns adversarial for one reason, threat, and the article keeps returning to it. When people feel their livelihood, financial or social, is at risk, trust collapses between people who were deeply bonded, "fairness" becomes the word in every meeting, and the lawyers get called. The article separates real unfairness from unaccounted-for giving, shows why a business cannot run on love, and lists what the companies that transition cleanly do early: a clear process, explicit contribution and compensation, and order created while trust still exists.
How the Hell Did We Get Here?
High-growth companies end up in weird places when the organization carries several unnamed, competing intentions and nobody realigns it. Meetings multiply, decisions slow, camps form, and the company is active without moving. The article separates desire (I want this) from intention (this is where we are going), and shows how a CEO who sets sail for Italy lands in Libya. It then walks through 3 failure patterns from our work: shareholders with different unspoken futures for the company, a successor who wants the title without the exposure, and the "nice" CEO who mistakes avoidance for compassion. The fix starts with awareness and ends with one destination the company does not renegotiate every hour.
When the World Goes to War
We wrote this piece while clients, friends, and family faced daily bombardment, and it is the work we shared with people on the ground. When the world destabilizes, the danger to a business begins when uncertainty migrates inward and reaction replaces judgment. The article separates real danger, which the body handles well, from ambient fear absorbed through headlines, and it treats information overload as interference rather than vigilance. Its instructions are practical: take care of your body, your family, and your business; pay who needs to be paid; clear what can be cleared; and ask one question, am I responding to reality or to fear?
Stop Moralizing Data
Engagement surveys and dashboards are meant to clarify reality, and too often they turn into a quiet accusation: you are failing. The article, which appeared in this edition only, sets out a different way to read leadership data. Absolute and relative scores answer different questions, gaps of a few percentage points are usually noise, and the useful signal appears when you segment the data by role, tenure, and layer, where it points to the part of the system that is failing to support people. Leadership data is a signal, and the strongest leaders can read imperfect data without collapsing into self-judgment or avoiding responsibility.
