I began the year with a blunt reality check: leadership today is forged in public, under pressure, and in real time. With Donald Trump already installed as US president for his second term, markets have moved faster than at any point in my career, reacting not to speculation but to executive action, rhetoric, and resolve. The first lesson this year has burned itself into my thinking: certainty beats comfort.
Leaders need to invite disagreement, not just expect it. When the invitation to offer their opinion is not clear, teams will assume you don't want it. Leaders often don't realize that their status can unconsciously silence dissent. No matter how often leaders stress that no one will be punished for disagreeing, their own zeal, conviction, intelligence, and energy can be intimidating.
I was 38, and the role - which oversaw standards, best practices, and technology for Amazon's 200+ site merchandisers - was the biggest of my life by far, one I'd been thrust into just three months after my arrival in Seattle and at Amazon. I was thrilled (and a bit terrified) by the size of the opportunity, and threw myself into it.
When in my 20s, I equated hope with "sunny-side-of-the-street" wishful thinking-what we now call " toxic positivity." I was wrong. I live, work, and lead these days with a new kind of grounded hope. Many thoughtful, intelligent people today are sliding toward cynicism. But recent research shows something surprising about the nature of hope in the face of cynicism. I want to share research conducted on cynical college students-and how that research shifted the outlook even of the chief researcher.
Unpredictable. That is the defining condition of the world today. Leaders, especially CEOs, are grappling with the hard truth that the models, forecasts, and strategic assumptions they once relied on no longer apply. Today's most urgent leadership challenges are fast-changing, interconnected, and largely shaped by human behavior.
If my three-decade journey in the corporate world has taught me anything, it's that in business, as in life, the only certainty is uncertainty. In the past 20 years, periods of upheaval, from pandemics to financial crises to AI hysteria, have restitched the fabric of how we work, travel, and communicate. While this uncertainty can generate tension and turmoil, it also forges the best leaders.
When asked who a successful leader is, some people will say Barack Obama, some will say Jean Luc Picard, and others may say Oprah Winfrey. For many people, a successful leader is someone who has vision, a well-defined strategy, and is great at decision-making. These skills help a leader to motivate teams, drive sales, and ensure that the teams they oversee offer great long-term performance.
Neuroscience and sports psychology (for example, acceptance and commitment therapy) show that anxiety, perfectionism, and fear of mistakes shrink cognitive flexibility and creativity. The more we obsess over results, the more our attention collapses into the future. This focus makes us less present with what is happening now. As mental performance coach Graham Betchart puts it: "Stress is the absence of presence."
There's no such thing as perfection. Even when we're doing well, we always want more - that will remain the case. I handle praise the same way I handle criticism. I'm focusing on the next game. We have a good feeling at the club, also in terms of the atmosphere. I want to do my job, motivate the boys, and make sure they make the right decisions. Anything can happen in a game, but I'm confident that we can always be successful,
I got the words I said there completely wrong, said a sheepish Stokes. Has-beens is a horrible word. It's the only thing that managed to come out of my mouth at that moment. God, I'm going to be one of those one day. But it's not at all what I meant by that. Talk of lessons being learned is a common refrain from defeated sides but Stokes preferring one-on-one debriefs rather than all in one room was happy to expand on a few.
When leaders assume "responsibility," they take ownership of a situation, managing it in as many dimensions as necessary so that problems are resolved and all the moving parts operate in sync. They may need to call on skills they didn't know they had -or develop new ones fast. But beyond skills, responsibility is an attitude. It implies attentiveness, and the will to make hard choices. It means that you can take the heat and stand up for what you think is right.
As a daughter of the Mississippi Delta and Black woman in the South, so many narratives about me have been told without me. My body, as trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk would say, keeps the score. Nevertheless, as a journalist, entrepreneur, mental health counselor, evaluator, and now foundation program officer, I have had the opportunity to combine and crystallize the importance of storytelling, leadership, healing, and lived expertise.
It's just one game, but the Toronto Marlies answered the call of their head coach and leadership group by delivering an overpowering performance against Iowa. Admittedly, the Wild are a young group missing some key pieces, but you can only beat the team in front of you. The Marlies did it with aplomb on Saturday, starting with a dominant first period.
"I try to instill this into the rest of the team, but certainly I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit," he told the MIT Technology Review in 2014. "Like, it's just terrible, and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though."
How can you tell if someone is a great leader? They always want to know more. They're interested in mastery of a subject or skill. They ask great questions. And, as they find out more, they sometimes change their mind. They're a "learner." But these days, most CEOs and other leaders take the opposite approach. They think of themselves as "knowers." They appear to have all the answers. That's bad for them, their direct reports, and the organizations they lead.
Walking into the New England Patriots this offseason meant there was a lot of work to be done for Mike Vrabel and the new coaching staff. Besides the five years of dwindling relevancy straight to the bottom of the league, the franchise appeared to be in more trouble from a roster standpoint, as the team seemed disjointed in a way that would take a while to fix.
Jamie Dimon is the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and a great business icon from which to learn. No matter where you are in your career (an early 30-something seeking Jamie Dimon advice or an older professional looking for retirement wisdom), Jamie Dimon offers appropriate insights for everyone. If you're a 60-something reflecting on your career or heading toward retirement, here are five Jamie Dimon quotes every 60-year-old needs to hear.
This wasn't a struggling junior employee; this was a leader at the pinnacle of his career, shouldering the same gnawing doubt we often relegate to the inexperienced. For decades, we've called this "impostor syndrome," treating it as a personal flaw to be fixed. But groundbreaking research reveals we've been thinking about it all wrong-and in correcting our misunderstanding, we find not just relief but unexpected advantage.
It's shorthand for letting AI generate code from simple language prompts instead of writing it manually. In many ways, it's great. AI has lowered the barrier to entry for coding, and that's pulled in a wave of hobbyists, designers, and side-project tinkerers who might never have touched a codebase before. Tools like Warp, Cursor, and Claude Code uplevel even professional developers, making it possible to ship something working in hours instead of weeks.
