Unpopular Opinion: Having a Plan B might be working against your Plan A. Behavioral science has long studied a concept sometimes called the "burning the boats" effect. When Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and burned his ships, his soldiers had one option left: fight and win. No retreat meant no mental bandwidth wasted on retreat. Researchers studying commitment devices have found something similar in modern decision-making: when an escape route exists, the brain quietly keeps

Try this thought experiment with me for a minute. You're on a hiring panel. There's a candidate sitting across from you. Smart, sharp, clearly capable. But something's off. They don't laugh at the right moments. They challenge an assumption you didn't even know was an assumption. They don't feel like "one of us." So you pass. You tell yourself it's instinct. You call it culture fit. Now imagine the opposite scenario. Every single hire from here on out feels effortless. They g

The wrong people will convince you that wanting more is something to be ashamed of. Here’s why I say this: In college, after scoring among the highest in my semester, a group I used to call friends walked into my hostel room and spent an hour calling me a nerd and laughing at me. I don't call them friends anymore. In fact, I haven’t seen or spoken to them since I graduated college. I've had the pleasure of genuinely great company and the displeasure of really poor ones. The d

The most confident decision I ever watched a leader make was a coin flip. Not literally, but from the outside, it looked exactly like one. He had two options on the table. No data clearly favouring either one and a room full of people who needed someone to just pick a direction and mean it. He picked one and when he did, he said it like he had known all along. The team heard it, believed it, and got to work. What nobody in that room knew was that he had spent the previous th

Dependency looks like value in the short term. Over time, it is just a very polite career ceiling.

If you’ve ever made popcorn, you know the smell of freshly made popcorn is just magnifique. There are a few early pops. Then a noisy rush. And then a few stubborn kernels that refuse to play along, no matter how long you wait. Then, the most important question: When do you stop? Same question when you lead teams: How long do you wait for someone to “get there”? Do you keep the heat on because potential exists? Or do you step back before the rest burn to a crisp? Leaders tend

First time managers run into two traps. The first one is over control. You grip everything. You micromanage. You hover. You want everything run by you. You want to prove you earned the role. Eventually, the team stops taking initiative. They wait. They let you make every call. Because you conditioned them to. The second trap is the opposite. You freeze. You are scared to make a move. Your peers now report to you, and you still see yourself as “one of them”. So you avoid tou

You walk onto the pitch. Test match, day one. You’ve got your strategy: play for swing, get behind the line, play with a straight bat. Ten minutes in, the bowler realises the pitch is jagging off the cracks with uneven bounce. The bowler changes his length. And your neat plan is history. Now it’s all about reacting better, and playing the situation at hand. You walk onto court. Ready to dominate with your forehand. But your opponent clearly got the memo. Decided to pin you on

Leadership is about moving on quick. From agony or ecstasy. You don't have time to dwell. The next challenge always awaits.

Perfect ideas don’t exist. What succeeds are the logical ones that get shipped and shaped. Great leaders build teams where imperfect ideas see the light, get executed, and evolve.

Analysis paralysis isn't just overthinking. It's organizational cancer. It spreads through teams, destroys momentum, and kills companies that could have thrived. Your competition doesn't wait for perfect data. They move. And if they did wait for perfect data, they’d not be your competition, they’d be dead.

If you want to be liked by everyone as a leader, you are setting yourself up for failure.

Leadership looks different from the outside. From the outside, it’s strategy decks. Big moves. Team calls. From the inside, that’s not...

Range is underrated. Breadth of experience changes everything.

Every meaningful decision costs something. The smart ones just know what’s worth losing.

We often confuse stability with sameness. But what we don’t change, we eventually outgrow. This piece is a reminder that continuity doesn’t mean clinging to the past — it means having the courage to evolve.

I used to believe that speed was leadership. Act fast. Decide fast. Move fast. The world rewarded urgency, and so did I. Until I learned...

How Great Leaders Hold Steady in Chaos

High-performance teams thrive on empathy, listening, collaboration, and communication—not just brilliance. Culture drives success.