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

Your customers are lying to you. They don't even know they're doing it. They ask for a feature. What they mean is "make my pain go away." They ask for a discount. What they mean is "I don't feel like this is worth it." They ask for a policy change. What they mean is "something in this experience broke my trust." Most companies fulfill the request. The best companies decode the intent underneath it. The average businesses and great ones split by their ability to decode custome

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

In 2009, Domino's was the fastest pizza company in the world and customers hated the pizza. In their own taste tests, people rated identical pizza lower the moment they were told it came from Domino's. The brand itself had become a flavor and it tasted like punishment. Most companies bury feedback like that. You rework the recipe, keep the cameras off, and hope nobody remembers how bad it got. Admitting the product is broken feels like handing customers a reason to leave. Dom

Chasing fairness in an unfair world is stupidity. Life doesn't distribute talent, opportunity, or circumstance equally. It never has, and never will. Yet we've built entire systems - political, social, institutional, around the pursuit of fairness. Why? Because the human mind cannot tolerate randomness. Psychologists call this the "just-world hypothesis", our deep cognitive need to believe that outcomes are deserved. That if we work hard enough, follow the right rules, and fi

The last time someone on your team brought you bad news, what did you do in the next ten seconds? That reaction matters more than the open-door policy you've put in place. It's the moment your team learns what honesty actually costs in your organisation. Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson uncovered this almost by accident while studying medical teams in the 1990s. She expected the best-performing teams to report fewer errors. Instead, she found the opposite: the higher-performi

Every hiring manager has said it. "Skills can be trained. Hire for attitude." I've hired for attitude. It works - until it doesn't. And when it doesn't, it's not a small problem. Here's something experience taught me that no hiring framework will: Attitude gets you in the door. But attitude without the foundational skill to back it - creates a very specific kind of mess. The person works hard. Wants it badly. But can't execute. And because they care so much, feedback becomes

Founders hire their first CX leader in one of two moments. Either the reviews are bad, the churn is visible, and the founder is getting tagged in angry tweets - meaning the damage is already done and whoever walks in is inheriting a fire. Or the product is still finding its feet, the customer base is too small to generate real signal, and the hire ends up building processes for problems that do not exist yet. Both are expensive mistakes. One costs you money. The other costs

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

The deal closed. The founder thinks they are the best salesperson. They might actually be the bottleneck. Here's what usually happens: The sales team made a decision they weren't allowed to make. A discount. A trade-off. A call on where to hold firm. So they did the only thing the process lets them do; they said, "let me get back to you." Went back to the founder. Went back to the customer. By then, the deal had cooled. The founder jumped on a call. Made the decision live. It

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

2002 Nobel prize laureate Daniel Kahneman said "For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential." And then I thought about NPS. And I laughed. Then felt sad. It was hilarious and all too real at the same time. Nobody woke up one day and decided CSAT and NPS were the twin pillars of customer

Being known for great customer experience is fantastic. But, if it isn't adding revenue, then what’s the point? You can make the same argument for great branding, great marketing, also, great leadership. If it doesn't connect to a commercial outcome at some point, it's just an expensive hobby with a (maybe) good-looking dashboard. In one of my discovery calls for a consulting assignment, I was asked to come in and track a metric that would look good on paper and make the earl

Martin Brundle has a phrase he deploys with surgical precision during Formula 1 broadcasts: "a day late and a dollar short." He uses it when a driver attempts a defensive move too late, or commits to an overtake half-heartedly. The gap has closed. The opportunity has passed. And worse, the hesitation has telegraphed weakness to every other driver on the grid. Business is no different. The difference is that instead of losing a position on lap 34, we lose teams, opportunities,

The teacher was screaming from backstage, ”Linish, don't be an idiot. Do not invite the dignitaries back on stage. They're already on stage." I was in seventh grade, president of the Interact Club, a division of the Rotary Club. It was tradition for the president to deliver what was essentially a state of the club address. The entire high school would be in attendance, along with dignitaries from the local Rotary Club. The protocol was: the dignitaries would be seated in the

Leadership problems often disguise themselves in different ways. Too often, it’s a question of focal length. But, hardly anyone sees it that way. Get too close and you start solving problems your team should be solving. You add control, meetings, check-ins. You become to bottleneck for everything. Get too far and you rely on vision decks and town halls. You don’t find the right focal length by reading about it. You find it by testing the edges. Step in closer than feels comfo

A useful rule of thumb. Not every question deserves an answer. Not every invitation to explain is made in good faith. Some are simply traps disguised as curiosity. Some people aren’t confused. They’re invested. Invested in missing the point.Invested in circling the same argument until you’re tired enough to surrender.Invested in turning explanation into a tax you keep paying. They don’t want clarity.They want leverage.They want you busy proving what they’ve already decided to

There’s nothing glamorous about showing up the same way every day. The discipline of doing the basics well. Again. And again. And again. Most people don’t fail because they lack talent. They fail because they chase intensity instead of consistency. Sprint for a week. Take on more responsibility for a couple of weeks at work. Overdeliver once. And then drift. Consistency looks dull from the outside. From the inside, it’s demanding. Because it asks for the same standard on good

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