WoW Wednesday​

We are living through a fundamental shift in the relationship between employees and employers. The tactics that worked twenty years ago—rigid hierarchies, strictly defined roles, and top-down directives—are rapidly becoming liabilities in our complex, fast-paced business environment.

Yet, many leaders are still clinging to the outdated “playbook” of the industrial era, focused on efficiency and control above all else. They are trying to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century management styles.

Today’s wisdom comes from a fantastic book, The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation, by AWS executives Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner. It perfectly captures the essence of the leadership pivot required right now:

“People don’t want to be managed; they want to be inspired. They don’t want to be told; they want to be heard.”

The Shift from Compliance to Contribution

This quote is a powerful indictment of traditional “command and control” structures. It highlights a crucial distinction that many organizations miss: the difference between management and leadership.

Management is about handling complexity through planning, budgeting, organizing, and controlling. It is necessary, but it is insufficient for growth in a volatile world. You “manage” resources, inventory, and processes.

Human beings, however, should not be “managed” in the same way. When you treat people solely as resources to be managed for maximum efficiency, you get compliance. They will do exactly what they are told—no more, no less. In a static world, that might have been enough. In a world demanding constant innovation and adaptation, compliance is a slow path to irrelevance.

Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change by setting a direction, aligning people, and motivating them. As Le-Brun and Werner point out, modern talent wants contribution, not just compliance.

What This Looks Like in Practice

Moving from “managing and telling” to “inspiring and hearing” isn’t just soft skills jargon; it requires concrete behavioral changes in how we lead our teams daily.

Here are a few examples of how this shift plays out in the real world:

1. The Strategy Session

• The “Manager” (Telling): Walks into the room with a fully baked 12-month strategy, presents it via 50 PowerPoint slides, and assigns tasks to the team. They ask for questions at the end, but the direction is already set.
• The “Leader” (Hearing & Inspiring): Frames the challenge the organization is facing and shares the ultimate vision (the “why”). They then open the floor, genuinely asking the team—who are closest to the work—how they believe they can best achieve that vision. They synthesize the team’s collective intelligence into a strategy.

2. Dealing with Failure

• The “Manager” (Control): Focuses on who is to blame when a project misses the mark. They implement new layers of approval processes to ensure the mistake “never happens again,” inadvertently slowing down future innovation.
• The “Leader” (Inspiring): Focuses on what can be learned. They inspire psychological safety, ensuring the team knows that calculated risks are encouraged even if they fail. They treat failure as data, not a dereliction of duty.

3. Performance Conversations

• The “Manager” (Telling): Uses the annual review to give a retrospective report card on what the employee did wrong over the last year based on rigid KPIs.
• The “Leader” (Hearing & Inspiring): Has continuous, forward-looking conversations. They ask, “What barriers are stopping you from doing your best work, and how can I help remove them?” They listen to the employee’s career aspirations and connect their daily work to those loftier goals.

The New Mandate

The modern workforce is highly educated, mobile, and seeks purpose over mere paychecks. If your leadership style is defined by “telling,” you are severely limiting your organization’s potential to the boundaries of your own knowledge.

The most effective leaders today act as catalysts. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room; they need to be the person who unlocks the intelligence of everyone else in the room. By shifting from managing to inspiring, and from telling to hearing, you move your organization from a rigid machine to an adaptable, living system ready for whatever the market throws your way.

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📚 Book Recommendation: The Octopus Organization

If today’s quote resonated with you, I highly recommend picking up “The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation” by Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner (2025).

Why Read It: We talk a lot about “agility” in business, but often it just devolves into bureaucracy by another name. Le-Brun and Werner, drawing on their massive experience as executives at Amazon Web Services (and previously McDonald’s), move beyond buzzwords.

They use the brilliant metaphor of the octopus—intelligent, highly adaptable, with decentralized nervous systems in its tentacles that can operate independently yet cohesively—to describe what modern organizations must become.

The book is a practical guide to breaking away from the broken models of top-down transformation. It helps leaders identify the “anti-patterns” keeping their organizations stuck in rigid structures and provides actionable levers to build a culture that is endlessly adaptable and highly resilient.

If you are trying to lead a team through uncertainty, this book is your new playbook.

This weekend, millions of us will tune in to watch College Football Championship Weekend. We will see confetti, trophies, and legacies defined in sixty minutes of play. The networks will build narratives around “destiny” and “glory,” but if you listen closely to the post-game interviews, you’ll notice a distinct pattern among the winning coaches. They rarely talk about the “need to win” or the shiny trophy. They talk almost exclusively about execution.

As we head into our own version of “Championship Weekend”—closing out Q4, finalizing budgets, and locking in Go-To-Market strategies for 2026—there is a valuable lesson to be learned from the architect of the greatest dynasty in modern sports, Nick Saban.

His advice on handling high-stakes pressure is counterintuitive:

“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That is the process. Let’s finish!” — Nick Saban

In business, we are often guilty of “scoreboard watching.” We obsess over lagging indicators: the stock price, the quarterly revenue target, or the signed contract. While these metrics matter, fixating on them during the game is a distraction. It creates anxiety, tightness, and emotional decision-making.

Saban’s philosophy, known simply as “The Process,” flips this dynamic. It argues that the score is just a byproduct of the habits you execute in the dark. To apply this to your leadership, consider these three pillars:

• Redefine the Goal: The “National Championship” is your annual revenue target; the “Drill” is the quality of the email you are writing right now. Great leaders narrow the focus. Don’t ask your team to “win the quarter” today. Ask them to win the 10:00 AM meeting.
• The Standard is the Standard: Saban was famous for ripping into his defense even when they were up by 30 points. Why? Because the standard of excellence doesn’t change based on the score. In business, this means treating a $500 invoice with the same process rigor as a $5 million contract. If you get sloppy with the small stuff because you’re “winning,” you build the habits that will eventually make you lose.
• Eliminate the Clutter: Championship environments are noisy. There is media, hype, and criticism. The “Process” is about mental shielding—ignoring the external noise (market volatility, competitor gossip) to focus entirely on internal execution.

We saw the ultimate real-life example of this during the 2018 National Championship game. Alabama was down 13-0 at halftime against Georgia. The offense was stagnant, and the “outcome” looked bleak. If Saban had focused on the scoreboard or the championship trophy, the safe, logical move would have been to stick with Jalen Hurts—a quarterback who had gone 26-2 as a starter—and hope for a lucky break.

Instead, Saban focused purely on “what is needed in this moment.” The moment called for a passing spark that the current strategy wasn’t providing. He made the gut-wrenching decision to bench his proven starter for a true freshman, Tua Tagovailoa. It was a massive risk. If it failed, he would have been villainized. But he didn’t manage for the narrative; he managed for the immediate need of the next play. The freshman threw the game-winning touchdown in overtime.

In business, we face this “halftime” constantly. We stick with legacy software, underperforming vendors, or comfortable strategies because “they got us this far” (the Sunk Cost Fallacy). True leadership requires the discipline to pivot a strategy or reallocate resources now—even if it’s uncomfortable—because the immediate “drill” demands it, regardless of what the Q4 projections said two months ago.

As you watch the games this weekend, enjoy the spectacle. But come Monday morning, stop looking at the trophy. Keep your eyes on the drill in front of you. That’s how dynasties are built.

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Book Recommendation 📖

The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh. While Saban perfected “The Process,” Bill Walsh invented the philosophy for the modern era. When Walsh took over the 49ers, they were the worst team in the league. He didn’t set a goal to win a Super Bowl. He set a “Standard of Performance”—dictating everything from how players tucked in their shirts to how receptionists answered the phone. He believed that if you perfected the micro-details, the winning would happen automatically.

Much Watch Video 📺 🔥🔥🔥

A must watch, Nick Saban: The Process of Sustained Excellence. I selected this video because it breaks down the specific components of Saban’s “Process” (Process over Outcome, Vision-Driven Culture) in a way that directly translates to business leadership, perfectly complementing the article’s theme.

With Thanksgiving arriving tomorrow, our inboxes and feeds are flooded with sentiments of thanks. It is a wonderful time of year to pause and reflect on our blessings, but in the fast-paced world of business, “thanks” can often become a throwaway line—a box we check at the end of a quarterly town hall to boost morale scores.

As we head into the holiday, I want to challenge us to look at gratitude not as a sentiment we speak, but as a culture we operationalize. John F. Kennedy framed this distinction perfectly:

“As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.”

In leadership, the gap between “uttering words” and “living by them” is where retention is either won or lost. Employees can spot performative gratitude a mile away; it’s the generic “kudos” email sent while simultaneously denying resources or ignoring burnout.

True appreciation in a business context is demonstrated through investment. When a leader lives their appreciation, they stop viewing their team merely as assets to be managed and start treating them as partners to be empowered. This creates a tangible ROI on gratitude:

• Autonomy: You show gratitude for competence by micromanaging less and trusting more.
• Advocacy: You show gratitude for hard work by fighting for your team’s budget, resources, and visibility behind closed doors.
• Mentorship: You show gratitude for potential by investing the most valuable currency you have: your personal time.

This principle holds equal weight in our living rooms. We often fall into the trap of assuming our families know we are grateful for them simply because we haven’t said otherwise. But in an era of constant distraction, the highest form of appreciation we can offer is our undivided presence.

• The Shift: Instead of just telling a partner or friend “I appreciate you,” demonstrate it through the currency of attention.
• In Practice: It’s putting the phone away during dinner. It’s doing the chore that everyone hates without seeking credit. It’s listening to understand rather than listening to reply.

Whether in the boardroom or the dining room, the goal is the same: to move beyond the easy act of speaking thanks and embrace the harder, more rewarding work of showing it.

As you gather with family and friends tomorrow, I hope you find moments to demonstrate your gratitude through action. May your turkey be moist, your football team victorious, and your post-meal nap completely uninterrupted. 🦃🏈😴

And remember, calories don’t count on the fourth Thursday of November. That’s just science.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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For those looking to dig deeper into the data behind this, I highly recommend reading “Leading with Gratitude” by Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton.

The authors do a fantastic job of exposing the “gratitude gap”—the chasm between leaders who think they are appreciative and employees who feel undervalued. It moves beyond “soft skills” fluff and offers rigorous strategies to turn gratitude into a driver of high performance. It effectively teaches you how to close the gap between JFK’s “uttering” and “living.”

The Stoic Blueprint for Modern Business 💡

In the dynamic world of business, we often strive for control. We seek to dictate market outcomes, manage risk down to zero, and impose our will on the environment. But what if the secret to strategic mastery wasn’t about control, but about acceptance?

This week’s wisdom comes from the ancient Greek philosopher Euripides: “Whoever embraces necessity counts as wise, skilled in divine matters.”

For the modern leader, this quote offers a powerful lens: necessity is not a defeat; it is the non-negotiable constraint that fuels the most powerful form of innovation. True business skill lies in recognizing the rigid, unchangeable facts of the market and designing brilliant solutions around them.

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Expanding on Necessity: The Foundation of Strategic Clarity 🏛️

Embracing necessity means distinguishing between challenges you can influence and those you cannot. This distinction is the bedrock of strategic clarity.

1. Strategic Redirection, Not Resistance

The wise leader accepts the structural shifts in the market—such as permanent consumer behavioral changes, unavoidable regulatory mandates, or the fundamental physics of a supply chain—as fixed boundaries. Instead of spending capital and political will on resistance, they immediately pivot to strategic redirection. They ask: “Given this unchangeable fact, what is the most powerful path forward?” This saves immense time and resources that would otherwise be wasted fighting an unwinnable battle.

2. Forced Focus and Resource Optimization

Necessity acts as a focusing mechanism. When a necessity (like a sudden 30% jump in raw goods costs) is acknowledged, you are forced to re-evaluate every process and product that relies on that good. This often leads to radical efficiency gains that were previously deemed impossible. By accepting the constraint, the leader sharpens their focus onto the value-generating activities that remain viable, optimizing resources where they can have the most impact.

3. The Catalyst for Radical Innovation

Often, the greatest innovations arise not from an open field of possibility, but from severe constraints. The accepted necessity acts as the ultimate design prompt. If a technology is no longer cost-effective (a necessity), the company is forced to invent a completely different, more efficient process. This shift from incremental improvement to fundamental transformation is the hallmark of embracing necessity.

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Finding Personal Wisdom in Constraint 🙏

While the quote has huge strategic implications, its deepest power often resonates in our personal lives.

I recently faced a personal necessity: the need to dedicate several individual days to travel and be present for one of my kids college tours. This was non-negotiable family time, requiring me to be physically away from the office and internal / external meetings for short periods of time.

My initial reaction was frustration—how could I possibly manage my demanding schedule while prioritizing this personal necessity?

The moment I truly embraced it as an unchangeable necessity, everything changed:

• The Constraint: Significant, mandatory small chunks of time off the grid.
• The Pivot: I stopped trying to squeeze in work during travel and instead focused intensely on optimizing the days and weeks before and after the tours. This necessity forced me to master extreme time blocking, delegate critical tasks more thoroughly than ever before, and front-load major decision-making.
• The Result: My preparation became exponentially more efficient. The necessity of mandatory downtime forced a profound innovation in my workflow and delegation style, proving that focused, high-leverage work before a break is vastly superior to distracted work during it. I was present for my family and my team was empowered to execute in my absence.

Embracing that necessity unlocked a new, more disciplined, and ultimately more effective professional rhythm.

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The Path to Mastery 🎯

Embracing necessity is the true test of leadership skill. It is the ability to look at the unyielding facts of your business environment—or your personal life—and declare, “This is the boundary. Now, let’s build something brilliant inside it.”

This mindset transforms reactive struggle into proactive mastery, positioning you as a strategist skilled in the “divine matters” of understanding and working with the flow of reality.

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📚 Book Recommendation

I recommend “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t” by Jim Collins.

Collins introduces the Stockdale Paradox: The necessity of confronting the brutal facts of your current reality while maintaining unwavering faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. This perfectly captures the spirit of the quote. It’s about being ruthlessly honest about the “necessity” you face while maintaining the disciplined commitment to do what it takes to succeed within those constraints.

In today’s complex and fast-paced business world, the old notion of the infallible leader has no place. The truly effective leader understands the power of interdependence and humility. Admitting you don’t know every answer is the first step toward finding the best answer. 👇

This week’s wisdom comes from business leader Georgette Mosbacher:

“Never hesitate to show your own staff that you need help. They need to be reminded how important they are to the process.”

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How This Resonates in Business Today 🌐

This quote is a powerful reminder that asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness—it’s a sign of a secure and courageous leader. It resonates today because:

• Fosters Psychological Safety: When a leader shows vulnerability, it explicitly demonstrates that it is safe to not have all the answers. This creates a high-trust environment where team members feel comfortable flagging potential risks early, admitting mistakes, and sharing unconventional ideas without fear of judgment or retribution. This is the cornerstone of agile and innovative organizations.
• Unlocks Talent and Ownership: By specifically asking for a team member’s unique expertise, the leader gives them a profound sense of trust and ownership over a critical solution. This doesn’t just build morale; it leverages specialization. The staff are reminded how vital their specialized skills are to the collective success, leading to higher engagement, better retention, and superior outcomes.

Two (2) Practical Leadership Examples 🤝

• Delegating the Technical Deep-Dive: A CTO initiating a new product launch might not have the most up-to-date knowledge on the latest cloud infrastructure requirements or security protocols. Instead of making assumptions, a strong leader openly tells their technical lead, “I need you to own the architectural review on this, as your expertise here is far beyond mine. We will be relying on your final assessment.” This act validates the lead’s authority, ensures the product is built on the most sound technical footing, and accelerates the decision-making process.
• The Problem-Solving Huddle: A manager notices a significant operational bottleneck slowing down customer service, but the cause isn’t clear from the reports. Instead of trying to build a new process solo, they gather the frontline staff—the people who interact with the system daily—and says, “I’ve hit a wall on how to streamline this. I need your collective, on-the-ground experience to help me build a better, practical process.” This approach generates immediate, actionable solutions that work in reality, while simultaneously elevating their staff from doers to strategic partners in the company’s continuous improvement.

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Book Recommendation on Vulnerable Leadership 📚

I recommend: Dare to Lead by Brené Brown.

Why: Brené Brown’s research-backed approach defines leadership as “courage over comfort.” She provides a clear framework for why vulnerability is the fundamental skill set of brave leadership. The book gives leaders practical, actionable steps on how to cultivate courage, build trust, and have the tough conversations that Georgette Mosbacher’s quote encourages. It perfectly explains the how and why behind showing your staff that you need them.