WoW Wednesday​

As we enter the final weeks of the year, the world around us shifts toward the act of giving. In our personal lives, we often search for the perfect gift to show our loved ones they are valued. But in the world of business, I’ve found that the most impactful gifts aren’t found in a box or a year-end bonus check.

The true “spirit of the season” in leadership is the intentional investment we make in the human beings behind the results.

This week, I’ve been reflecting on a timeless piece of wisdom from the ancient philosopher Lao Tzu:

“The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.”

In a corporate world that often rewards “laying up treasures”—hoarding proprietary knowledge, claiming sole credit for wins, or protecting one’s own authority—Lao Tzu’s advice feels radical. Yet, it is the fundamental secret of high-impact leadership.

What does this look like in practice?

• Sharing Knowledge vs. Hoarding Expertise: A leader who “lays up treasures” keeps their expertise a secret to remain indispensable. A wise leader gives that knowledge away through active mentorship and documentation. By teaching your team to solve problems without you, you aren’t losing power; you are gaining a more autonomous, high-performing team and the bandwidth to focus on the next level of innovation.
• Distributing Credit vs. Collecting Accolades: When a project succeeds, a “wise” leader doesn’t stack the credit on their own desk. They distribute it publicly. By giving away the “treasure” of recognition, you gain something far more valuable: deep-seated loyalty and a team that feels safe enough to take the risks necessary for future breakthroughs.
• Investing in the Future (Even Beyond Your Department): Investing time in a direct report’s professional development—even if it prepares them for a role outside your immediate team—is an act of professional generosity. Ironically, the more you help others grow and move upward, the more your reputation as a “talent-maker” flourishes, attracting even better talent to your door.
• Opening Doors and Networks: True “treasures” in business include your connections and your seat at the table. A wise leader uses their social capital to introduce junior team members to key stakeholders or invites them to high-level meetings. Giving others access to your network doesn’t diminish your influence; it expands the reach of your entire organization.
• The Gift of Trust and Autonomy: One of the hardest treasures to give away is control. However, by giving your team the “gift” of autonomy, you empower them to take ownership. When people feel they own their work, the quality of that work rises exponentially, enriching the company’s output far more than micromanagement ever could.

As we look toward the New Year, let’s remember that our wealth as leaders is not measured by the titles we hold, but by the number of people we have empowered to succeed.

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A Personal Note on the Season

Before we head into the holiday break, I wanted to share a personal thought. While we spend much of our year focused on targets, growth, and professional “treasures,” this season is a vital reminder to pause and recalibrate.

No matter how much we achieve in the office, nothing replaces the time spent with family, friends, and loved ones. These are our true treasures. I hope you take this time to unplug, be present with those who matter most, and recharge your spirit. Value what is most important: the people who walk through life beside you.

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Book Recommendation

Book: Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman

Why I recommend it: This book is the perfect modern-day companion to Lao Tzu’s philosophy. Wiseman distinguishes between “Diminishers” (leaders who need to be the smartest person in the room) and “Multipliers” (leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the capabilities of everyone around them). It provides a practical framework for how “giving away” your power and intelligence actually makes the entire organization significantly smarter and more productive.

We are in the era of “Big Hairy Audacious Goals.” We spend our strategy offsites obsessing over the destination. We build complex slide decks showing hockey-stick growth curves, we rally the troops with vision statements, and we pin our hopes on the idea that if we just want it bad enough, we will achieve it.

But there is a harsh reality that hits usually around Q2, when the initial excitement fades and the numbers start to drift: Ambition is not a strategy.

Winners and losers in any market have the exact same goals. Every tech startup wants to disrupt the industry. Every restaurant chain wants to be the leader in hospitality. Every athlete wants the gold medal. If the goal is the same, the goal cannot be the differentiator.

James Clear, in his foundational book Atomic Habits, delivers the single most important lesson for modern operators:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

The Critical Distinction: Direction vs. Progress

We often conflate these two concepts, but in a business context, they serve entirely different functions:

• Goals are about results. They are the destination on the map. They are necessary for direction—they tell you where the ship is pointing.
• Systems are about processes. They are the engine room, the crew schedules, and the navigation protocols. They are the vehicle for progress.

The problem arises when leaders spend 90% of their energy discussing the result and only 10% designing the process. A goal is a momentary change; a system is a continuous improvement. If you hit a revenue goal but don’t change the way you sell, you are just treating a symptom without fixing the cause. You might win the quarter, but you won’t win the decade.

Operationalizing the Mindset

If you want to move from “Goal Thinking” to “Systems Thinking,” you have to stop managing outcomes (which are lagging indicators) and start managing behaviors (which are leading indicators).

Here is how this shift transforms three key business verticals:

1. Sales & Revenue Strategy

• The Goal Mindset: “We need to hit $5M in ARR this quarter.” This often leads to “Happy Ears”—sales reps keeping dead deals in the pipeline just to make the coverage look healthy, resulting in a surprise miss at the end of the quarter.
• The Systems Mindset: You focus on Pipeline Integrity. You implement a “Red Team” system where every deal over a certain size must be defended against an internal peer review before being forecasted. You enforce strict “Exit Criteria” for deal stages—if a prospect hasn’t taken a specific action in 14 days, the system forces a “Close Lost” or “Nurture” status.
• The Result: You stop banking on hope and start forecasting on truth.

2. Customer Experience (CX)

• The Goal Mindset: “We need a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 70+.” This leads to “score begging,” where staff pressure customers to give them a 10/10, skewing the data without actually improving the service.
• The Systems Mindset: You design a “Service Recovery Protocol.” You give every front-line employee a pre-authorized budget (e.g., $50) to resolve any guest issue immediately, without needing manager approval. You build a “friction log” where every customer complaint is tagged and reviewed by the Product team every Friday to systematically eliminate the root cause of the frustration.
• The Result: You stop managing the score and start managing the experience that creates the score.

3. Talent & Culture

• The Goal Mindset: “We need to hire A-Players to scale the engineering team.” This leads to the “Post and Pray” method—posting a job description and hoping a genius applies.
• The Systems Mindset: You treat recruiting as a supply chain. You require every hiring manager to spend 30 minutes a week networking with passive candidates, regardless of whether there is an open role. You replace “gut feeling” interviews with a standardized scoring rubric based on core competencies to remove bias. You build an onboarding system that is scripted down to the hour for the first two weeks.
• The Result: You stop hiring by accident and start hiring by design.

The Leadership Pivot: From Visionary to Architect

As leaders, we are often told our job is to be the “Visionary.” While true, that is only half the job. The most effective leaders I know act less like motivational speakers and more like architects.

It requires a suppression of the ego. It is much more fun to stand on stage and announce a massive new target than it is to sit in a room and refine a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). But the SOP is what protects your business when things go wrong.

When motivation fails—and it always does—your people fall back on their habits. If your system is brittle, your culture collapses under pressure. If your system is robust, your team executes even on their bad days.

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📚 The Recommendation

Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear.

Why it matters: Do not be fooled by the “Self-Help” category label. This is a business operations manual in disguise. Clear’s framework on the “Aggregation of Marginal Gains”—improving 1% in 100 different areas—is the secret weapon of high-growth companies.

If you are leading a team, this book provides the vocabulary you need to stop talking about “trying harder” and start talking about “designing better.” It’s a mandatory read for anyone serious about organizational excellence.

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.”