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3 Deaths. 3 Lessons. 3 Questions to Survive (and Thrive)

3 Deaths. 3 Lessons. 3 Questions to Survive (and Thrive)

by | May 5, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Stories & Examples, Strategy

Sunday morning, my phone blew up. Thirty-three text messages. Most mornings, I have zero, so my first thought was “who died?”

The texts were about a death. Sort of.

Sloan Management Review died (ceased publication) and a group chat filled with academics, thought leaders, and consultants were having an absolute meltdown.

Knowing that my husband, an actual Sloan graduate, hadn’t yet seen the news, I broke it to him gently. “Okay,” he shrugged, not even glancing up from his phone.

This was in stark contrast to his reactions to the demise of Spirit Airlines (howling with laughter at the memes) and the resurrection of Allbirds as an AI company (thoughtful and incredibly technical analysis).

Lesson 1: The Race to the Bottom Never Ends Well

CNN’s headline said it all, “Why did Spirit fail? Too many passengers hated flying it.” To prove the point, the article opens,

“Lousy service, not the Iran war, killed Spirit Airlines.  Spirit was doomed to fail because of mismanagement, deep financial problems, and – crucially – its reputation for poor customer service.  The spike in jet fuel prices during the war just accelerated Spirit’s inevitable demise.”

If that can be written about your business, you don’t deserve to be in business.

It’s only a matter of time until you’re not.

 

Lesson 2: Be Patient for Growth and Impatient for Profit

Allbirds raised $348 million when it IPOed in 2021 and, at one point, was valued at $4.1 billion despite never turning a profit. Six years later, its stock price had fallen 95% and it sold its business and IP to a brand management company for $39 million.

How did this happen? There are plenty of theories – it expanded too aggressively into bricks and mortar retail, it made ugly shoes but operated like a fashion brand, its Tech Bro image is no longer aspirational for Gen Z customers – but the fact is that it prioritized growth over profit and that ultimately bit them in the balance sheet.

 

Lesson 3: Some Businesses are Butterflies

While my colleagues’ alarm was understandable, it missed the bigger picture.

Sloan Management Review (SMR) didn’t die. It metamorphosed.

Yes, the SMR brand is going away, but future ideas, research and findings will continue to be shared through digital newsletters, short-form videos, podcasts, and social-first content.

In effect, SMR is metamorphosing to better reflect how its subscribers consume information. Busy executives don’t have the time to read long-form, dense research articles. They grab information in snippets and soundbites. This change ensures the people who need the ideas the most get them.

3 Questions to Find Your Fate
  1. Do you treat your customers like they exist for your benefit? In other words, are you more focused on value extraction than value creation and delivery? If yes, start planning your business’ funeral and don’t expect anyone to attend.
  1. Do you have a financially and operationally sustainable business model? If no, start planning your funeral but take comfort in the fact that people will attend and may even say nice things about you.
  1. Do you know the unique, relevant, valuable, and hard to imitate reason why you exist? Can you articulate the rare and essential Job to be Done you do for your customers? If no, you’re on life support. When you can answer yes, you’ll be ready to be a butterfly.

 

One quick caveat

When businesses die, people lose their jobs and that is incredibly tragic. The psychological, financial, and relational impacts of job loss are tremendous, impacting people far beyond the individual laid off. It can take months, even years for people and families to recover and, for some, it never happens.

Creative destruction is real and necessary for long-term economic, technological, and societal growth. But the short-term impact has human consequences that should never be ignored.

Competing Priorities Aren’t a Trade-off. They’re a Test. Are You Passing?

Competing Priorities Aren’t a Trade-off. They’re a Test. Are You Passing?

by | Apr 28, 2026 | Leadership, Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” – Ron Swanson, Parks and Rec

With all due respect to Ron Swanson, leaders today need to whole-ass two things. In a world of constrained resources, you don’t have enough time, money, or people to put against your highest priority, let alone multiple high priorities.

But if you think you must choose between investing in today or the future, know that you’re most likely choosing between killing your company quickly or slowly.  That’s what “And, not or,” and it’s required in these three areas.

 

 

Development AND Research

“Right now, it’s not sufficient to just keep treading water.” – L. Rafael Reif, former MIT president and current professor of electrical engineering and computer science

“America Is Losing the Innovation Race” screamed the Foreign Affairs article in which Reif detailed evidence that America is falling behind China in electric vehicles, nuclear energy, war technologies, and other areas of critical technology.

Since 2015, as China invested in science and technology to develop the capability to produce high-end products at scale, US federal spending on basic research, as measured in real 2017 dollars, has declined.

Even the research that is funded isn’t keeping up. A paper published in 2022 examined nearly 50 million academic papers and patents from 1945 to 2010 and found a precipitous decline in the “disruptiveness” (i.e. makes previous findings obsolete or pushes the field in a new direction) of research across all scientific fields, including a 100% drop in the physical sciences and a 78.7% decline in computer and communications patents.

The funding story is quite different but no less alarming on the corporate side. Between 1964 and 2022, business funding as a source of R&D funds more than doubled but the vast majority of those funds are spent on applied research (13%) and development (80%), not the type of fundamental research that launches a country forward economically or societally.

 

 

Operators AND Innovators

“It’s a trap” – MBA student

For two hours, we discussed Netflix’s culture: the no vacation policy” policy, the “act in Netflix’s best interest” expense policy, and the management philosophy that stresses hiring people for their expertise and then trusting them to make decisions.

To me it sounded like a dream. So, when I asked who wanted to work for Netflix, I was shocked when not a single hand went up.

To my students, it sounded like a trap.

And that’s ok. Not everyone wants to face the accountability and repercussions of taking risks, exercising judgment, and making decisions.

Companies need people who want to follow processes, become experts in their fields, and keep the business steady and growing. AND they need people who question processes, explore far beyond their industries, and challenge the business to do better and grow further.

 

 

AI AND Humans

“What keeps me up is the fact that so many people are being convinced that they don’t matter anymore.” – Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

When 16,000 jobs, on average, have been lost each month for the past year due to AI, it’s pretty hard to convince a human and they matter.

Yet a growing body of research shows that humans enabled by AI generate new and novel ideas more quickly and cost efficiently than either AI or humans alone. In a battle between 125 “global problem solvers” and one expert in prompt engineering, the latter produced 180 ideas in 5.5 hours at a total cost of $27.01 and none of the ideas were meaningfully different in terms of strategic viability, environmental or financial value, or overall quality than the human-only ideas.  At P&G, researchers found that the most innovative ideas were generated by AI-enabled teams and that those teams worked about 12% faster than other teams and AI-enabled individuals.

 

Ultimately, the companies that succeed won’t be the ones that make the best bets.

They’ll be the ones that learn to whole-ass two things.

What If Moving Faster is Driving You Out of Business?

What If Moving Faster is Driving You Out of Business?

by | Apr 22, 2026 | Leading Through Uncertainty, Strategy

“Weeks. Always weeks. Man, the last time I talked months was a million weeks ago.”

Jim Halpert, The Office, 2013

Last week, I spoke to the Chief Human Resources Officer of a tech company about an engagement that would take 2-3 weeks to complete. Her response? “We don’t talk in weeks anymore. We talk in days, preferably hours.”

At first, I wanted to remind her that just because a woman can make a baby in nine months, doesn’t mean nine women can make a baby in once month.

But we weren’t talking about making babies. We were talking about leading a company in a world that feels like it’s changing faster than ever and we’re scrambling to catch up or keep pace. But is speed really the solution?

 

She’s right. We need to move faster.

An increase in the pace of change isn’t just a feeling. It’s facts:

The World Economic Forum and Bain & Company put it plainly, “What was once a five-year strategic horizon has compressed into a 12-month horizon, while a two-to-three-year plan is now a six-month view. The strategy machinery must spin at a speed no company is used to managing.”

They go on to say that “waiting is not caution – it is abdication.” But as dangerous as doing nothing is, how does it compare to do the wrong thing quickly?

 

She’s not wrong. But speed isn’t the (whole) answer.

McKinsey’s research begins to answer that question. It found that, of the 70% of large-scale transformations that failed, neither a lack of urgency nor insufficient speed were root causes. Instead, the most common root causes were:

  • Setting targets based on incremental thinking rather than bold vision
  • Failing to engage the full organization in the change
  • Never embedding new ways of working into how the business actually runs day to day

These findings are reinforced by The Project Management Institute’s 2025 global study of nearly 6,000 projects finding that that found that 50% of projects successfully delivered the intended outcomes and create value while only 13% failed. For projects without a clear vision of success, the number are flipped, failures exceeded both successes and projects with mixed results.

None of those failure modes are solved by moving faster. In fact, compressing timelines makes them all worse. Less time to clarify and communicate a vision of success and build commitment. Less time to engage broadly. Less time to make anything stick.

 

The solution isn’t speed. It’s clarity.

 Without clarity, every new technology, every competitor move, every shift in the market feels equally urgent and equally threatening. And when everything is urgent, nothing gets done well.  Just quickly.

But when you have clarity about who you are as a leader and why your organization has a uniquely relevant, valuable, rare, and hard to imitate reason to exist, you aren’t overwhelmed when things change. You see relevant choices faster, understand trade-offs better, and move with confidence instead of chaos.

This is why the WEF and Bain report doesn’t focus on speed but on the imperative to treat strategy as a continuous cycle: constantly updated, scanning for signals, recalibrating as new information arrives.

The time pressure you feel is real, but the answer isn’t only to move faster. It’s to root yourself in clarity about who you are and what you do so that when you need to move in days, you already know what you’re moving toward.

Clarity leads speed. Not the other way around.

Want to Know Your 2027 Priorities? Look to Nebraska.

Want to Know Your 2027 Priorities? Look to Nebraska.

by | Apr 15, 2026 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leadership

In October, at InnoLead’s annual conference in Boston MA, everything was AI. When the facilitator of a LEGO Serious Play workshop announced we would not talk about AI, the room erupted in applause.

In April, at Inside Outside Innovation’s biannual conference in Lincoln NE, everything was human. By day’s end, speakers and attendees alike were celebrating the sweet relief of a human-led, AI-supported future.

Why the difference? AI hasn’t fallen out of the news cycle, nor have AI-driven layoffs ceased.

Perspective.

InnoLead’s conference featured practitioners living the day-to-day reality of change and innovation. IO 2026 spotlighted thought leaders like Eric Ries, David Bland, and Erin Stadler, advisors able to see across organizations and invited into the C-Suite’s inner sanctum.

One conference talks about what is. One about what will be.

So, if you want to know what your C-Suite will task you with in six months, look to Nebraska.

 

To move forward, we must face hard truths

Eric Ries, the creator of Lean Startup and author of the forthcoming Incorruptible, exposed the myth that free markets reward value creation. They reward value extraction. Companies focused on extraction forget their purpose, serve themselves over their customers, and ultimately fail.

Elliott Parker, CEO of Alloy Partners and author of  The Illusion of Innovation, declared corporate innovation to be alchemy. Isaac Netwon spent his life pursuing alchemy (creating calculus was just a side quest) but failed because the basic building block of matter, the atom, is immutable. The same is true of big company executives pursuing innovation. The atomic elements of corporations (efficiency) and entrepreneurship (autonomy, passion, urgency, skin in the game, and freedom) are immutable and incompatible. Just as lead cannot become gold, companies can’t create like startups.

 

 

To do better, we must focus on people

Erin Stadler, founder of Design Culture and author of one of my all-time favorite articles on innovation, shared a forgotten truth: “When we lead with people, the human element, the science, the innovation comes with it.”  To do this requires leaders and organizations to find and state their purpose, to build principles and values, and to act on them every day

Dan Hassenplug, VP of Design at sport tech company Hudl, boldly declared that customer obsession is the “real AI strategy.”  After all, getting 10x faster at something doesn’t matter if it’s on something that doesn’t matter. And what matters are your customers. Living with them, talking to them, listening to them. You’ll get radical and game changing insights that no competitor, survey, or synthetic persona can.

David Bland, founder of Precoil and author of Testing Business Ideas, implored the audience to flip the 80/20 ratio of feasibility experiments to desirability experiments. Why? “We can make anything these days. It doesn’t matter if you can make it if no one wants it.”

 

 

To focus on people, we must serve them

Ted Ullrich, co-founder of Tomorrow Lab, reminded us that “simplicity is earned,” not a starting point. We start by trying to do all the thingsfor customers, but that’s overwhelmng and unnecessary. Only by listening to humans and staying humble can we create the simple solutions that create value.

Julie Ann Crommet, founder of Collective Moxie and former VP at Disney, dazzled us with the simple fact that “the more specific the story, the more universal.”  She backed this up with data that films with Authentically Inclusive Representation perform nearly 3x better at the box office and the story behind how Coco became Pixar’s highest grossing movie in China, despite content that is typically banned.

 

 

The future is wonderfully human

AI isn’t going away and it will change almost all aspects of life and work. But if the thought leaders, advisors, and designers in Nebraska are right (and I think they are), the future will be far more human than machine.