Relevant Leadership Blog

Why Adaptability Wins When the Playbook Stops Working Success can make you less adaptable. That may sound backward, but success has a way of convincing us that the approach that worked yesterday will keep working tomorrow. We repeat the strategy. We protect the process. We become attached to the playbook that produced the result. Then the market shifts. Technology changes. A customer wants something different. A competitor moves faster. A role that once felt secure suddenly requires an entirely new set of skills. The people and organizations that struggle most with change are not always the least capable. Often, they

  Recently, my friend Martin Hurlburt introduced me to the book Social by Matthew Lieberman. One of the book’s central ideas immediately caught my attention: human beings are wired for connection. For most of human history, belonging wasn’t simply something that made us feel good. It helped keep us alive. Our ancestors depended on the group for food, protection, shelter, and survival. Being accepted by the tribe increased your chances of living. Being rejected or excluded could be dangerous. That history still influences the way our brains respond today. Social rejection activates some of the same threat and pain systems

  As a speaker and author, I spend a lot of time thinking about pedagogy. It is not a word that comes up often in everyday conversation, but it shapes every great presentation, book, classroom, training, and conversation. Pedagogy is the art and science of teaching. More specifically, it is the thinking behind how we help someone learn. It asks questions like: ● How should this idea be introduced? ● What does the audience already know? ● What will make a complex concept easier to understand? ● How do we keep people engaged? ● What will help them remember the

When the pressure hits, most people hope they will rise to the occasion. Top performers take a different approach. They do the work long before the occasion arrives. We tend to notice performance in the moments when it is most visible. It might be a big presentation, an important sales call, a difficult conversation, a championship, or an unexpected crisis. What we rarely see are the hundreds of small decisions that prepared someone for that moment. In the national study behind my book, Redefining High Performance, preparation emerged as the number one driver of high performance. That finding did not