This was my first trip to the US, and it happened on day one. In the Washington town I was visiting, this gas station store called Tom Thumb does a great to-go breakfast buffet alongside the usual knick-knacks. Having forgotten my toothbrush, I stopped in to grab one, and my churning stomach clued me in …
On January 7, 2002, Paul Levy became CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a hospital reeling from a difficult merger and years of deficits. Levy was an unusual choice to fix it, not a doctor, no clinical background, an outsider walking into a building full of specialists. The obvious move for an …
A new strategy is announced on Monday. By Wednesday, budgets are being revisited, someone is worried about their role, and delivery is still expected to continue as planned. Almost none of that gets resolved by the strategy document. It gets uravels, or doesn’t, at one layer: that of the managers standing between the decision and …
I am a relatively new driver. An anxious one at that. Which means every time I get behind the wheel, my nervous system is already doing more work than it probably needs to. It also helps very little that I drive in Delhi. And yet, every day, I pull up to a traffic light and …
As facilitators, we rarely witness this moment. It’s the three weeks later moment, when one of the participants is sitting in a difficult performance conversation. Or walking into a board review. Or deciding whether to ask one more question instead of rushing to an answer. Those are the moments that determine whether the work has actually …
I am walking into a pitch meeting. The slides looked impeccable. The numbers were absolutely defensible. My team, on stand by with a rehearsed strategy. Under my blazer and the calm face however, my body is preparing for an unknown danger. The heart rate has shifted. Breathing has become shallower. The body, in its ancient …
There is a childhood memory that remains remarkably vivid for some of us: the first sighting of a lighthouse. Impossibly tall, unwavering, and reassuring, an absolute beacon of hope calling lost sailors home. For others, this perception may have been shaped by a steady diet of Enid Blyton’s adventure books. And then there is also …
(And Why That Wasn’t an Accident) You may have noticed we’ve been a little quiet over the last couple of weeks. No flurry of year-end posts.No reflective LinkedIn threads.No “here’s what’s coming in 2026” announcements. That pause was deliberate. Because December has a habit of doing something subtle but powerful to us. Even as calendars …
In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set off to cross Antarctica. The ship was called Endurance. Bold name. Didn’t quite live up to it. A few months in, the ice closed in. Slowly at first, then like a vice. The ship was trapped, then crushed. One moment they were explorers. The next? Castaways. Hundreds of miles from help, …
Leadership lessons from the hive. We’ve been thinking a lot about bees lately. Not in a garden-glancing way, but thanks to Thomas Seeley’s research on how honeybee colonies make decisions. Their process? Surprisingly relevant for corporate hives too. When a bee colony needs a new home, after a storm or when space runs out, they …
