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Leadership

Are leaders born or made?

Think about the most impressive leader you have ever worked with in your career. Was this person born with a natural gift for guiding others? Or did they spend years learning how to lead through trial, error, and hard experience? This question has been debated for decades in offices, university classrooms, and executive boardrooms around the world. People often wonder if leadership is an innate talent hardwired into our DNA or a practical skill that anyone can acquire with enough effort. In the past, many researchers supported the idea that historical figures were simply born with extraordinary qualities. Today, modern behavioral science provides a much more complete answer. Scientists study human behavior using a framework called the bio-psycho-social model. This model shows that becoming an effective leader is not a simple choice between nature and nurture. Instead, leadership develops through a continuous interaction between your genetic code, your personality, your childhood upbringing, and your life experiences. The biological blueprint of leadership Let us begin by looking at biology. Are some human beings naturally born to lead? To answer this question, behavioral scientists have spent decades studying identical and fraternal twins. Because twins share either all or half of their genetic material, comparing their life choices helps researchers measure the exact impact of DNA on career paths. These twin studies consistently show that genetic factors account for roughly twenty-four to thirty percent of the variation in who takes on leadership roles. In simple terms, biology plays a real role, but it only explains about a third of the overall story. Scientists have even identified specific genetic markers associated with leadership positions. Research points to specific DNA sequences connected to neural receptors in the brain that appear more frequently in individuals who hold management roles. However, it is vital to understand what these genetic markers actually do. Genes do not automatically create a great manager or a charismatic executive. There is no single leadership gene that guarantees success. Instead, your DNA influences underlying biological systems that make certain leadership behaviors easier to perform. For example, genetics influence how your body regulates stress hormones like cortisol. Some people inherit a nervous system that stays calm during high-pressure situations. When a sudden crisis hits a company, these individuals do not panic easily. Genetics also influence dopamine levels, which drive physical energy, ambition, and the desire to achieve goals. A person born with high physical energy and a steady nervous system may find it easier to step into demanding roles. Yet, having a biological advantage is never enough on its own. Think of genetics as the quality of a seed in agriculture. A high-quality seed has great potential. However, if you drop that seed onto dry rocks without water, sunshine, or fertile soil, it will never grow into a tree. The exact same rule applies to human beings. A person may inherit a strong nervous system and high energy, but without the right environment, proper education, and real opportunities, that biological potential remains completely unused. Learning to lead through practice and experience Since genetics account for less than a third of leadership tendencies, the remaining seventy percent comes down to environment, education, and life experiences. This is an encouraging realization for anyone who wants to improve their skills. It proves that leadership is primarily a learned discipline rather than an exclusive club reserved for a lucky few. To understand how people learn to lead, we must look at how the human brain adapts over time. The brain is not a static organ that stops developing after childhood. Through a natural process known as neuroplasticity, the brain constantly builds new connections whenever you practice a skill or reflect on a new experience. Leadership is made of specific practical behaviors. Active listening, emotional control, strategic planning, clear communication, and delegating tasks are all skills that can be trained. None of these abilities appear magically overnight. Just like learning to play a musical instrument or speak a new language, mastering leadership requires deliberate practice. When a manager repeatedly practices remaining calm during difficult conversations, the brain strengthens the neural connections responsible for self-control. Over time, what felt difficult and awkward becomes a natural habit. People also learn how to lead by observing others around them. From an early age, human beings watch parents, teachers, managers, and public figures. When we see a manager handle a team conflict with fairness and respect, we remember that positive outcome. We mentally store that behavior and copy it when we face similar challenges later in life. Conversely, watching a poor manager destroy team trust teaches us what mistakes to avoid. However, the most powerful learning experiences often come from facing severe hardship. In leadership research, these intense personal challenges are called crucibles. A crucible might be a failed business venture, a painful career setback, a major project collapse, or a personal health crisis. These difficult moments force individuals to pause, examine their values, and rebuild their approach to life. When a leader goes through a crisis and takes time to reflect on what went wrong, they develop deep self-awareness and emotional strength. True confidence is rarely born during easy times. It is forged when you face failure, learn from your mistakes, and rebuild your career with greater wisdom. Personality traits and the myth of the extrovert While everyone can learn leadership skills, personal traits shape how individuals approach the role. Psychologists often study personality using five main characteristics: extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience, agreeableness, and emotional stability. Understanding these traits helps explain why different people adopt distinct management styles. Extraversion is often the most visible personality trait. People who score high in extraversion are outgoing, energetic, and comfortable in social settings. Because extraverts naturally speak up in groups and seek attention, they are frequently the first people to step forward into leadership positions. Researchers call this phenomenon leader emergence. When a team faces an uncertain situation, the loudest and most confident voice often gets chosen to take charge. However, there is a big difference between emerging as a leader and being an effective leader over time. While extraversion helps people get noticed initially, traits like conscientiousness and openness to experience predict long-term success. Conscientious individuals are organized, disciplined, reliable, and detail-oriented. They keep promises, meet deadlines, and create structured systems that allow businesses to run smoothly. Openness to experience brings curiosity, creativity, and a willingness to explore new ideas, which is vital for long-term strategy. Emotional stability is another crucial factor. Leaders who experience high anxiety, frequent mood swings, and deep self-doubt often struggle to make decisions under pressure. These negative emotions hurt decision-making and make it difficult for team members to feel secure. A leader who panics under stress spreads fear throughout the entire organization. For many years, popular culture assumed that great leaders had to be loud, dramatic extraverts. This assumption created a widespread myth that introverted individuals could not lead effectively. Modern psychological research has proven that myth completely wrong. In complex and fast-moving business environments, introverted leaders often outperform extraverted leaders. Introverted managers tend to be quiet, thoughtful, and excellent listeners. Instead of trying to dominate every conversation, they create space for their team members to share creative suggestions and take initiative. When a team consists of proactive, highly skilled employees, an introverted leader allows those employees to shine and innovate. Extraverted leaders, on the other hand, sometimes feel the need to control every discussion, which can accidentally crush the initiative of talented workers. While positive personality traits support healthy leadership, dark personality traits can cause immense damage. Characteristics like extreme narcissism, manipulativeness, and a lack of empathy can ruin organizations. Individuals with these traits often appear charming, confident, and persuasive in job interviews. They frequently climb corporate ladders quickly by taking credit for other people's work and manipulating office politics. However, in the long run, these individuals destroy trust, demoralize employees, and ruin corporate cultures. True leadership effectiveness must be measured by long-term organizational health, not short-term power. How early childhood shapes future leaders Long before a person attends their first business meeting or enters a management training program, their leadership foundation is already being built at home. The way parents raise their children leaves a permanent mark on how those children interact with authority, manage stress, and build relationships in adulthood. Psychologists study early childhood development using attachment theory. When parents provide consistent love, protection, and emotional warmth, a child forms a secure emotional bond. This secure attachment creates a strong sense of basic trust. Children who grow up feeling safe and valued develop healthy self-esteem and learn to trust other people. In adulthood, this basic trust becomes a cornerstone of healthy leadership. Secure leaders do not feel threatened when their team members succeed or express different opinions. They do not need to micromanage every detail because they genuinely trust their workers. Instead of controlling people through fear, secure leaders empower their teams, offer constructive support, and build environments where employees feel safe to take calculated risks. Parenting styles also play a direct role in developing personal responsibility. The most effective approach combines high emotional warmth with clear rules and boundaries. Parents who use this balanced approach set firm expectations, but they also explain the reasons behind those rules and listen to their children's feelings. This supportive environment teaches children that their actions have real consequences, developing an internal locus of control. An internal locus of control is the firm belief that you have the power to shape your own life through your choices and effort. Individuals who grow up with this mindset do not blame outside circumstances when things go wrong. When they face a crisis at work, they take ownership, adapt their strategy, and look for practical solutions. Furthermore, parents who encourage their children to make age-appropriate decisions build personal resilience early in life. Allowing a child to solve small problems, manage minor conflicts, and experience failure teaches them that mistakes are not fatal. When these children grow into adults, they possess the courage to make tough decisions under uncertainty without being paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. Putting the bio-psycho-social model into practice Understanding the complete picture of how leadership develops changes how organizations should select, train, and support their managers. Relying on outdated ideas about natural talent or charismatic personalities leads to poor hiring decisions and wasted human potential. When companies hire or promote leaders, they should look beyond outward confidence and superficial charisma. Assessment processes should focus on emotional stability, conscientiousness, self-awareness, and personal integrity. Evaluating how a candidate handles failure and listens to feedback provides far better clues about their future performance than listening to an impressive interview speech. Organizations must also redesign their leadership development programs. Traditional management training often consists of short lectures and reading materials, which do little to change actual daily behavior. Because the brain learns through practice and active reflection, effective training must include hands-on experience, real-world projects, long-term mentoring, and continuous feedback. Creating a culture that views mistakes as learning opportunities is equally critical. If a company punishes every minor error, managers will avoid taking risks and default to rigid, defensive behaviors. However, when an organization treats setbacks as natural learning experiences, leaders develop the resilience and adaptability required to navigate complex market changes. Summary of leadership factors To bring all these elements together, it is helpful to look at how different factors contribute to the overall development of a leader.Dimension Share or role Primary mechanism Key research conceptsGenetics 24% to 30% Biological predisposition, stress and energy regulation Genetic markers and twin studiesLearnability Around 70% Neuroplasticity, practical experience, role models, reflection Social learning and life challengesPersonality Moderating role Main personality traits guide leadership style and effectiveness Extraversion, conscientiousness, introversionUpbringing Foundational role Secure attachment, supportive parenting, personal responsibility Early trust and internal controlClosing thoughts The debate over whether leaders are born or made turns out to be incomplete. Biology sets a basic foundation, providing raw physical energy, stress tolerance, and temperament tendencies. Childhood upbringing builds the emotional security and personal responsibility needed to interact healthily with others. Finally, years of deliberate practice, observation, and reflection turn that potential into practical skill. Nobody is born a finished leader, and nobody becomes a great leader purely by accident. Becoming a leader is a lifelong process of learning, making mistakes, and growing as a human being. When organizations recognize this truth, they can stop searching for mythical born leaders and start building environments where real leadership can flourish. Great leaders are neither simply born nor purely made, but continually developed through experience, reflection, and growth.

Humanizing change to build better organizations

Experiencing major unexpected changes in your career can be a frightening experience, especially when you are young and just starting out in the professional world. Early in many people's careers, there comes a moment when the stability of a company suddenly disappears. Imagine starting a new job at a historic airline that has spent decades helping millions of people travel across the world. Suddenly, the company declares bankruptcy, and everyone in the office realizes that difficult decisions are coming. The atmosphere becomes heavy with anxiety because saving the business requires hard choices, including laying off many dedicated employees. It is painful to think about saying goodbye to colleagues who have devoted their entire working lives to one organization. During such a crisis, external advisers and coaches are often brought in to guide leadership through the emotional and operational process. In one memorable meeting, an adviser asked a question that shocked everyone in the room. He asked the leadership team to consider what would happen if being laid off was actually a good thing for every person who lost their job. At first, this idea sounded completely unreasonable. For anyone living paycheck to paycheck, losing a job brings immediate fears about paying rent, covering utility bills, buying groceries, and maintaining health insurance. It creates deep worry about future career opportunities and personal stability. However, keeping an open mind allowed people to listen to the actual research behind workplace transitions. The adviser had tracked hundreds of laid-off employees over several years to see what happened to their lives after leaving the company. The data revealed that, in most cases, losing a job was actually a blessing in disguise. It forced people out of comfortable routines and career ruts that no longer challenged them. With the help of severance packages, supportive professional networks, and career coaching, these individuals pushed themselves to try completely new directions. Many found new positions that accelerated their career growth, while others went back to college, learned valuable technical skills, or started their own successful businesses. Learning about this research creates a powerful shift in perspective. It leads to a fundamental belief that change, even when forced upon us, can bring positive outcomes if we remain patient and curious. When unexpected events happen, instead of asking why something bad is happening to us, we can choose to ask what opportunity the situation is creating for us. This mindset becomes especially valuable when leading organizations through major transformations, where uncertainty is constant and human emotions run high. Understanding the biological fear of uncertainty Leading organizational transformations across different industries shows that change is happening faster and becoming more complex than ever before. Whether working with global manufacturers restructuring their workforce, mining companies on the edge of financial failure, or essential grocery chains during global health crises, one truth remains clear. Change is continuous, and it is not going away. Yet, despite its frequency, the vast majority of people dislike change and actively try to avoid it. This resistance is not simply a negative attitude or a lack of discipline. Human beings are biologically built to resist change and uncertainty. The human brain is designed to seek safety and avoid potential threats in order to ensure survival. Whenever a person encounters an unexpected or unfamiliar situation, the brain automatically identifies it as a potential danger. Before a person even has time to think logically, a small part of the brain called the amygdala triggers an immediate physical response by releasing stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. To understand how this reaction works in daily life, consider a simple situation in nature. If you are walking through a forest and suddenly encounter a large bear, your brain immediately recognizes a life-threatening danger. Your body is instantly flooded with stress hormones, and your immediate physical reaction is to run away as fast as possible. However, running away from a wild animal is often the worst thing you can do, because it triggers the animal's natural instinct to chase you. To stay safe, you need to override your emotional panic, remain completely still, and rely on logical thinking rather than immediate impulse. A similar biological process happens in the modern corporate world. When a chief executive officer announces a sudden company merger, a major restructuring, or a new software system, employees experience the exact same chemical reaction in their brains as if they were facing a wild animal in the forest. Their bodies receive a wave of stress hormones, causing them to feel threatened, anxious, and defensive. This automatic response explains why nearly three-quarters of all corporate transformation programs fail to achieve their intended goals. When major changes are announced in the workplace, employees rarely respond with immediate excitement or open minds. Instead, their natural reaction is to list every possible reason why the initiative will fail. People often express skepticism by claiming that new strategies never work, or they silently choose to ignore the new rules in the hope that the initiative will eventually disappear. It does not matter how well a company plans its technical strategy if the humans involved are unconsciously working against it. Effective change management is fundamentally about helping people manage their biological fear response so they can use their intelligence and creativity to support the organization's growth. Moving beyond corporate metrics and financial goals To overcome this natural human resistance, business leaders must humanize the way they approach organizational transformation. Too often, companies focus entirely on structural adjustments, technology deployments, and project deadlines, completely forgetting about the emotional experience of the employees who must carry out the work. Humanizing change means placing the needs, motivations, and mental capacities of workers at the center of every strategic decision. One of the biggest mistakes corporate leaders make when communicating new strategies is relying entirely on financial language and executive metrics. Leaders frequently try to motivate their workforce by talking about increasing shareholder value, raising the company stock price, expanding profit margins, or hitting target bonuses. While these numbers are important to executive boards and investors, they fail to inspire the vast majority of everyday employees. Expecting frontline workers to feel passionate about corporate profit metrics ignores basic human psychology. Research conducted in behavioral science labs shows that people are motivated by very different internal drivers. When you study what truly inspires individuals to give their best effort at work, five main motivators consistently emerge. Everyone responds to these motivators to different degrees, but almost every person has one primary driver that influences their daily decisions and commitment. The first driver is personal achievement. Employees who are motivated by personal achievement care deeply about their individual career progression. They are energized by reaching clear career milestones, earning promotions, securing prestigious job titles, and being selected for high-profile projects that demonstrate their skills. The second driver focuses on customers. Workers who are driven by this motivation want to see how their daily effort directly impacts the real world. They care about the quality of the products or services their company provides and are energized by listening to user feedback so they can continuously improve the customer experience. The third driver revolves around team dynamics. People who are motivated by teams care intensely about their colleagues and the social environment of their workplace. Financial rewards alone will not keep these individuals in a company if they dislike their work environment. Conversely, if they feel supported by a strong and caring team, they will happily work late hours and overcome difficult challenges together to help their colleagues succeed. The fourth driver is community impact. Employees motivated by community need to know that their organization contributes positively to society. They look for companies that support social causes, participate in local charity initiatives, protect the environment, and actively work to make the world a better place. The fifth driver is financial outcomes. This motivator is straightforward and relates directly to monetary rewards. People driven by financial outcomes want to know exactly how a project or business performance will translate into higher wages, clear bonuses, and financial security for themselves and their families. When you survey a large group of employees across an organization, their primary motivators are usually divided quite evenly across these five categories. This means that if leadership only talks about corporate profit margins and executive bonuses, they are completely failing to connect with the majority of their workforce. By ignoring the drivers related to customers, team culture, personal growth, and community contribution, leaders leave most of his or her employees feeling uninspired and disconnected from the company's mission. Connecting company transformation to personal meaning To create a successful transformation, leaders must encourage employees to build their own personal change stories. A personal change story explains why an individual is personally motivated to support a new direction and why they are committed to seeing it through difficult times. When employees understand their own personal motivations and review them regularly, they can overcome their natural biological urge to resist workplace changes. A powerful example of this principle occurred during the turnaround of a large mining company that was just three months away from complete financial failure. The organization needed an immediate and drastic transformation to survive. During a strategy workshop with senior managers, one leader stood up to share his personal change story. He explained that he had grown up in severe poverty and knew firsthand how difficult life could be without financial security. Because of his background, he was deeply disturbed by the massive amount of wasted materials and inefficiency within the mining operations. This manager then connected the company's transformation plan directly to all five core motivators. He explained that if the turnaround succeeded, the business would attract essential investment from shareholders, satisfying the financial requirement. With that new capital, the company could purchase modern equipment to increase efficiency, allowing them to keep prices low for their customers. The increase in business stability would allow the company to raise worker wages, fulfilling personal achievement goals. Most importantly to him, the profits would allow the business to fund a local poverty reduction program in the surrounding community, while the improved operational stability would give internal teams more time to invest in learning and professional development. By the time the manager finished speaking, he was moved to tears, as were many of his colleagues in the room. In that single moment, the company's transformation shifted from a cold, numerical goal about saving money into a meaningful shared mission. Every employee in the room could see how their work connected to something larger than themselves. As a result, the entire organization united behind the plan, successfully turning the business into a profitable and stable enterprise. Modern technology makes it easier than ever for organizations to connect with employees on a personal level. By using communication platforms, automated tools, and thoughtful message segmentation, leadership can share news and updates that directly appeal to different employee motivators. For instance, workers who care deeply about team culture can receive updates highlighting collaborative achievements, while those motivated by community impact can receive stories about the company's environmental progress. Tailoring the message helps every employee stay reminded of why the change matters to them personally. Measuring cognitive load and managing team capacity Even when employees understand the purpose of a transformation and feel motivated to participate, leaders must remember that every individual has a different capacity to handle extra stress and work. A common mistake in corporate management is assuming that every employee possesses the exact same amount of energy, time, and emotional resilience. Organizations often manage major projects by using standard activity charts and assigning equal numbers of tasks to every team member, completely ignoring their individual circumstances. In reality, two employees sitting next to each other may have completely different ability levels to manage new responsibilities. One employee might have a stable personal life, high energy levels, and plenty of time to take on new challenges. Meanwhile, another employee might be experiencing severe personal stress, such as a painful divorce, a health issue, or family difficulties at home. Assigning the exact same workload to both individuals will inevitably cause the second employee to feel overwhelmed, leading to exhaustion, errors, and deep resentment toward the company. To prevent burnout and maintain steady progress during a transformation, organizations must regularly measure and manage cognitive load. Cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort and emotional energy required to perform a job effectively. It consists of two primary elements: capacity and confidence. Capacity relates to whether an employee has the actual time, physical energy, and material resources required to complete their assigned duties. Confidence relates to whether an employee truly believes in their personal ability to execute those duties successfully. If either capacity or confidence is lacking, the employee's cognitive load becomes dangerously heavy, making it nearly impossible for them to adapt to new workplace systems or expectations. Measuring cognitive load does not require complex or expensive tools. Leaders can gather valuable insight by asking employees to complete short, simple surveys on a regular basis. These surveys ask individuals how they are feeling emotionally, giving options such as feeling excited, tired, proud, or anxious. The survey then asks direct questions about their personal capacity, such as how effectively they are managing their balance between work and home life. Finally, it asks questions about their confidence, measuring how certain they feel about completing challenging tasks successfully. Gathering this information allows managers to make intelligent, human-centered adjustments across their teams. When the data shows that an employee has high confidence and extra capacity, managers can offer them new leadership opportunities, assign them complex projects, and help them advance their careers. Conversely, when the data reveals that an employee is struggling with heavy emotional stress or low confidence, managers can temporarily reduce their workload, adjust project deadlines, or provide extra support. Combining personal motivation with active capacity management creates a healthy workplace environment where change can actually succeed. When an employee experiences a dip in confidence or feels overwhelmed by new expectations, managers can step in with targeted support. A simple, encouraging note from a trusted leader or a brief reminder of the employee's personal change goals can help them regain their confidence. These small human interactions provide the support workers need to push through temporary difficulties and overcome their natural fear of uncertainty. Closing thoughts Navigating continuous change is one of the greatest challenges facing modern organizations, yet it also presents the greatest opportunity for long-term improvement. Success depends on recognizing that technological tools, strategic plans, and operational processes are only as effective as the people who run them. By understanding the biological reasons behind fear, connecting company goals to individual motivators, and actively protecting the mental capacity of employees, leaders can transform resistance into genuine commitment. Lasting organizational progress occurs when leaders stop fighting human nature and start designing change around the needs of their people.

Seeing opportunities with AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the way businesses operate, offering new opportunities and challenges. As a C-level executive, it's important to understand how AI can benefit your company while managing the risks involved. Setting Your AI Goals First, you need to decide what you want to achieve with AI. Do you want to use it to improve internal processes or to create new products and services? Your ambition will guide your strategy and set realistic goals. For example, AI can help streamline back-office tasks, making them faster and more efficient. Or, you might use AI to offer personalized customer experiences, which can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. Choosing the Right Approach Next, consider how you will implement AI. There are different ways to do this. You can use pre-built AI tools that are already available. This is quick and doesn’t require much technical knowledge, but it may not fit your specific needs perfectly. Alternatively, you can adapt existing models with your own data to make them more tailored to your business. This approach is more flexible but requires more expertise. Lastly, you can develop your own AI system from scratch. This gives you full control but is more expensive and time-consuming. Choosing the right path is crucial. It affects how quickly you can start using AI and how much it will cost. For instance, if your goal is to quickly improve customer service, a pre-built solution might be the best choice. If you need a highly customized solution for a specific problem, developing your own AI system might be necessary. Navigating the Risks Using AI also comes with risks. These include unreliable outputs, data privacy issues, cyber threats, and regulatory concerns. For example, AI systems can sometimes produce incorrect or unexpected results. This can happen if the data used to train the AI is flawed or if the system encounters new situations it hasn’t seen before. Ensuring data privacy is crucial, especially when handling sensitive information. You need to comply with regulations like GDPR in Europe or HIPAA in the U.S. Cyber threats are also a concern. AI systems can be targeted by hackers, putting your data at risk. This means you need to have robust cybersecurity measures in place. Additionally, different countries have different rules about AI, and you need to follow them. This can be complex, as regulations can change quickly and vary widely. For instance, regular audits and compliance checks can help ensure you stay within legal boundaries. Leading with Vision and Prudence Leading with AI requires a balanced approach. You need to support innovation while also ensuring safety and ethical considerations. This involves engaging stakeholders, balancing speed and caution, and fostering a culture of learning. Engaging stakeholders means talking to everyone involved, from developers to end-users, to get their input and support. This helps build a sense of ownership and alignment. Balancing speed and caution is also important. You need to move fast to stay ahead of competitors but take time to ensure your AI is reliable and secure. Fostering a culture of learning means encouraging your team to learn about AI and keep up with new developments. This helps keep your organization ahead of the curve. Wrapping Up AI offers a unique chance for C-level executives to drive growth and innovation. However, it also presents significant challenges. By carefully planning and managing risks, you can use AI to improve your business and stay ahead of the competition. In summary, leading with AI means setting clear goals, choosing the right deployment strategy, and being prepared for risks. With the right approach, you can unlock the full potential of AI for your organization. True leadership means guiding your company through the complexities of AI with vision and resilience.

Co-managed IT explained: who is really responsible?

Choosing how to run your IT infrastructure is one of the most important strategic decisions a business can make. However, many business leaders struggle with confusing terminology in the IT service provider landscape. Terms like co-managed IT, co-sourcing, fully managed services, and co-creation are often used incorrectly, leading to failed partnerships and unclear expectations. Understanding what these models actually mean, how responsibilities are divided, and how financial billing works is essential before signing any contract. The landscape of IT management models To make informed choices, business leaders must clearly distinguish between the different ways IT services can be delivered and organized. Under an insourcing model, a business handles all technology needs internally by hiring and managing its own personnel. Outsourcing, by contrast, transfers an entire process or department to an external provider who guarantees specific performance targets. Co-sourcing takes a staff augmentation approach by bringing in external personnel to work under your internal team's direction, adding temporary capacity without shifting operational control. Service delivery models also differ in scope and management approach. A standard managed service focuses on buying a specific functional outcome under a strict agreement, while remote managed services rely on software tools to monitor systems from a distance. Fully managed services go a step further by handing over complete operational responsibility for the entire IT environment to an external partner. Finally, co-managed IT involves an internal team and a provider managing a domain together, whereas co-creation focuses on jointly developing new digital products rather than managing existing systems. Deep dive into co-managed IT: what it is and what it is not Co-managed IT is often misunderstood in the service provider market, where it is frequently confused with buying extra staff or single software tools. In reality, a true co-managed setup is a joint operational partnership. Both the internal IT team and the external provider actively manage a specific domain together by sharing access to management platforms, support queues, and daily workflows. Both parties share equal accountability for system health, overall uptime, and cybersecurity. This approach is fundamentally different from other sourcing arrangements. It is not co-sourcing because co-sourcing merely supplies extra hands without transferring operational accountability to the vendor. It is also distinct from co-creation, which develops new intellectual property, and traditional outsourcing, which removes the internal team from daily operations entirely. Companies select co-managed models when they have a capable internal team that understands the business, but needs enterprise-grade tools, 24/7 coverage, and specialized knowledge. Financially, co-managed services usually rely on a predictable monthly fee per user or device, combined with set rates for project support. Deep dive into co-creation: what it is and what it is not Co-creation is another term that is often misused when organizations confuse custom software development with operational IT management. At its core, co-creation is a collaborative development strategy where a client and a technology vendor build a software tool together. The client provides domain expertise, practical feedback, and operational requirements, while the vendor contributes technical architecture, software engineering, and scalable infrastructure. This model should not be confused with standard custom software development, where a client pays the full cost to keep exclusive rights. Nor should it be mistaken for co-managed IT or co-sourcing, as co-creation focuses on building new digital tools rather than supporting daily IT operations. Businesses choose co-creation when standard commercial software falls short, but building custom tools alone is financially unfeasible. Financially, the client typically receives lower development rates or early software access. In return, the vendor retains the core intellectual property and creative freedom, allowing them to market and sell the solution to other commercial customers. The shared responsibility model: operational versus legal reality When working with an external IT partner, dividing responsibilities correctly is critical to avoiding operational gaps and legal surprises.IT Sourcing Model Operational Execution Operational Responsibility Legal Accountability Common Billing StructureInsourcing Internal staff Internal IT management Internal business board Internal salaries and capital spendOutsourcing External provider External service provider Internal business board Fixed monthly contract or service feeCo-sourcing Internal staff & external personnel Internal IT management Internal business board Time and materials or daily ratesCo-managed Shared internal and external team Joint shared responsibility Internal business board Fixed fee per user/device + project rateCo-creation Joint development team Joint development leadership Internal business board Discounted dev fees + IP retentionFully Managed External provider External service provider Internal business board Fixed monthly fee per user or deviceOperationally, you can delegate tasks and share daily responsibilities with a partner. In a co-managed environment, the vendor might handle backup management and software patches while your internal team supports end users. If a backup fails due to vendor negligence, the vendor is operationally accountable based on agreed service levels. However, legal responsibility works very differently. Regulators and courts hold your board of directors legally accountable if a cyberattack occurs or privacy laws are violated. While you can seek financial damages from a partner for breach of contract, ultimate legal accountability remains with your business. Closing thoughts Modern IT management requires a clear understanding of where effort ends and true responsibility begins. Misidentifying your sourcing model leads to operational confusion, unfulfilled promises, and unmanaged business risk. By defining roles, financial structures, and legal boundaries early, organizations can build effective partnerships that protect their operations. True IT partnerships are built on shared operational accountability, but business leaders must remember that legal responsibility can never be outsourced.

Governing AI agents while driving business value

Technology leaders today face a very difficult choice. On one hand, company executives want to see clear financial results from artificial intelligence investments. On the other hand, using automated AI tools introduces safety and security risks that older systems never had. To handle this successfully, companies must move away from simple testing and focus on clear rules, cost control, and practical learning. Higher pressure on budgets and financial results For a few years, many companies spent money on AI just to see what it could do. Today, that period of open spending is over because business leaders want to see real value. While many companies are still spending more money on technology, only a small number expect to get fast returns on their AI investments. This gap between spending and real results puts a lot of pressure on technology directors. To solve this, successful companies are changing their approach in three main ways:Focusing on clear tasks: Leaders are stopping general pilot projects that have no clear goals and are choosing tasks where results are easy to measure. Setting goals before starting: Good teams decide on clear targets before launching a project, so they can prove the financial benefits later. Managing hidden costs: Using AI models too much, paying high usage fees, and running uncontrolled software tools can quickly become too expensive.The hidden risks of automated software tools The step from standard AI models to automated AI agents creates new risks for companies. Standard tools just answer questions, but automated agents can run code, change databases, and complete complex actions across different systems by themselves. If these systems operate without strict rules, they can make unexpected mistakes, like accidentally deleting important company databases. At the same time, many employees are using unapproved AI tools on their own. Workers in different departments often use personal accounts or free online tools to do their jobs faster. While this can save time, it can also leak private company information and create serious security problems. Changing safety rules from yearly checks to daily monitoring Old ways of managing software risks, such as checking rules once a year, do not work for fast AI systems. Because automated tools work continuously and very quickly, security plans must adapt to monitor them all the time. To keep systems safe without stopping work, technology managers should follow a clear plan:Limiting system access: Automated tools should never have full access to everything; their permissions must match the exact task they are doing. Creating strong central rules: Instead of changing safety settings for every new tool, create one strong system that decides what data can be used and when a human must check the work. Keeping complete activity logs: Every action taken by an automated tool must be saved in a list so managers know what happened and why.** Giving clear responsibility to staff: Set up mixed teams and clear ownership so that technology, legal rules, and business goals work together.Helping employees learn and adapt As software work becomes more automated, companies face a new human problem. Younger workers and junior developers who rely too much on AI tools might not learn basic building skills. If they do not learn from real mistakes, it becomes hard for them to notice when an AI system gives a wrong answer. To fix this problem, business leaders need to build a learning culture. Experienced staff members should guide younger workers, encourage open discussions about technical issues, and check AI outputs carefully. Good training across the whole business helps everyone understand both the power and the limits of these new tools Closing thoughts Navigating the complex world of modern technology requires both fast innovation and careful control. Successful leaders will not be the ones who buy every new tool, but those who build clear safety rules, manage spending carefully, and stay responsible for their automated systems. True progress in technology happens when we combine speed with total responsibility.

Mastering inner leadership

Effective leadership does not begin with managing teams, setting strategy, or optimizing processes; it starts with mastering your own mindset. To navigate complex environments, leaders must move beyond quick automatic reactions and cultivate a deep level of self-awareness. Understanding your inner sabotage Every leader carries hidden patterns that quietly influence decisions. Under intense pressure, these automatic triggers take control. We often mistake our immediate emotional impulses for logical thinking. In reality, these impulses usually stem from fear, ego, too much empathy, or a need for complete control. Recognizing that your initial reaction is rarely your best response is the foundational step toward true authority. When you stop acting on instinct alone, you gain the clarity required to lead effectively. Thinking in loops and balancing opposites When pressure mounts, standard linear thinking pushes leaders toward rapid, binary choices: problem versus solution, yes versus no. Real growth happens when we adopt continuous loop thinking, recognizing that opposing forces exist together and can balance each other out. Instead of fighting difficult emotions or impulses, effective leaders invite their natural counterparts to restore harmony:Anger and forgiveness: Uncontrolled anger drains energy, whereas choosing forgiveness restores focus, reduces conflict, and creates emotional clarity. Pride and humility: An inflated ego creates organizational blind spots, while conscious humility keeps leaders grounded and open to learning. Jealousy and self-worth: Comparing performance to others breeds insecurity, but leaning into core values builds authentic confidence. Greed and generosity: The urge to hoard control or credit weakens trust, while generosity creates shared success and stronger teams.The power of paradoxical action Understanding internal dynamics is important, but true leadership mastery shows up in your actions under pressure. Leaders often fall into predictable behavioral traps driven by immediate instincts. Breaking these habits requires practicing paradoxical action: stepping out when your instinct tells you to step in, and stepping in when your instinct tells you to step out. When pride or frustration urges you to intervene immediately, dominate a situation, or enforce total control, that is your signal to step out, observe, and create space. Conversely, when uncertainty or discomfort makes you want to avoid a crucial conversation or delay a tough decision, that is your precise cue to step in and lead. Building long-term emotional agility Self-mastery is not a one-time decision; it is a continuous daily habit. By observing your reactions without judgment, you create a vital pause between emotion and action. Over time, this deliberate practice transforms leadership from a series of stressful stress-responses into a calm, intentional art. Closing thoughts Great leaders are not defined by their initial emotional impulses, but by how they choose to respond to them. By breaking automatic patterns and balancing internal forces, you unlock genuine emotional agility and strong personal authority. True leadership begins when you master the courage to step back from reaction and step into responsibility.

Stop wasting time on the scenic route to success

A manager once gave me a long speech about how success is a slow journey. He used the metaphor of a road trip: driving from Amsterdam through Cologne, relaxing in Austria, enjoying good food, and eventually reaching Rome. He told me that every leader needs to enjoy the ride. My response was simple: "If the goal is to enjoy a road trip, that makes sense. But if the goal is to get to Rome as fast as possible, I am going to Schiphol Airport to catch a plane. I can eat good food and relax when I get there." Too often, I hear leaders say that things "just take time." But every leader should ask themselves an honest question: is this really taking time, or are you just letting time pass? The trap of enjoying the journey too much There are many managers and directors who make a comfortable living taking the slow road. They love the discussions, the endless process, and the feeling of moving forward without the pressure of actual results. They are happy, well-paid, and comfortable. However, using "the journey" as an excuse often hides a lack of ambition or execution. When leaders focus too much on the process, they confuse activity with achievement. Enjoying the ride is fine, but as a leader, your primary responsibility is still to reach the destination. From zero to hero in three years I know how powerful human potential is when you combine a clear goal with discipline. Years ago, after several frustrating client conversations, I decided to leave service management and move into presales and architecture. At that point, I had never even opened the Azure portal. Instead of taking years to figure it out slowly, I set a clear target. Every evening, I studied in my attic room. I stayed curious, learned relentlessly, and built a network of experts who were willing to help me. In less than three years, I went from knowing nothing about Azure to becoming a Microsoft MVP and a senior solutions architect. It happened because I refused to accept anything less than my target. I did not wait for time to pass; I made time work for me. Taking control of your health with the same discipline I applied this exact same mindset when my health was at risk. My children wanted me to stop smoking, and after suffering a second collapsed lung before a major operation, I knew I had to make a drastic change. I stopped smoking completely. Today, I train in the gym four days a week, play padel with friends, eat healthy, avoid weekday alcohol, and deal with stress immediately instead of keeping it in my body. I prioritized myself so that I could be strong enough to support others. Once again, it was not about waiting for a slow transformation. It was not about making small, simple changes. It was about making a firm decision and following it up with daily discipline. Most people underestimate their own power Most leaders and teams severely underestimate what they can achieve. Although they overestimate what you can achieve in a few weeks, they underestimate what discipline can do for you in a few months. Consistency is key. Most leaders think big changes require endless time, so they move at a comfortable pace. But with real ambition, clear focus, and relentless discipline, you can achieve in months what takes others years. It is completely fine if some people prefer the long, scenic route. But you do not have to slow down for them. Set your goal, board the plane, and leave the slow movers behind. You'll meet them in Rome later. Closing thoughts Success is not an accident, and time is not an excuse. While others spend years talking about the journey, you have the power to define your destination and fly straight to it. Focus on what you want, build the discipline to get it, and never let comfortable people dictate your pace. True leadership is not about enjoying a slow ride, but about having the discipline to reach your destination at your own pace.

Why leaders shouldn't give weight to every battle

As a leader, you are constantly surrounded by information, conflicts, opinions, and unexpected events. It feels natural to address everything that lands on your plate. However, there is a fundamental rule in leadership that many overlook: your reaction creates reality. When you choose to respond to a situation, you publicly give it weight. You acknowledge that it is real, important, and worthy of attention. But what happens when you react to the wrong things? Understanding when to step into the ring and when to pretend you didn't see a thing is one of the most critical skills a leader can master. The hidden danger of acknowledging everything It is tempting to believe that a good leader handles every problem directly. But acknowledging every minor conflict, provocation, or mistake can backfire quickly. When you validate every issue by responding to it, two things happen:You give up your power: If you constantly react to what others do or say, you let them set your agenda. You become reactive instead of strategic. You risk looking weak or submissive: Formally acknowledging minor politics or small attacks can make you look defensive. It shows that those small things can easily disturb you.If you react to every small distraction, you erode your own authority and mandate. You waste precious energy on noise instead of focusing on long-term impact. When to "play dumb" Sometimes, the most powerful response is no response at all. In management, choosing not to see or hear something—turning a blind eye—can be a strong tactical move.It starves negative energy: Small drama and minor provocations rely on oxygen. If you don't give them attention, they usually fade away on their own. It preserves focus: Your team watches what you pay attention to. If you focus on small details, they will too. If you ignore the noise, they stay focused on the real work. It maintains your position: By ignoring trivial issues, you signal that certain low-level behavior is simply beneath your level of engagement.Act or ignore? Before you jump into action, ask yourself these three filtering questions: 1. Does this threaten our core values or strategic goals? If a situation directly harms team safety, ethics, or main targets, you must act firmly and immediately. Leaving these issues unaddressed damages your credibility. 2. Am I reacting out of ego or true necessity? If someone makes a light remark or questions your stance, ask yourself if your ego is just feeling hurt. If there is no real impact on the business, let it go. 3. Will my reaction solve the problem or just amplify it? Sometimes, bringing an issue into the spotlight creates a bigger crisis than the original problem. If acknowledging an event makes your position weaker or subordinate, step back. Protecting your mandate and authority Leadership is not about fighting every battle; it is about choosing which battles are worth winning. When you are selective with your energy, your team learns that when you do speak or act, it truly matters. By refusing to acknowledge small, distracting realities, you protect your authority and stay in control of the narrative. Closing Thoughts Mastering the balance between action and silence takes practice. Acknowledge what builds your team and advances your mission. Ignore the noise that drags you into petty politics. Your authority does not come from controlling every detail, but from directing your focus toward what truly lasts. True authority is not shown by responding to everything, but by choosing what truly deserves your energy.

Why saying 'no' is the only sustainable choice

Many operational leaders recognize this scenario: you return from vacation and discover that important decisions were made informally over coffee. Official rules were ignored, and there is no proper handover. Suddenly, an urgent executive presentation lands on your desk with a 48-hour deadline. Your first instinct is likely to work overtime and clean up the mess. It feels helpful, useful, and necessary. However, stepping in to fix everything is the worst thing you can do. Leadership expert Bas Kodden explains in his book The Devil Inside that you end up sabotaging yourself and your organization. When you solve problems caused by poor leadership, you hide the real damage of broken agreements and keep the chaos alive. To build a healthy organization, you must face the truth: you have to stop helping. The trap of self-sabotage Why is it so hard to say "no"? Why is our default reaction always a stressed "yes"? It comes down to internal "saboteurs" or emotional triggers:Fear: Fear of conflict, fear of appearing unhelpful, or fear that everything will fall apart if you do not step in. Empathy: Excessive sympathy for desperate colleagues, which causes you to take on their pressure and stress. Ego: The desire to be the hero who saves the day, or the fear of feeling guilty.Because of these triggers, we constantly compensate for broken processes. True leadership starts with self-leadership: leading yourself first. You need to reflect on these emotional traps and stop making excuses for poor planning. Why "no" is the most sustainable choice Saying "no" to artificial urgency is not selfish or unhelpful. It is the most sustainable choice for your team and organization. When you decline an unplanned request, three positive things happen:The problem stays with the owner: The person who ignored rules or failed to plan feels the direct consequences, which encourages better behavior next time. You protect your team: You save your team's energy and capacity for planned operational goals. Governance is restored: Declining informal requests forces managers to use official decision-making channels.7 Rules for operational boundaries Saying "no" requires self-control. Use these seven practical rules to evaluate last-minute requests:No goal means "no": If the request does not directly support agreed goals, it is not a priority. Urgent is not always important: Someone else's panic usually means poor planning. Do not make it your problem. Look at hidden costs: Every extra task takes time. Ask yourself: Which important goal must I sacrifice for this? Saying "yes" to chaos means saying "no" to strategy: Time is limited. Last-minute work always hurts the quality of your core duties. Take time to pause: Stop reacting automatically. Take a moment to think before giving a clear answer. Let your calendar decide: If the task does not fit into your schedule, the calendar makes the decision for you. Demand context first: Ask for the business objective and proper approval. Often, you will find the request was not necessary after all.Closing thoughts An organization cannot grow on heroic acts, overtime, and personal favors. Sustainable success comes from clear agreements, structured roles, and respect for operational boundaries. Once you learn to manage fear, ego, and excessive empathy, you realize that saying "no" is not a rejection—it is professional respect. It forces the organization to mature and protect its own systems. Stop helping. Start protecting the system. Saying "no" to artificial chaos is the most sustainable choice you can make.

Why great leadership is about agreements, not expectations

Every morning, millions of professionals wake up and unconsciously ask themselves the exact same question: “What is expected of me today?” They spend the rest of their day trying to satisfy an endless list of imagined demands. What does my boss expect? What does my partner expect? What do my children expect? Trying to guess and fulfill everyone’s hidden expectations is an impossible task. It creates a painful cycle of stress and frustration. Instead of growing into who they could truly be, people get trapped in a passive routine. Unspoken expectations never bring clarity; they only grow bigger, heavier, and more exhausting over time. Why expectations create immature relationships To understand why expectations fail in business, we can look at psychologist Eric Berne’s famous theory of Transactional Analysis. Berne explained that human interactions usually fall into specific roles: Parent, Child, or Adult. Expectation Culture: [Parent Leader] ⟷ [Child Employee] (Control & Frustration) Agreement Culture: [Adult Leader] ⟷ [Adult Employee] (Equality & Ownership)When management relies on vague expectations, it creates an unhealthy Parent-Child dynamic:The Manager acts as the Parent: Trying to micro-manage behaviors, soften every conflict, or act like a caretaker to be liked by everyone. The Employee acts as the Child: Waiting to be told what to do, feeling patronized, and complaining about unclear workload.Many managers make the mistake of practicing "amateur psychotherapy." They focus on controlling the personalities and emotions of their team members rather than building direct working relationships. This caretaking behavior is often just a way to avoid uncomfortable conversations. Real leadership is not about managing feelings; it is about treating people as equals who can take responsibility for their promises. Victims wait, owners agree In his book Conscious Business, leadership expert Fred Kofman highlights the fundamental difference between a Victim mindset and an Owner mindset. Expectations are, by definition, completely passive. When you expect something, you sit back in a false sense of safety, silently hoping someone else will act.The Victim Mindset: Victims prefer expectations because expectations require no courage. A stressed employee sits at their desk silently worrying: "Does my manager really expect this report by Friday? That's impossible, I'm already so overworked!" Instead of speaking up, the victim stays silent, misses the deadline, and blames the system. The Owner Mindset: Owners hate vague expectations. They know that promises require action, clarity, and bold communication. An owner steps forward, opens a direct dialogue, and creates a firm agreement: "I can deliver section A by Friday at 3 PM, but to do that, we need to push project B to next Tuesday. Do we agree?"Making an agreement requires real bravery. You must make clear promises, set measurable goals, and accept total responsibility for the outcome. How to build an agreement-driven workplace Replacing expectations with clear commitments instantly cleans up team communication. When two adults make a voluntary agreement, traditional micro-management becomes obsolete. The leader's role shifts simply to monitoring what was agreed upon. Key Elements of Effective Agreements:Explicit Deadlines and Numbers: Vague statements like "finish this soon" must be replaced with "delivered by Thursday at 12:00 PM." Mutual Input: Agreements are made together. Both parties must freely say "yes" or negotiate better terms before committing. Direct Problem-Solving: When an agreement is broken, you do not judge the person's character; you discuss the facts of the broken promise directly and respectfully.Closing thoughts Leadership is not about carrying the weight of everyone's emotions or expecting people to read your mind. It takes courage to stop guessing, abandon false safety, and start making clear, equal commitments with your team. When you replace passive expectations with active agreements, you build a culture of high performance, deep trust, and mutual respect. True leadership is not about managing personalities or setting vague expectations; it is about making clear agreements as equals and holding each other accountable.

The AI productivity paradox: Why more tools aren't saving us time

Artificial intelligence has spread faster than almost any other technology in human history. Today, workers across every industry use generative AI daily. They use it for writing reports, designing presentations, writing software, and summarizing long meeting notes. Major software companies have embedded AI directly into our email clients, office suites, and project dashboards. On paper, this should save us hours of work every week. Yet, if you look at modern business statistics, overall productivity has barely moved. Many business leaders are left asking the same frustrating question: If everyone is using AI, why is work not getting done any faster? This situation is not actually new. It is a modern version of the famous "productivity paradox" observed by economist Robert Solow in the 1980s. Back then, he noted that computers were visible everywhere except in the economic productivity numbers. Today, AI faces the exact same challenge. Why AI saves minutes, not whole processes The main reason for this productivity gap is simple: most people use AI to speed up small, isolated tasks rather than fixing full workflows. For example, a customer service agent might use AI to draft a quick reply to an email. The drafting takes five seconds instead of five minutes. However, that message still needs manual review, manager approvals, and input into old database systems. The bottleneck simply moves to another part of the process. In addition, several hidden time-wasters prevent AI from delivering its full potential:The Double-Checking Burden: AI outputs are rarely perfect on the first try. Employees end up spending significant time checking facts, correcting hallucinations, and editing formatting. Tool Overload: Organizations often use multiple specialized AI tools at the same time, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney, and GitHub Copilot. Deciding which tool to use and switching between them creates mental fatigue. The "More Content" Trap: Because creating documents and emails has become easier, companies generate much more of them. This creates a massive ocean of reports and emails that other employees must spend time reading. Constant Context Switching: Workers constantly jump between Slack messages, email, AI chats, and project boards, which drains mental energy throughout the day.What history teaches us about real efficiency MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson points out that groundbreaking technologies rarely boost productivity immediately. He compares the current adoption of AI to the arrival of electricity in factories during the late 19th century. When factory owners first replaced steam engines with electric motors, productivity did not go up right away. It was only when they completely redesigned factory layouts and assembly lines around electricity that output exploded. Old Approach: [Standard Process] + [Add AI Tool] = Minimal Time Saved New Approach: [Redesigned Process Built for AI] = Massive EfficiencySimilarly, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick emphasizes that AI works best as a collaborative partner rather than a basic tool. Companies that see massive productivity gains do not just give their workers an AI login; they fundamentally rethink how work gets done. Real-world example: Support & software developmentCustomer Support: Instead of using AI just to suggest email templates, leading companies let AI agents sort tickets, handle routine queries autonomously, and route complex edge cases directly to human experts. Software Engineering: Rather than using AI merely to write single lines of code, teams integrate AI across the whole cycle—from initial architecture planning and automated unit testing to security checks and documentation.Looking ahead: The shift to autonomous agents We are currently moving from simple AI assistants toward autonomous AI agents. New multimodal agentic systems—like Alibaba’s Qwen 3.7 Plus—can look at user interfaces, click buttons, navigate websites, and complete multi-step tasks across different software without constant human prompting. As these tools mature and become affordable to deploy, the central question for businesses will change. It will no longer be "Should we use AI?" but rather "How must we redesign our work to let AI perform whole tasks effectively?" Closing Thoughts Having access to the most powerful AI tools in the world will not automatically make your team faster or smarter. Technology only provides the raw capability; real success depends on how thoughtfully you restructure your daily habits, workflows, and organizational structures to support it. True productivity in the AI era is not about doing old tasks faster. It is about designing completely new ways of working.

Stop using engineers as shock absorbers

Look at almost any modern tech job advertisement today, and you’ll see the exact same list of benefits: “Flexible hybrid work, autonomous culture, latest hardware, and regular team events.” Yet, despite these perks, tech companies worldwide face a persistent crisis: their highest-performing senior engineers and tech leads are silently walking out the door. Industry data confirms this gap. According to global developer experience benchmarks, over 65% of senior engineering turnover is driven by organizational friction and administrative noise, rather than technical difficulty or compensation. Developers do not quit because of a lack of team socials or fruit baskets. They leave when their day-to-day job becomes buffering their team against executive indecision, sitting in low-value alignment meetings, and blunting structural chaos. The "Human shock absorber" In many growing software organizations, a subtle leadership failure occurs as teams scale. When executive boards struggle to establish clear strategic boundaries or resolve cross-departmental friction, they quietly delegate that responsibility downward. They create what can only be called a Frankenstein Role: a Tech Lead or Staff Engineer who is asked to be 100% hands-on architect, 100% people coach, and 100% process firefighter. Instead of solving complex technical problems or building scalable cloud architectures, your highest-paid technical experts become human shock absorbers. They spend up to half their working week absorbing leadership noise, translating vague goals, and mediating conflicts that should have been settled at the C-level. Research on developer cognitive load shows that modern software engineers spend less than 30% of their actual workday writing code or designing software. The remaining time is consumed by context-switching, status updates, and navigating organizational friction. The real math behind senior engineering turnover When a burned-out senior engineer or lead resigns from a bloated role, the financial damage on the P&L statement is far larger than most executives realize. The true total cost of losing a key technical figure can be broken down using standard engineering talent benchmarks:Cost Category Impact Level DescriptionDirect Replacement Costs Significant Agency fees, interviewing hours, sign-on packages, and competitive market salaries for senior talent.Onboarding & Ramp-Up Substantial Lost productivity during the 6 to 9 months it takes a new senior engineer to master a complex codebase.Contagion Effect (Domino Turnover) High Risk McKinsey research shows that when a respected lead quits, team members are up to 35% more likely to leave within 6 months due to increased workload and chaos.Roadmap & Market Delay Severe Slid delivery dates, delayed feature releases, and missed market opportunities.Plaguing your organization with high turnover isn't a recruitment issue—it is a direct leadership leak. You can't code out of broken governance With the rapid adoption of AI coding assistants, agentic dev-tools, and automated testing suites across engineering teams, leadership teams often assume tech investments will solve their productivity bottlenecks. However, recent studies on AI engineering adoption highlight a clear contradiction: While AI assistant tools improve individual line-of-code generation by 15% to 20%, total organizational delivery velocity in chaotic companies improves by less than 3%.Why? Because generating code was never the primary bottleneck. If your decision-making process is slow, your boundaries are blurry, and your teams are misaligned, AI tools simply help your developers build the wrong things faster. Buying AI licenses to compensate for poor organizational design is one of the most expensive escape routes on an IT balance sheet. You cannot solve a structural leadership deficit with a software subscription. How to sanitize your engineering leadership Restoring execution speed and retaining top-tier engineering talent requires structural clarity at the top. You don't need another soft skills workshop, agile transformation, or internal culture initiative. You need clean leadership architecture: 1. Keep C-suite accountabilities at C-level Executives must set firm strategic priorities, establish binary boundaries, and clean up inter-departmental politics. Never ask a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager to resolve organizational friction without giving them explicit executive authority. 2. Ruthlessly separate technical roles from line management Stop expecting senior engineers to be elite software architects and full-time people managers simultaneously. Create clear, parallel career tracks:Individual Contributor (IC) Track: Focused 100% on architecture, technical execution, and code quality. Engineering Management Track: Focused on people development, resource allocation, and team enablement.3. Measure friction, not just output Instead of tracking raw output or ticket velocity, measure organizational friction:How many hours a week do senior leads spend in alignment meetings? How often do decisions made at the top get reopened three weeks later? How long does it take to get a clear 'yes' or 'no' on technical decisions?Closing thought Senior A-players in software engineering do not leave companies because the work is hard. They leave when the work is made unnecessarily chaotic by a lack of leadership structure. The next significant improvement to your bottom line and product delivery won't come from a new framework, a recruitment drive, or another AI tool. It will come from eliminating the hidden operational friction that is draining your lead engineers today. Ask yourself: Is your executive team providing clear boundaries for your engineers to build great products, or are you using them as human shock absorbers for organizational noise?

The ungoverned cloud: Why cloud strategies fail at execution.

In boardrooms across Europe, cloud strategy is undergoing a harsh reality check. For years, the narrative was centered on speed and migration. Today, executive teams face a very different set of challenges: unpredictable cloud expenditure, strict regulatory mandates (NIS2, BIO2, EU AI Act), and diffuse operational accountability. When external audits reveal that two-thirds of cloud environments lack proper control, the executive reflex is predictable: install a heavy Governance Board, write 80-page policy manuals, and require manual sign-offs for every change. This approach fails every time. It creates shadow IT, paralyzes delivery teams, and fails to eliminate actual risk. Personally, I view cloud governance not as a bureaucratic brake, but as an operational operating system. True governance provides clear guardrails, automated compliance, and organizational clarity—allowing engineering teams to move fast safely. To achieve this, organizations must move away from theoretical policies and implement a functional Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).The 5 pillars of cloud governance Before structuring your team, you must define what cloud governance actually encompasses. Mature cloud governance covers five distinct operational domain pillars:Pillar 1: Financial Management (FinOps)Shifting from static annual IT budgets to dynamic unit economics, continuous cost allocation, and real-time optimization.Pillar 2: Security & Regulatory Compliance (NIS2 / BIO2)Enforcing baseline controls aligned with NIS2, BIO2, ISO 27001, and GDPR across all cloud landing zones.Pillar 3: Automation & Platform EngineeringEliminating manual infrastructure configuration through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and automated developer platforms.Pillar 4: Identity & Data Control (Zero Trust)Implementing Zero Trust architecture, strict least-privilege principles, and explicit data boundaries.Pillar 5: AI & Emerging Tech Governance (ISO/IEC 42001)Setting parameters for responsible AI use under the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001, preventing unmanaged shadow-AI implementations.What is expected of C-level leadership? Cloud governance cannot be delegated away to IT or a compliance team. Real governance requires active C-level involvement, clear sponsorship, and strategic alignment. Here is what is explicitly expected of executive leadership across each core domain:C-Level Role Core Executive Expectation & Operational ResponsibilityChief Executive Officer (CEO) & Board Treat Cloud Governance as Risk Management: Recognize that cloud failure, data breaches, and non-compliance carry direct board liability under NIS2. Establish risk appetite boundaries and mandate cross-functional governance across the company.Chief Operating Officer (COO) Align the Operating Model & CCoE Mandate: Provide the CCoE with formal authority to set organizational standards. Break down functional silos between IT, Security, and Business units, ensuring that delivery speed never bypasses compliance.Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Enforce Financial Accountability (FinOps): Shift financial oversight from traditional CapEx IT depreciation to dynamic OpEx management. Demand unit-cost transparency and require Business/Product Owners to account for cloud consumption within their P&L.Chief Information / Technology Officer (CIO/CTO) Drive Modern Architecture & Enablement: Transition engineering teams away from manual ticketing towards self-service platforms (IDPs). Enforce "Policy as Code" and ensure cloud infrastructure aligns with architecture goals.Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Automate Guardrails Over Gatekeeping: Move from reactive security reviews to proactive, automated policy enforcement. Integrate NIS2, ISO 27001, and AI compliance directly into deployment pipelines.Key Leadership Takeaway: Executive leadership is not expected to manage cloud settings or review code. Leadership is expected to set parameters, grant mandate, enforce accountability, and model the culture required for operational discipline.Enablement, not control The central execution engine of cloud governance is the Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE). Too many companies misinterpret the CCoE as an architectural approval committee that meets every Thursday to review tickets. That is the quickest way to kill organizational momentum. Gatekeeper vs. EnablementAnti-Pattern: The Gatekeeper CCoE Modern Pattern: The Enablement CCoEManually reviews and approves architectural change requests. Builds automated guardrails and self-service templates.Writes static policy PDFs that engineers rarely read. Embeds policy directly into deployment pipelines (Policy as Code).Acts as a centralized bottleneck for cloud adoption. Functions as an internal product team serving delivery teams.Measures success by policy compliance and audit logs. Measures success by engineering velocity, security, and cost efficiency.Structure & core roles A successful CCoE is a lean, cross-functional team that brings together key domains. It does not replace engineering teams; it empowers them.Executive Sponsor (COO / VP Operations): Secures budget, aligns governance with corporate P&L goals, and resolves organizational friction between business units. Cloud Lead / Architect: Defines overall multi-cloud strategy, Landing Zone standards, and reference architectures. Cloud Security & Risk Specialist: Translates regulatory requirements (NIS2, ISO 27001, EU AI Act) into actionable security policies and automated checks. Platform Lead / Software Architect: Drives Platform Engineering, building Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) and self-service "Golden Paths". FinOps Practitioner: Analyzes cloud consumption data, establishes unit-cost metrics, and works directly with product owners on cost accountability.Practical implementation: A 4-phase roadmap Implementing cloud governance across an organization requires a phased, practical approach. Phase 1: Establish the charter & landing zone architectureDefine the CCoE Charter: Formally declare the team's purpose, scope, and mandate across the business. Build Landing Zones: Create standard multi-account cloud structures (e.g., AWS Organizations or Azure Management Groups). Isolate workloads by environment (Dev, Test, Prod) and business unit. Implement Centralized Logging: Ensure audit trails, identity logs, and network traffic are automatically ingested into a central SIEM system from day one.Phase 2: Automate guardrails (Policy-as-Code)Define Preventive & Detective Controls: Use native cloud policies (e.g., Azure Policy, AWS Service Control Policies) to enforce mandatory constraints: Preventative: Block public S3 buckets or unencrypted storage volumes from ever being created. Detective: Automatically flag and alert security teams when a resource drifts from baseline configuration.Tagging Strategy Enforcement: Mandate metadata tags (Owner, CostCenter, Environment, DataClassification) at deployment time. If a resource lacks tags, auto-remediate or reject the build.Phase 3: Platform engineering & self-service (Golden Paths)Build the Internal Developer Platform (IDP): Provide engineering teams with a self-service portal (e.g., Backstage) to provision compliant infrastructure in minutes. Publish Golden Paths: Pre-package approved architectures (e.g., secure microservice deployment, compliant SQL cluster) that include security, monitoring, and backups by default. Community of Practice: Establish cloud guilds to train product teams, share best practices, and accelerate internal skills development.Phase 4: FinOps maturity & Responsible AI governanceShift-Left Cost Management: Integrate cost-estimation tools into CI/CD pipelines so developers see the estimated monthly bill before merging code. Establish AI Guardrails: Deploy private API endpoints for Generative AI. Ensure corporate data is isolated and protected under strict tenant boundaries. Continuous Executive Dashboards: Provide board-level visibility into compliance posture, operational risks, and cloud cost efficiency.What the board needs to see To ensure your CCoE is delivering real value, track concrete operational metrics rather than subjective milestones:Metric Target / Good Practice Executive FocusLanding Zone Coverage > 95% of workloads in governed Landing Zones Risk & ComplianceUntagged Cloud Resources < 2% of total cloud assets Financial AccountabilityPolicy Drift MTTR < 4 hours to remediate non-compliant resources NIS2 / Security PostureGolden Path Adoption > 80% of new microservices deployed via IDP Velocity & StandardizationCloud Unit Cost Decreasing cost per business transaction P&L & ScalabilityClosing thoughts Solving cloud governance is not a technical problem; it is an organizational design challenge. Relying on manual audits, reactive firefighting, and bureaucratic approvals inevitably leads to higher costs and increased business risk. True operational leadership means building a system where compliance, security, and cost control are automated and frictionless. By establishing a modern Cloud Center of Excellence, embedding Policy as Code, and adopting Platform Engineering, executive teams can bridge the gap between high-level strategy and ground-level execution. When governance is built directly into your operating model, compliance stops being a burden—it becomes a competitive advantage that enables rapid, resilient, and profitable growth.

Rolf Schutten
13 Aug, 2026

From waiting too long to moving ahead: Why Cbw and AI governance need one clear plan.

In the Netherlands, waiting until the very last moment to deal with new rules is very common. For a long time, the standard approach to IT security was simple: "They won't check us yet," or "Let's wait and see what others do." With the European NIS2 directive and the new Dutch cybersecurity law — the Cyberbeveiligingswet (Cbw) — that time is over. The laws are active, supervision is starting, and the final responsibility now sits directly with company directors and executive management. Viewing the Cbw as just a burden or a boring checklist is a mistake. At the same time, the EU AI Act and frameworks like ISO 42001 are coming at us fast. Treating these as completely separate projects will waste budget and burn out your team. The smartest move is to stop waiting and combine IT security and AI governance into one clear strategy. The Cyberbeveiligingswet (Cbw): Why waiting is no longer an option The goal of NIS2 and the Cbw is simple: raise the basic level of digital security across Europe. The old rules mostly applied to traditional vital sectors like energy and water. The new Cbw applies to many more organizations. Medium and large companies in logistics, food, chemistry, digital services, and IT providers (MSPs and MSSPs) now fall under the law. Because of this, supply chain security becomes a shared legal responsibility. Two core parts of the Cbw change how companies must operate:Duty of Care & Fast Reporting: Companies must prove they take the right technical and organizational security steps. If a major incident happens, strict rules apply: a first warning must be sent to regulators within 24 hours. Personal Board Responsibility & Mandatory Training: Directors can now be held personally responsible if they ignore basic security rules. On top of that, executives are legally required to take regular training to understand cyber risks. Leaving IT security completely to the IT department without director oversight is no longer allowed by law.BIO2 becomes law: Your foundation is already there For Dutch government bodies and their IT suppliers, an important change is happening. The Baseline Informatiebeveiliging Overheid (BIO2) is moving from a voluntary framework to a binding law under the Cyberbeveiligingsbesluit. While many organizations worry about this, the truth is that BIO2 gives you a solid foundation you might already own. It builds on well-known global standards:ISO/IEC 27001: The process foundation for security management (ISMS). It sets up risk checks, policies, and continuous improvement. CIS Controls: The practical, technical checklist. Where ISO tells you what goals to reach, CIS Controls give you a concrete list of actions (device management, multi-factor authentication, logging, and endpoint protection).If your organization already works with ISO 27001 or BIO2, you already cover most of the technical requirements of the Cbw. The AI side: Don't build another separate project At the same time, company boards are hearing about the EU AI Act and ISO 42001 (the standard for Artificial Intelligence management). The usual reaction is to push AI away: "Let's finish the Cbw project first. We will worry about AI in a few years." This is a missed opportunity. If you compare BIO2 and ISO 27001 with ISO 42001, you see something interesting: a company running a good ISO 27001 or BIO2 setup already covers 70% to 80% of what ISO 42001 requires. That is because AI management uses the exact same basics as normal IT security: risk checks, data rules, access management, supplier controls, and incident handling. You do not need to build a whole new management system. The specific "AI gap" The remaining 20% to 30% gap is very specific:AI Ethics & Fairness: Making sure algorithms work fairly without discrimination. Explanation & Human Control: Understanding how an AI tool reaches a decision and keeping a human in control (human-in-the-loop). Impact on People: Checking how the AI tool affects employees, customers, and privacy. AI Lifecycle Management: Checking data quality and monitoring if the AI model changes over time (data drift). AI Incident Handling: Preparing for new threats like prompt injection or accidental data leaks through AI tools.These extra steps are not a new system; they are just a direct addition to your current IT security setup. One integrated plan: Build it once The AI Act timeline moves forward regardless of your Cbw deadlines. Companies that treat these things as three separate projects — one for Cbw, one for ISO 27001, and one for AI — will pay three times as much for the same result. The practical order to follow is: BIO2 / ISO 27001 Foundation ➡️ CIS Controls (Technical Setup) ➡️ ISO 42001 (AI Extension) Practical steps to takeCombine Risk Checks: Add AI tools and algorithms directly to your existing risk lists in your security management system. Use Clear Technical Rules: Use CIS Controls to secure your cloud environments (like Microsoft Azure) to meet the requirements for both Cbw and ISO standards. Extend Your Security Policies: Add the specific ISO 42001 points for AI ethics and control directly into your daily processes. Train the Board: Combine the required Cbw training for directors with a practical update on AI risks and opportunities.Closing thoughts Putting off rules and regulations until the last minute no longer works. The Cyberbeveiligingswet, mandatory BIO2 rules, and the EU AI Act mean that IT security and AI are now direct topics for company leadership. Instead of running separate compliance projects, combining these standards into one clear plan turns a legal obligation into a practical advantage. You protect directors from liability, remain a trustworthy partner in your supply chain, and build a safe foundation to use AI effectively in your business.

Why AI pilots stall on operational reality (and how to build real value)

Almost every organization is investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence. Budgets are expanding, executive teams are eager, and press releases about new AI pilots appear daily. Yet behind boardroom doors, the reality is far more frustrating. According to a global CEO survey by Bain & Company, 80% of chief executives are unhappy with the progress of their AI programs. Even more telling, 85% report that their organizations have failed to turn AI experiments into lasting, structural change. Research from Gartner shows a similar picture: only 28% of AI projects in infrastructure and operations fully succeed and meet their expected return on investment (ROI). Why are so many organizations getting stuck? Why do promising AI experiments fail the moment they touch day-to-day operations? In my work advising and leading IT service organizations—the companies I work with—I see this pattern repeatedly. The problem is rarely the underlying AI technology or the models themselves. The problem is that companies are trying to plug modern AI into outdated, fragmented, and disorganized operational foundations. The "humanoid theater" and the layoff illusion To understand why AI transformations stall, we must first look at where companies spend their energy. Many organizations get distracted by what can be called "humanoid theater"—flashy demonstrations of chatbots, novel tools, or complex dashboards that look impressive in demos but fail to improve the bottom line. At the same time, we see a troubling trend across the technology sector. Over 160,000 jobs have been cut across tech companies in recent months. Wall Street often rewards leaders who label these mass layoffs as an "AI efficiency strategy." But cutting headcount without redesigning your operational workflows is not an AI strategy; it is simply reducing capacity while keeping the same inefficient processes. Real value is not created by buying a shiny new software tool or cutting workforce numbers. It is created by doing the hard, complex work: integrating AI deeply into legacy IT systems, unifying fragmented data sources, and reshaping daily workflows. This explains why established IT integrators and software providers are seeing strong growth. They solve the difficult integration challenges that prevent most companies from scaling. Fix the process before adding the technology A major misconception among business leaders is that deploying new technology automatically drives adoption and business results. If your underlying business processes are confusing, inconsistent, or broken, adding AI will only automate that confusion at higher speed. As an executive, you often need to act as the organization's traffic light. Turning lights green for good ideas is easy, but your most critical decisions are the red lights: stopping teams from wasting time, money, and energy on the wrong initiatives. Before layering AI into your business, you must build a strong operational foundation:Standardize core workflows: Simplify business processes and remove unnecessary manual handoffs between teams. Clean and organize data: AI outputs depend directly on data quality; un-silo your systems and establish clear data ownership. Remove daily friction: Focus first on administrative tasks and repetitive work that slow down your employees.In a recent operational transformation, standardizing and consolidating service management processes reduced support ticket volumes by 30% on its own. Only after that clean operational foundation was established did adding automation and AI capabilities bring total ticket reductions close to 70%. The primary gain came from operational discipline; technology simply accelerated the result. [TRADITIONAL APPROACH] Messy Workflows + AI Deployment = Automated Chaos & High Failure Rate[OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE APPROACH] Process Standardization -> Clean Data & Governance -> Targeted AI Layer = Scalable P&L ValueFrom assistants to autonomous agents: The governance gap The AI landscape is shifting rapidly from passive tools (like a chatbot summarizing a document) to Agentic AI—autonomous software agents that can execute tasks, change system configurations, update tickets, and make decisions independently. This evolution fundamentally changes an organization's risk profile. An employee typing an awkward prompt into a chat interface is a minor issue. An autonomous AI agent carrying full employee access rights and executing dozens of automated system actions is a major operational risk. Boardrooms and executive teams must address new governance questions:Identity: Who or what is authenticated when an AI agent acts on behalf of an employee? Authorization: What specific system boundaries and guardrails limit the agent's actions? Accountability: Who is responsible when an autonomous agent makes an incorrect decision?Without clear governance, companies risk creating a dangerous new form of shadow IT. Furthermore, as software takes over operational execution, traditional service models built purely on billable hours will face severe pressure. Successful companies will build AI-by-design operating models where software handles repetitive execution, allowing human teams to focus on strategy, quality, and high-value customer relationships. Measure business impact, not activity AI programs lose momentum when leadership measures activity instead of real outcomes. The P&L statement does not care how many Copilot licenses you have assigned or how many pilots you have launched. To build sustainable value, executives must track hard operational indicators:Reductions in service turnaround times and cycle times. Improvements in gross margin and unit economics. Reductions in error rates and operational incidents. Scalability—handling higher business volumes without increasing headcount proportionally.Scaling technology requires active change management and leadership. Avoid broad, blanket rollouts that confuse employees. Instead, deploy capabilities in phases, focus on specific team cohorts, and clearly demonstrate how the tools improve daily work. Building scalable value Artificial Intelligence is a powerful lever, but a lever only works if it rests on a solid fulcrum. Companies do not fail with AI because they lack advanced algorithms. They fail because they lack execution discipline, clear governance, and standardized processes. The market leaders of tomorrow will not be the companies running the most AI pilots, but those that build an operational foundation capable of turning technology into predictable, scalable performance. Closing thought Technology will not fix a broken operational model, but leaders who build disciplined, adaptable organizations will use AI to widen their competitive advantage rapidly. The goal of AI transformation is not to turn managers into programmers or replace human judgment with automated software. It is about creating the operational clarity, governance, and culture needed for people and technology to perform at their best together. Stop looking for quick AI wins. Start building the operational foundation that turns technology into real value.

Accountability begins where blame ends

One of the biggest differences I've observed between average managers and exceptional leaders has nothing to do with intelligence. Or experience. Or technical expertise. It has everything to do with a simple question: "From which position do I choose to act?" Do I wait until circumstances improve? Or do I accept responsibility for influencing the outcome? That distinction sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything. Waiting is often a decision disguised as patience Recently I witnessed an interesting situation. One of the companies within our group had entered into a strategic partnership with another IT company several years ago. Over time, that partner was acquired by a competing investment group. Suddenly, the partnership no longer made strategic sense. The conclusion was obvious. The partnership had to end. The company did exactly what you would expect. They evaluated alternatives. Created a longlist. Reduced it to a shortlist. Performed technical and commercial assessments. Produced a thorough recommendation. Everything was ready for the next phase. Except... Nothing happened. The recommendation was sent upwards. Everyone waited. The contract termination deadline approached. Time became increasingly valuable. And so did urgency. The conversations gradually shifted from: "How do we move this forward?" to "We're still waiting for a decision." Blame feels safe What struck me wasn't the delay itself. It was the mindset that emerged. "We already warned them." "We're still waiting." "There's nothing more we can do." None of those statements were factually incorrect. But every single one had something in common. They transferred control to someone else. And once you believe someone else owns the outcome... You also surrender your ability to influence it. Blame is strangely comfortable. Because it removes responsibility. Unfortunately, it also removes agency. Responsibility is not the same as fault One of the most valuable lessons I've ever taken is the distinction between being responsible and being guilty. Those are not the same thing. Leadership is not about accepting blame for everything. Leadership is about accepting responsibility for what happens next. That shift changes the entire conversation. Instead of asking: "Whose fault is this?" Leaders ask: "Given where we are today, what can I do?" That's an entirely different mindset. One keeps you waiting. The other gets you moving. Accountability isn't permission The company in this situation had already done almost all the hard work. They knew the preferred supplier. They understood the risks. They owned the operational relationship. They had the expertise. Yet they were waiting for permission to continue. I couldn't help wondering: What would happen if they simply behaved like owners? Not recklessly. Not ignoring governance. But proactively. Preparing implementation. Scheduling conversations. Building momentum. Reducing the time needed once formal approval arrived. Sometimes leadership means asking for permission. Sometimes it means asking for forgiveness. Knowing the difference is part of the job. Ownership is a state of mind Many people think ownership is something an organization gives you. A title. A role. A mandate. I don't believe that. Ownership is a choice. It's the decision to stop defining yourself by the constraints around you. Every leader experiences moments of frustration. Every leader encounters bureaucracy. Every leader occasionally has to wait. The question isn't whether those obstacles exist. The question is whether you allow them to determine your behavior. Owners ask: "What is still within my control?" Victims ask: "Why won't somebody else fix this?" The circumstances may be identical. The outcomes rarely are. Leaders create options One of the dangers of the victim mindset is that it gradually convinces you there are no choices left. You're waiting. You're blocked. Someone else has to decide. The world becomes smaller. Real leadership does the opposite. It expands possibilities. Not because every obstacle disappears. But because leaders instinctively search for the next move they can make. Even under pressure. Especially under pressure. Because time is both your greatest enemy... ...and often your greatest ally. Pressure creates movement. If you're willing to create it. Accountability is contagious Just like culture, accountability spreads. When leaders blame circumstances... Others blame circumstances. When leaders wait... Others wait. When leaders take ownership... Others start looking for what they can influence instead of what they can't. Organizations rarely become accountable because accountability appears in a set of company values. They become accountable because enough people consistently model that behavior. Leadership is always more visible than leaders think. Closing thought There will always be reasons why something cannot move forward. Budgets. Governance. Approvals. Dependencies. Those constraints are real. But they should never become an excuse for giving away ownership. The most effective leaders I've worked with don't spend much time asking who is responsible for the situation. They ask what they are responsible for next. Because blame looks backwards. Accountability looks forwards. And that's where leadership begins. Not when someone hands you authority. Not when circumstances become perfect. But the moment you decide: "I am responsible for what happens next."

The decision spectrum: Why unclear decision-making is slowing your team down

Most frustration in teams doesn't come from bad decisions. It comes from leaders using the wrong decision style for the problem at hand. In struggling leadership teams, you often see the same two mistakes. On one end, leaders make big choices completely on their own without asking anyone, creating anger and resistance. On the other end, they pull every small daily choice into endless meetings, turning simple tasks into slow bureaucratic debates. Good leadership is not a choice between acting like a dictator or running a democracy. It is about choosing the right approach for the right moment. To lead effectively, managers need to understand five clear ways of making decisions—and know exactly when to use each one. The 5 Modes of Making Decisions Decision theories and modern organizational models show that your authority must adapt to the situation. A strong leader clearly switches between five different modes: [ Mode 1 ] ------------> [ Mode 2 ] ------------> [ Mode 3 ] ------------> [ Mode 4 ] ------------> [ Mode 5 ] Silent Action Decide & Inform Ask for Advice Check Objections Group Decision1. Silent Action: Decide, act, and do NOT informWhen to use it: Small operational fixes or confidential personal matters. Why it matters: Flooding your team with useless updates creates unnecessary noise. If a decision has zero impact on a colleague's daily work, just make the call and keep moving.2. Unilateral Command: Decide and inform immediatelyWhen to use it: Urgent emergencies, clear expert choices, or small decisions that are easy to reverse. Why it matters: Speed is critical. When a crisis hits or you are the expert, asking for everyone's opinion is a waste of time. You make the choice, take responsibility, and inform your team right away.3. Ask for Advice: Consult experts, but keep ownershipWhen to use it: Important strategic choices where you need extra input, but you are still responsible for the outcome. Why it matters: This is where many managers get stuck. They confuse asking for advice with asking for a vote. In this mode, you tell your team: "I am making this decision, but I need your input first." You gather perspectives, but the final choice remains yours.4. Check for Objections: The Consent ModelWhen to use it: Major changes to policy or structure where hidden resistance could break execution later. Why it matters: Instead of trying to make everyone happy (which leads to weak compromises), you present a clear plan and ask: "Does anyone see a critical reason why this will not work?" You are not asking if everyone loves the plan; you are checking if anyone sees a real danger.5. Group Decision: Delegate to collective agreementWhen to use it: High-impact team goals where success depends 100% on everyone owning the plan. Why it matters: True consensus should be rare. Use it only when the entire team must own the result together. The manager steps back and becomes a facilitator, agreeing to follow whatever the group decides.Be clear about the rules upfront The secret to fast decision-making is transparency. Before you start a conversation, tell your team which mode you are using. If you call a meeting to ask for advice, but your team thinks they are gathered to vote, they will feel cheated when you make a different choice.Fake democracy causes far more damage than clear authority.When leaders hide behind fake group decisions to avoid personal responsibility, progress stops. But when leaders force decisions without checking for real objections, execution fails anyway. Closing thought Leadership is not about making every choice yourself, nor is it about dumping every problem on a committee. It is about picking the right decision style for the problem in front of you. Be crystal clear about how a decision will be made before you start the conversation. Clarity on how you decide is just as important as the decision itself.

The end of the traditional org chart: Why the future of work is AI-by-design

If you look at how most companies are adopting AI today, you will notice a strange paradox. On one hand, leadership teams are spending millions on enterprise software, Copilot licenses, and prompt engineering bootcamps. On the other hand, the actual structure of the organization remains completely untouched. We are handing exponential technology to teams that are still arranged in rigid, 20th-century hierarchies. We are using revolutionary tools to do the exact same work, just ten percent faster. That is not transformation. That is just expensive optimization. Real competitive advantage in the coming decade will not come from adopting the latest AI models. It will come from having the courage to tear down legacy operating models and build an organization that is AI-by-design. The law of inevitable automation To build a future-proof company, you have to start with a realistic premise: if a workflow can be fully automated without losing strategic quality, it eventually will be. Roy Amara, the late scientist and president of the Institute for the Future, formulated what we now know as Amara’s Law: we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Right now, many executives view AI as a glorified copywriting tool or a faster search engine. That is short-term thinking. In an AI-first operating model, routine operational execution is handed over to specialized software agents. Customer support touchpoints, routine software engineering, data ingestion, and first-line administrative workflows will be 80% automated. Not to remove humanity from business, but because autonomous agents offer a level of speed, precision, and scalability that human effort simply cannot match. The emergence of the human "Orchestrator" When execution shifts to algorithms, the role of the human employee doesn't disappear—it ascends. We are moving away from the era of the human task-executor and entering the era of the AI Orchestration Leader. Instead of managing five humans who manually crunch numbers or handle support tickets, a single professional will direct, monitor, and refine a squad of specialized autonomous agents. Wharton professor Ethan Mollick describes this as working alongside a digital "co-intelligence." In this new dynamic, the manager functions less like an administrator and more like a conductor of an orchestra. The human remains strictly in charge of three non-negotiable domains:Strategic Context: Defining the goal, setting the parameters, and telling the agents why a task matters. Ethical Guardrails: Ensuring the automated outputs align with human values, legal standards, and societal impact. Quality & Nuance: Acting as the ultimate editorial filter before decisions impact real customers or stakeholders.What an AI-by-design company actually looks like If you were to start a business from scratch today, unburdened by legacy department silos, your operating model would look fundamentally different:Micro-Teams with Macro-Leverage: Small, interdisciplinary teams leveraging autonomous agentic workflows will achieve the output that previously required entire business units. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has openly speculated about the imminent rise of a "one-person billion-dollar company." The exact valuation doesn't matter; the message does. Individual human leverage is reaching unprecedented levels. Intentional Human Interaction: When transactional work is automated, real human interaction becomes a high-value asset. Complex negotiations, deep empathetic client care, creative vision, and organizational culture become the areas where human presence is fiercely protected. Fluid Structural Architectures: Instead of static departmental walls (Marketing vs. Sales vs. IT), work flows dynamically around project-based AI infrastructure managed by high-leverage generalists.Rethinking the architectural foundation Philosopher Karl Popper famously argued that progress requires us to relentlessly challenge our existing assumptions rather than defending past dogmas. Our current organizational charts are dogmas built for a world where humans were the primary processors of routine information. That world is gone. Inundating an old, bureaucratic hierarchy with AI tools will not make it agile. It will only accelerate its inefficiency. The true leadership challenge of our time is not learning how to write better prompts—it is having the vision to redesign the system itself. Closing thought Technology is shifting from a tool we use to an infrastructure we work alongside. If your organization is merely using AI to speed up old habits, you are missing the point. The future belongs to those who stop trying to fit modern intelligence into legacy structures, and start building organizations where software handles the execution, so humans can focus on vision, ethics, and genuine connection. Stop automating old workflows. Start designing the new organization.

We are teaching managers how to be machines. Just as machines are taking over.

For decades, business schools and executive programs have relied on a familiar curriculum. If you want to become a successful manager, you learn data analysis, financial modeling, operational planning, and strategic execution. You are trained to optimize processes, map out roadmaps, and treat an organization like a mechanical system that can be tuned with the right metrics. This is the exact, analytical side of business administration. It is logical, structured, and comfortably measurable. There is just one fundamental problem with this approach: We are spending billions teaching human leaders how to perform tasks that computers can now do significantly better, faster, and cheaper. The crisis of relevance in management science The traditional management discipline is facing a quiet crisis of relevance. Analytical capacity, resource scheduling, operational planning, and data-driven scenario analysis used to be the exclusive domain of senior executives and high-priced consultants. Today, algorithmic models, automated platforms, and AI systems can synthesize complex organizational data in seconds. The hard, analytical side of management is rapidly becoming software. Yet, our educational institutions and corporate training programs continue to produce managers trained for a world that no longer exists. Instead of evolving, we pass down the exact same playbook from generation to generation. A playbook that produces managers who default to the classic 3 C's: Coordinating, Commanding, and Controlling. They try to act like human processors, optimizing spreadsheets while remaining distant from the human reality of their teams. Real leadership cannot be automated If machines are taking over the mechanics of management, what is left for human leaders to do? Everything that actually matters. True leadership has never been about process management. It is, first and foremost, an emotional, personal, and interpersonal discipline. It requires traits that no software model possesses:Authenticity: The courage to be transparent, vulnerable, and consistent in your values. Social and Emotional Intelligence: The ability to navigate conflict, read unsaid dynamics, and build genuine trust. Sense-Making: Helping teams find purpose, context, and direction in an increasingly complex world.You cannot learn these qualities by studying a framework or passing a written exam. Emotional maturity and authentic leadership require rigorous personal reflection, deep self-awareness, and—above all—the willingness to experiment, fail, and gain messy, real-world experience. From command to connection We have reached a fork in the road. We can either double down on outdated management models and watch our organizations become rigid and disengaged, or we can fundamentally shift our course. We must stop training leaders to be analytical overseers and start developing them as social-emotional anchors. When you strip away the administrative and analytical tasks that technology now handles, a leader's true responsibility becomes clear: Don't manage the process; empower the people. That means stepping away from the urge to command and control. It means creating an environment of psychological safety where employees feel trusted to take ownership, innovate, and make decisions within a clear direction. The generational loop we need to break The reason bad management persists is not a lack of books or webinars. It persists because it is copied. Young professionals enter the workplace, watch their managers lead through control and coordination, and assume that is what authority looks like. When they eventually get promoted, they repeat the cycle. They pass down the 3 C's because nobody taught them how to navigate the uncomfortable, human side of leadership. Breaking this cycle is the most urgent challenge facing modern organizations. We don't need more managers who act like algorithms. We need leaders who have done the hard internal work of becoming emotionally developed human beings. Closing thought Technology is stripping away the illusion that management is merely an analytical science. It is forcing us to confront a truth we should have embraced long ago. If your value as a leader relies solely on planning, tracking, and operational control, you are already redundant. The future belongs to leaders who understand that technology handles the logic, but humans supply the soul. Stop training managers to compete with machines. Start raising leaders who know how to connect with people.

Why helping your team is secretly destroying their ownership

When pressure builds inside an organization, a predictable instinct kicks in for many leaders. They lean into what they know. They start managing closer, checking status updates more frequently, and making decisions on behalf of their teams. Without realizing it, they default to a classic, comfortable playbook built on three traditional pillars: Coordinating, Commanding, and Controlling. It feels responsible. It feels like taking charge. But in reality, it is an outdated operating system that paralyzes organizations, smothers initiative, and creates an environment where nobody takes true responsibility for the outcome. If we want to build resilient, adaptive teams, we have to abandon the old 3 C's—and rethink what leadership actually means. The trap of the 3 C’s The traditional manager spends their day coordinating schedules, commanding who does what, and controlling every output before it reaches the outside world. That model might have worked in assembly-line factories a century ago, where tasks were predictable and repetition was the goal. But in modern knowledge work—and especially in an era shaped by complex tech and fast-moving environments—it falls completely flat. When a leader coordinates everything, employees stop aligning with each other. When a leader commands, employees stop thinking critically. And when a leader controls, employees stop caring about quality because "the boss will check it anyway." You don't get speed, quality, or innovation. You just get a bottleneck with a title. A different triad: Direction, Space, and Accountability Leading effectively requires a fundamental shift in posture. Instead of managing tasks, leaders must design the environment in which work happens. That comes down to three entirely different principles:Provide Direction: Be crystal clear about where the team is going and why. What is the strategic goal? What does success look like? What are the boundaries? Offer Space: Step back and grant the team complete autonomy over how they achieve that goal. Give them the trust, tools, and psychological safety to figure out the path themselves. Ask for Results: Hold people accountable for the outcomes, not the hours spent or the exact steps taken. Expect ownership and high standards.Direction without space is micromanagement. Space without direction is chaos. Space without accountability is just apathy. But when you balance all three, ownership naturally flourishes. The dangerous illusion of "helping" This brings us to one of the most subtle ways leaders accidentally ruin their teams: the urge to help. It usually sounds benevolent: "Let me quickly take care of that for you," or "I'll jump into this meeting and fix it." It comes from a good place. Leaders want to be supportive, alleviate stress, or just get things done faster. But let’s be honest about what "helping" actually means in practice. In most cases, helping means partially or fully stepping in to take over ownership of a problem. The moment a leader takes the pen out of an employee's hand to rewrite the slide, or steps in to solve an operational issue, a invisible contract is signed: This is no longer your problem. It is now mine. What happens when ownership is stolen When you "help" by taking over tasks, two things break down instantly: First, you rob your team of the discomfort required for growth. Problem-solving is muscle memory. If you never let your team struggle through a complex challenge, they will never build the capability or confidence to handle it next time. Second, you create a culture of learned helplessness. Employees quickly realize that if a problem gets tough enough, the leader will step in and solve it for them. Ownership evaporates, and the leader is left wondering why "nobody takes initiative around here." Real support isn't stepping in to do the work. Real support is coaching from the sidelines while keeping the ball firmly in the team's field. Bringing leadership back to intent True leadership is not measured by how much work passes through your hands, or how indispensable you make yourself to the daily execution. It is measured by how well your team performs when you are not in the room. That requires letting go of the need to control the micro-details. It means being willing to sit with the temporary discomfort of watching someone else solve a problem differently than you would have solved it yourself. Closing thought The role of a leader is not to carry the weight of every problem. It is to build a team capable of carrying it themselves. If you spend your days coordinating every move, commanding every step, and stepping in to "help" whenever things get difficult, you aren't leading. You are just holding your organization hostage to your own capacity. Stop managing the execution. Give direction, create genuine space, demand results—and leave the ownership exactly where it belongs.

The invisible tax of organizational immaturity

When organizations talk about costs, the conversation usually revolves around salaries. Or around software licenses, cloud consumption. Office space even, or procurement. Those costs are easy to measure. They appear neatly on financial statements. But after working with organizations of different sizes and maturity levels, I've become convinced there's another cost almost nobody measures. An invisible tax. One that quietly drains productivity, frustrates employees and slows decision-making. Not because people aren't working hard. But because the organization itself creates friction. Everyone is busy. Few people are moving forward. One of the first things I pay attention to when joining an organization isn't the technology. It isn't the financial performance. It isn't even the organizational chart. I watch how people work. How decisions are made. How priorities change. How meetings end. How often people say things like:"We're waiting." "Nobody knows who's responsible." "We'll discuss it again next week." "I assumed someone else was taking care of it."Those sentences rarely point to individual performance. They point to organizational design. Because mature organizations don't become productive by hiring smarter people. They become productive by reducing unnecessary friction. The tax nobody budgets for Organizational immaturity doesn't usually appear as one dramatic failure. It appears as thousands of tiny inefficiencies. Like a meeting without decisions. An action without an owner. A priority that changes three times in one week. An approval that waits in someone's inbox. A project delayed because two departments assumed the other was responsible. Individually, none of those events seem particularly significant. Collectively, they become incredibly expensive. Not because they cost money directly. Because they consume something even more valuable: Leadership capacity. Attention. Momentum. Friction compounds Recently I observed an organization working through several operational challenges at the same time. None of them were catastrophic. A leadership transition. A supplier decision waiting for approval. Priorities shifting as new information became available. Teams adjusting schedules to respond to unexpected developments. Every individual situation was understandable. What interested me wasn't the incidents themselves. It was how much organizational energy disappeared into coordinating them. People weren't solving customer problems. They were reorganizing calendars. Clarifying responsibilities. Following up on decisions. Waiting for answers. Every interruption looked small. Together, they formed a pattern. The organization wasn't paying for the incidents. It was paying for the friction between them. Activity is not progress Immature organizations often look incredibly busy. Calendars are full. Teams work hard. Everyone feels under pressure. From the outside, it almost looks impressive. Until you ask a few simple questions: What are our three most important priorities this quarter? Which KPI tells us whether we're improving? Who owns this decision? What happens if nothing changes?Surprisingly often, the answers become vague. Because activity is easy to observe. Progress requires clarity. And clarity requires leadership. The hidden cost of ambiguity Ambiguity is one of the most underestimated operational costs I know. If priorities are unclear... People create their own. If ownership is unclear... People wait. If success is undefined... Everyone believes they're doing the right thing. The irony is that highly capable people become less effective, not because they lack competence, but because they're forced to spend their energy navigating uncertainty instead of creating value. Organizations don't lose momentum because employees suddenly become less talented. They lose momentum because ambiguity quietly taxes every decision. Every interruption has a cost One unexpected meeting. One rescheduled customer visit. One delayed approval. One forgotten follow-up. One unclear decision. Individually, they're almost invisible. But organizations rarely suffer from one interruption. They suffer from hundreds. Every context switch costs attention. Every unclear responsibility creates another conversation. Every missing KPI creates another opinion. Every delayed decision creates another dependency. Eventually, the organization becomes extremely busy managing itself. Instead of serving customers. Maturity isn't about perfection No organization operates without surprises. Nor should it. Markets change. Customers change. People leave. Plans evolve. Operational maturity isn't the absence of unexpected events. It's the ability to absorb them without disrupting everything else. The most mature organizations I've worked with weren't necessarily the most structured. They were the most predictable. People knew who decided. People knew what mattered. People knew what success looked like. That predictability creates an enormous competitive advantage. Because it allows talented people to focus on solving meaningful problems instead of organizational ones. The role of leadership This is why I believe organizational maturity is fundamentally a leadership responsibility. Not because leaders should solve every problem. But because leaders design the environment in which problems are solved. Good leaders don't simply remove obstacles. They remove recurring obstacles. They don't fix today's confusion. They redesign tomorrow's process. They don't celebrate people who constantly save the day. They build organizations that need fewer heroes. Because every recurring operational problem is usually trying to tell you something. Not about the people. About the system. Closing thought The most expensive organizations aren't always the ones with the highest payroll. Sometimes they're the ones quietly paying an invisible tax every single day. A tax on attention. A tax on momentum. A tax on decision-making. A tax on leadership. Most organizations never notice it because they experience it gradually. It simply becomes "the way we work." But it doesn't have to be. Because organizational maturity isn't measured by how hard people work. It's measured by how little unnecessary friction they have to overcome before they can do their best work.

Great organizations don't react faster. They lead sooner.

Every organization faces unexpected events. A key employee resigns. A customer leaves. A supplier disappoints. A critical project slips behind schedule. None of those situations are remarkable. The interesting question isn't whether they happen. It's what happens next. Because while every organization reacts... Not every organization leads. Two conversations always emerge I've noticed that almost every unexpected event creates two conversations. The first is about what happened. Who made the decision? Could it have been prevented? What were the circumstances? Who approved it? Those questions are natural. Sometimes they're even necessary. But then there's a second conversation. One that often receives far less attention. What are we going to do now? That's where leadership begins. Reality doesn't care whose fault it is One of the most common patterns I observe inside organizations is how quickly conversations drift toward explanation. Why this happened. Why another department was involved. Why someone else needed to decide first. Why a dependency caused the delay. Why governance prevented action. Interestingly, most of those explanations are factually correct. They're also largely irrelevant. Reality doesn't change because we understand it better. Leadership starts the moment we stop negotiating with reality and start working with it. The circumstances are what they are. The only remaining question is what we intend to do next. Waiting is often a decision Every leader encounters situations where formal approval is required. That's normal. Governance exists for a reason. But I've also seen organizations confuse governance with inertia. A recommendation has been written. The preferred solution has been identified. The risks are understood. The business case is complete. Everything is ready. And then... Everyone waits. Not because there's nothing left to do. But because everyone assumes someone else now owns the next step. Waiting feels safe. After all, nobody can criticize you for acting too early. The problem is that waiting is rarely neutral. It is often a decision disguised as patience. Great leaders create momentum The most effective leaders I've worked with share one characteristic. They don't spend much time asking whether circumstances are ideal. They ask a different question. "Given today's reality, what can we move forward?" Maybe implementation can't start yet. But preparation can. Maybe contracts can't be signed. But planning can begin. Maybe a final decision hasn't been made. But dependencies can already be removed. Momentum rarely appears on its own. Someone creates it. Governance should enable action One of the biggest misconceptions about governance is that it's primarily about control. I don't think it is. Good governance exists to improve decision-making. Not to delay it. Not to spread accountability so thinly that nobody feels responsible. And certainly not to create an environment where people stop thinking for themselves. The healthiest organizations I've seen combine strong governance with strong initiative. People understand the boundaries. But they also understand that leadership begins long before formal approval arrives. Governance should answer the question: "How do we make better decisions?" Not: "How do we avoid making them?" Leadership is accepting reality quickly One lesson I've learned over the years is that exceptional leaders don't waste much energy wishing reality were different. They don't spend days arguing with circumstances. Or blaming timing. Or waiting for perfect conditions. They accept reality remarkably quickly. Not because they like it. Because they understand that accepting reality isn't surrender. It's the starting point for changing it. You can't influence the situation you're refusing to acknowledge. The difference between reacting and leading Reactive organizations ask: "Who owns this?" Leading organizations ask: "What can we influence right now?" Reactive organizations focus on why progress is difficult. Leading organizations focus on removing the next obstacle. Reactive organizations wait until certainty appears. Leading organizations create clarity through action. The circumstances may be identical. The outcomes rarely are. Leadership is a mindset before it's a position Titles don't create leadership. Authority doesn't create leadership. Experience doesn't create leadership. Leadership begins with a decision. The decision to stop defining yourself by what others haven't done. And start defining yourself by what you can do next. That doesn't mean ignoring governance. Or bypassing colleagues. Or acting recklessly. It means refusing to surrender your ability to influence the outcome simply because someone else hasn't moved yet. There is almost always another conversation to have. Another dependency to remove. Another scenario to prepare. Another problem you can solve before someone asks you to. That's what leaders do. Closing thought Every organization will experience disruption. Every organization will encounter uncertainty. Every organization will have days where carefully made plans suddenly become obsolete. Those moments don't reveal whether an organization is successful. They reveal how it thinks. Some organizations become trapped in explanations. Others immediately start creating options. Because leadership isn't demonstrated when everything goes according to plan. It's demonstrated in the moment reality refuses to cooperate. You can spend your energy explaining why circumstances prevented progress. Or you can ask the only question that has ever moved an organization forward. "Given reality as it is... what's our next move?"

Your experience has no value if nobody wants to work with you

Every election produces winners. Yet the largest political party doesn't automatically end up governing. Why? Because winning votes and building a coalition are two very different skills. Influence has never been about numbers alone. Influence doesn't come from being right. It comes from others being willing to work with you. I think exactly the same principle applies inside organizations. Experience earns expertise. Relationships create impact. We've all met them. The engineer with twenty-five years of experience. The consultant who has seen every technology come and go. The architect who always seems to have the right answer. Brilliant people. Yet somehow... Nobody enjoys working with them. People avoid asking them questions. Meetings become uncomfortable. Conversations become debates. Eventually, people stop involving them altogether. Not because they lack knowledge. Because they lack influence. Experience creates expertise. Relationships create impact. Without the second, the first becomes remarkably ineffective. Being right is surprisingly overrated One of the biggest misconceptions in leadership is believing that being right is enough. It isn't. You can have the best idea in the room. The best architecture. The best strategy. The most accurate analysis. If people no longer want to collaborate with you, those ideas rarely leave the meeting room. Knowledge has little value if it never influences decisions. The ability to convince, inspire and collaborate is often far more valuable than simply having the correct answer. Being right is surprisingly overrated if people stop listening. It's the tone that makes the music In Dutch, we have a saying. "It's the tone that makes the music." I've always liked that expression because it captures something every experienced leader eventually learns. People can handle difficult feedback. They can handle disagreement. They can even handle hearing they're wrong. What they struggle with is unnecessary disrespect. The words are rarely the problem. The way they're are delivered usually is. The difference between: *"This design is wrong." and "Can I challenge one assumption? I think there's another approach worth considering." isn't technical. It's relational. One damages trust. The other builds it. Leadership is not about winning arguments Many leaders unknowingly turn every discussion into a competition. They need to have the final word. They need to prove they know more. They need everyone to recognize their experience. Ironically, the most respected leaders I've worked with did the opposite. They asked more questions than they gave answers. They listened before they challenged. They corrected without humiliating. And they made people feel smarter after the conversation than before it. That's influence. Not authority. Authority comes with a job title. Influence has to be earned every single day. The cost of being difficult I've seen incredibly capable people quietly become irrelevant. Not because their expertise became outdated. Because people stopped inviting them. Stopped asking for advice. Stopped involving them in important discussions. Not out of spite. Out of self-preservation. Every difficult interaction teaches people something. Either: "I'd like to work with this person again." Or: "Next time, I'll ask someone else." Few professionals realize how quickly that reputation spreads. Leadership by example This matters for everyone. But it matters even more for leaders. Because leaders don't just influence individual conversations. They influence culture. When leaders interrupt, others interrupt. When leaders dismiss opinions, others stop contributing. When leaders publicly criticize people instead of ideas, psychological safety disappears. And when leaders consistently treat people with respect, even during disagreement... The organization learns that respect isn't weakness. It's professionalism. Leadership by example isn't a slogan. It's how culture is transmitted. Expertise is only valuable when it creates more expertise The best leaders I've worked with all had one thing in common. They weren't interested in demonstrating how much they knew. They were interested in helping others become better. Their expertise didn't make them the smartest person in every room. It made everyone else smarter. That's a subtle but profound difference. Because leadership isn't about collecting followers. It's about multiplying capability. Closing thought I've met people with decades of experience who struggled to create lasting influence. And I've met relatively young professionals who inspired entire teams. The difference was rarely technical expertise. It was trust. People naturally follow those who make them feel respected. Those who challenge ideas without attacking people. Those who make collaboration easier instead of harder. Because in the end, your experience isn't measured by the number of years on your résumé. Nor by the certifications you've collected. Nor by how often you've been right. The value of your expertise isn't measured by what you know. It's measured by how much of that knowledge helps others succeed. And if nobody wants to work with you... Your experience has very little value at all.

Ownership is not a KPI. It's a culture.

One of the most common frustrations I hear from leaders is surprisingly consistent. "People don't take enough ownership." It's often followed by familiar observations:"Nobody takes responsibility." "Everyone waits for someone else." "Things keep falling between the cracks."I understand the frustration. I just think we're asking the wrong question. Ownership isn't something you can demand from people. It's something your organization either produces... ...or suppresses. And that starts with leadership. Every organization gets the culture it designs for Culture is often described as something intangible. Something that "just exists." I don't believe that. Culture is simply the collection of behaviors that leaders consistently reward, tolerate or ignore. If leaders reward collaboration, collaboration grows. If leaders reward accountability, accountability grows. If leaders reward hitting individual targets regardless of the outcome... That's exactly what people will optimize for. Culture isn't what is written on the wall. It's what happens when nobody is watching. The lease car wasn't the problem Recently I received a lease car through my employer. On paper, everything had gone according to plan. The administration was complete. The delivery had been scheduled. The paperwork was ready. Every process had apparently been followed. Yet the experience told a different story. The car smelled of smoke. Parts were missing. The key battery was almost empty. The interior clearly hadn't received the attention you would expect before handing it to a new driver. None of those issues were catastrophic. Individually, they were almost trivial. Together, they sent a very clear message: Nobody owned the outcome. I'm convinced everyone involved completed their own task. Someone scheduled the delivery. Someone processed the paperwork. Someone prepared the vehicle. Someone cleaned it. Someone inspected it. The problem wasn't that nobody did any work. The problem was that nobody seemed to ask one simple question before handing it over. "Would I be proud to deliver this myself?" That's the difference between completing a process and owning a result. Activity is not accountability I've seen the same pattern throughout my career. Hours spent in meetings. Good discussions. Interesting ideas. Everyone contributing. And then the meeting ends. No action list. No owners. No deadlines. No follow-up. A week later, the same discussion starts all over again. Not because people didn't care. Because nobody was explicitly responsible for making something happen. The meeting produced activity. Not accountability. Those are very different things. You can't manage what you haven't defined The same applies to performance. I've worked with organizations that wanted to improve quality, customer satisfaction and operational excellence. All admirable ambitions. Then I asked a simple question: "Which KPI tells us whether we're succeeding?" Silence. Not because people lacked intelligence. Because nobody had translated ambition into something measurable. If you don't know which outcomes matter... How do people know where to focus? How do they know which trade-offs are acceptable? How do they know when something deserves escalation? Leadership often asks for ownership while failing to define success. That's an impossible assignment. The danger of optimizing the wrong thing This is where KPIs often get a bad reputation. People say: "KPIs don't create ownership." That's true. But poor KPIs can absolutely destroy it. If you measure ticket closure, don't be surprised when people close tickets quickly. If you measure utilization, don't be surprised when calendars fill up. If you measure cost reduction, don't be surprised when quality quietly declines. People optimize for what the organization demonstrates is important. Not for what leadership says is important. Metrics don't create culture. They reveal it. Leadership by example is more than a slogan Leadership by example has become one of those phrases everyone agrees with. Yet few organizations truly live it. Ownership starts long before employees decide to take responsibility. It starts when leaders do. Leaders who admit mistakes instead of explaining them away. Leaders who finish what they start. Leaders who make responsibilities explicit instead of assuming someone will "pick it up." Leaders who ask not only what happened, but also who owns making it better. Culture copies behavior. Far more than it copies presentations. Ownership is designed into the organization Many leaders try to solve ownership by asking for more of it. I think that's backwards. Instead, ask different questions:Does every important outcome have a clearly identifiable owner? Does everyone understand what success looks like? Are responsibilities explicit? Are decisions made where the knowledge exists? Do our KPIs reinforce the behavior we actually want? Would our leaders behave the same way they expect others to?Those questions reveal far more about ownership than another workshop ever will. Closing thought I've become convinced that organizations rarely have an ownership problem. They have a leadership problem. Not because leaders don't care. But because ownership isn't created by asking people to "take responsibility." It's created by designing an environment where responsibility is obvious. Where success is clearly defined. Where outcomes have owners. Where leaders model the behavior they expect from everyone else. Because in the end, people don't simply work within the culture of an organization. They work within the culture its leaders create. And if ownership is missing throughout the organization... The first place I would look isn't at the people. It's at the example they're following.

Onboarding is not an HR process

Every organization talks about Customer Experience. Increasingly, they talk about Employee Experience too. There are conferences dedicated to it. Dashboards measuring it. Entire software platforms promising to improve it. And yet, I continue to see organizations where a new employee spends the first weeks chasing a laptop, waiting for system access, wondering who to ask about a lease car, or discovering that nobody seems entirely sure what should happen next. That isn't an HR problem. It is an organizational one. The first experience shapes everything We often assume culture is something employees discover over time. I don't think that's true. Culture starts on day one. Not during a presentation about company values. Not during an all-hands meeting. Not because someone tells you what the organization stands for. Culture emerges from dozens of seemingly insignificant moments. Was someone expecting me? Was my manager prepared? Did my accounts work? Did I know where to go for help? Did different departments seem connected, or did I become the person connecting them? None of those moments appear in an annual report. Yet together they answer a much bigger question: "Do these people have their organization under control?" Every small interaction builds operational trust Trust is often discussed as something leaders earn over months or years. But there is another kind of trust. Operational trust. It has nothing to do with charisma. It comes from consistency. Every smooth handover, every proactive update and every well-prepared first day tells a new employee the same thing: "Someone thought this through." The opposite is equally powerful. Every missing approval. Every unanswered question. Every process that requires the employee to coordinate departments that should already be working together. Those moments don't just create frustration. They quietly undermine confidence in the organization itself. Onboarding is not an HR process This is perhaps the biggest misconception. Organizations often divide onboarding into responsibilities.HR prepares the contract. IT provisions the laptop. Facilities arranges a desk. Procurement orders the phone. The hiring manager schedules introductions.Individually, each team may perform perfectly. Collectively, the experience can still fail. Because onboarding isn't a collection of departmental tasks. It is the first end-to-end process an employee experiences. The employee doesn't care where HR ends and IT begins. They experience one company. Which means onboarding is not an HR process. It is one of the clearest demonstrations of operational excellence a company will ever give. Or fail to give. Culture is experienced before it is explained Organizations spend enormous effort defining culture. Mission statements. Leadership principles. Core values. Internal campaigns. Most of them are well intended. But people don't believe culture because they read it. They believe culture because they experience it. If your organization says people matter, but nobody notices a new colleague waiting three days for access to essential systems, the employee remembers the experience. Not the PowerPoint. Culture is never communicated as effectively as it is demonstrated. Different people need different beginnings One of the mistakes organizations make is assuming everyone wants the same onboarding experience. Some people want structure. Others want autonomy. Some appreciate detailed guidance. Others would rather receive a laptop, a login and the freedom to explore. Neither approach is right. Neither is wrong. The real challenge is recognizing that equality does not always mean uniformity. Good organizations don't standardize people. They standardize quality while allowing room for individual needs. AI isn't replacing onboarding Every technology conference seems to ask the same question: "What's our AI strategy?" Perhaps a better question is: "Which problems are we still asking people to solve manually?" Ironically, many onboarding activities have already been automated for years.HR-driven provisioning creates accounts automatically. Identity platforms assign access. Workflow engines trigger approvals.The technology already exists. Yet the employee experience often remains fragmented. Not because automation is missing. But because the process itself was never designed as a single experience. That is where AI becomes genuinely interesting. Not as another chatbot. But as an orchestration layer. An assistant that notices a laptop hasn't been delivered before the employee does. That reminds managers of conversations they should have already scheduled. That recognizes dependencies across HR, IT, Facilities and Procurement before they become delays. That answers questions before someone has to ask them. The real opportunity isn't replacing people. It is removing unnecessary friction between the people who are already involved. Why CEOs should care Too often, onboarding is delegated. HR owns part of it. IT owns another. Facilities owns something else. Everyone has responsibilities. Nobody owns the experience. That should concern every CEO. Because onboarding is rarely remembered for a single event. It is remembered as a pattern. A pattern that answers one simple question: "Is this an organization that operates deliberately, or one that reacts continuously?" That first impression influences trust. Trust influences engagement. Engagement influences retention. And retention ultimately influences business performance. This is no longer an HR conversation. It is a leadership conversation. Final reflection Organizations often say that people are their greatest asset. I believe most leaders genuinely mean it. But beliefs become visible through design. The first weeks of employment are not simply about receiving a laptop, signing policies or collecting access rights. They are the first demonstration of how an organization thinks, collaborates and executes. Customers experience your products. Employees experience your organization. Both form opinions remarkably quickly. The difference is that customers can walk away. Employees first decide whether they believe your culture. Only afterwards do they decide whether they want to become part of it.

When integrity costs your seat, but saves your leadership

There’s a version of corporate leadership that looks structured on paper, but in practice runs on something far less formal: influence, alliances, internal politics, and the quiet redistribution of power. I didn’t just observe that system. I operated inside it. And at a certain point, I made a conscious decision about where I stand in it. I held a senior leadership responsibility across technology, engineering, architecture, portfolio and product domains within a large managed services organization in the Netherlands. On paper, authority is defined by role. In reality, authority is defined by whether people choose to respect it. And once that alignment breaks, you are no longer in a stable system. You are in a political one. At that point, there are only two options left: adjust your principles to fit the environment, or stay aligned with your own standards and accept the consequences of that choice. I chose the latter. The shift that starts before it is visible These kinds of transitions rarely start where people think they start. In my case, the shift began with a change in the leadership layer above me. The Managing Director was pushed out after internal disagreement about direction and leadership style. Two senior directors had already aligned in that process. From that moment on, the balance inside the executive team changed. Influence started to outweigh structure. One of those directors—let’s call him Harry, responsible for service delivery and customer engagement—began pushing for organizational redesigns that would significantly increase his span of control. Most of the leadership team did not fully align with that direction. But disagreement has limited impact when escalation mechanisms no longer function as safeguards, but become formalities. At the same time, behaviour that normally would be addressed through direct leadership accountability was handled differently in practice. Escalations. Emotional outbursts. Walking away from responsibility. Periods of absence. And instead of direct intervention, the response was containment: home visits, informal conversations, coffee at kitchen tables. Not necessarily ill-intended. But structurally inconsistent. And that inconsistency sends a very clear signal into any organization: accountability is not applied evenly. Once that signal is embedded, culture changes faster than policy ever can. When you become the inconvenient perspective At a certain point, I became the person who no longer fully aligned with how decisions were being made and how behaviour was being interpreted. Not because I was opposing change, but because I refused to normalize inconsistency in leadership accountability. There was a moment where trust in my position was explicitly questioned by Harry. I asked the rest of the leadership team a simple question: Do you stand behind me? The answer was yes. Privately, there was alignment. Publicly, nothing changed. No correction. No reset. No visible follow-through. That gap is not neutral. That is where organizations start to drift. Because it exposes a fundamental truth: internal agreement does not automatically translate into external action. From that point on, I stopped experiencing the environment as a purely functional system. It became political navigation. When leadership meets cost logic Later, financial pressure added another layer. A proposal emerged that effectively meant structurally assigning low performance ratings in order to reduce headcount through forced exits or settlements. Not based on performance reality, but as a mechanism. I did not participate in that approach. Not selectively. Not conditionally. Not partially. That created tension that unfolded over time. It was often framed as “just how things work in organizations”. I don’t accept that as a default argument. Because there are moments where that sentence is exactly the problem, not the explanation. I escalated the matter to holding level with a simple request: Address it. Don’t ignore it. Don’t leave it in silence. What followed was not resolution, but hesitation. Fear of internal relationships. Fear of political consequences. Fear of reputational friction. And as a result, nothing changed. But nothing is also a decision. Just an unspoken one. The meeting that clarified everything Weeks later, I had a conversation with Garry, a holding-level portfolio director (superior to the Managing Director, in this moment interim Managing Director himself), about the increasing tension between responsibilities, behaviour, and unresolved accountability. The conversation itself was calm. Not emotional. Not escalatory. But it became a defining moment. I stated clearly that I could not continue operating in a system where accountability was inconsistent and where responsibilities were continuously blurred in practice. That was not a complaint. It was a conclusion. Afterwards, a message followed suggesting that the initiative for separation was placed with me. That was not my intention, and I immediately corrected that position. But something had already shifted. Not formally. Structurally. From that point on, one thing became unavoidable: the system was not going to self-correct in a way that aligned with my standards of leadership integrity. And that meant the real question was no longer whether things would change. It was what staying would require from me. The disappearance of a role during absence In the period after the conversation with Garry, I deliberately took a few days of distance from the day-to-day environment. Not as a withdrawal, but to process a moment that was, for me, professionally significant and personally disappointing, and to reflect on next steps with clarity. Shortly after that brief period of distance, I was confronted with an unexpected medical situation and required surgery. That immediately shifted the context from reflection to recovery. While I was away from the organization for medical reasons, the system continued to move. Technology operations, engineering leadership, and all my other responsibilities were split into separate functions. Responsibilities were redistributed. People were promoted into those areas. Reporting lines were changed. None of this involved me. No consultation. No alignment. No conversation. It simply happened in my absence. Returning to something that no longer exists Six months later, I was ready to return. What I returned to was not a paused role. It was a structure that had already been fundamentally redesigned. There was no longer a coherent function to step back into. There was a new Managing Director, who didn't know me, or the role I had. The role still existed on paper once. But not in reality anymore. In that moment, I did not experience confusion. I experienced clarity. In the meantime, conversations had taken place about alternative directions. Senior leadership roles within other entities in the same holding structure. Advisory positions. Holding-level functions. I participated in those conversations. I explored them in good faith. I engaged with them professionally. But underneath it, one thing was already true: I was not looking for a way back in. I was observing whether there was still a meaningful way forward inside the same system. And I concluded there wasn’t. So the decision became simple. Not emotional. Not reactive. Clear. I chose not to return. Not because I had lost something. But because I no longer needed to stay in a system where alignment required compromise on principle. And I choose not to build success in environments where I do not believe in the foundation. I would rather lose on my own terms than win on someone else’s. What this revealed to me What stayed with me was not frustration. It was clarity. Organizations are often far more decisive when redistributing power than when addressing behavioural inconsistency. The same system that struggled to intervene when it mattered most became highly efficient when restructuring in my absence. That contrast is not incidental. It is diagnostic. It shows where real power sits. Not in org charts. But in influence, alignment, and internal stability. Integrity as a leadership position Over time, something became non-negotiable for me. I do not operate from fear. Not in leadership. Not in decisions. Not in how I treat people. My baseline is simple: Remove status, politics, and self-interest, and ask what the right decision is. That is not always comfortable. And it is rarely rewarded in the short term. But I remain convinced of this: integrity is not a moral statement. It is a leadership strategy. Because people may tolerate politics for a while. But they do not forget consistency. And they talk. I still speak to people from that period. Some are still inside the organization, quietly re-evaluating their path. Some have already left. Some were affected by structural changes that felt more political than performance-driven. And many express the same reflection in different words: this is not what leadership should feel like.Final reflection Leadership is not control. It is followership. And followership is never enforced. It is earned. In the end, I did not lose a role. I made a decision about where I would and would not continue to invest my energy. And that distinction matters. Because sometimes leaving is not loss. Sometimes it is alignment. And that is exactly what this was.

Strategy is for decision-making. Marketing is for storytelling.

Organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time defining their vision, mission, purpose and values. Workshops are organized. Consultants are hired. Leadership teams debate every word. Marketing departments create beautiful presentations. Posters appear on office walls. And then, on Monday morning, nothing changes. Not because the strategy was poorly communicated. But because it was never designed to help people make decisions in the first place. Too often, organizations treat strategy as a communication tool. I believe it should be treated as a governance tool. The day I realized we were solving the wrong problem Not long ago, I was part of a leadership team redefining the identity of a growing IT services company. The ambition was clear. We wanted to define who we were, what we stood for, and where we wanted to go. Something people could genuinely recognize themselves in. Something that would unite the organization as it continued to grow. At least, that was my expectation. Instead, the conversation quickly became familiar. Customer intimacy. Innovation. Competitive pricing. Quality. The kinds of phrases every organization seems to use because nobody can reasonably disagree with them. None of them were wrong. But I kept asking myself a simple question. What will we do differently on Monday because of this? Nobody seemed able to answer. And that was the moment I realized we weren't creating a strategy. We were creating marketing. A strategy should answer questions before they're asked As organizations grow, decisions become increasingly decentralized.Recruiters hire people they've never worked with. Sales teams negotiate deals without involving the board. Architects design solutions independently. Product managers decide what gets built next. Marketing teams position the company every single day.The larger the organization becomes, the less practical it is for leadership to approve every decision. That is precisely why strategy exists. Not to inspire people. Not to impress customers. Not to look good on a website. But to ensure that hundreds of people make decisions that move in the same direction. A good strategy reduces uncertainty. It doesn't create it. Every strategic principle should have consequences Words like innovation, quality and customer intimacy sound impressive. But they only become meaningful when they influence behavior. Imagine a customer asks for a highly customized solution. Do we build it? The answer shouldn't depend on who happens to be leading the meeting. It should already be implied by the strategic framework. A recruiter finds an exceptional engineer. Technically brilliant. But unlikely to thrive within the organization's culture. Do we hire them? Again, the answer shouldn't require executive intervention. Marketing wants to launch a new campaign. Should we position ourselves as the cheapest provider? The premium specialist? The safest choice? The most innovative? If your strategy doesn't make that decision easier, what exactly is it for? Every strategic principle should eliminate options. If it doesn't help people decide what not to do, it isn't providing direction. Growth demands autonomy When organizations have fifty or a hundred employees, many decisions still happen organically. People know each other. Leadership is accessible. Context spreads through conversation. But as organizations scale, that changes. Information becomes fragmented. Teams specialize. Decision-making becomes distributed. You cannot build a thousand-person organization where every important decision depends on a handful of executives. Nor should you want to. Growth requires autonomy. But autonomy without direction creates inconsistency. That's where strategy becomes essential. Not because larger organizations need more slogans. But because they need better decision-making frameworks. Strategy should reduce debate, not create it One of the simplest ways to test whether a strategic framework works is to observe what happens during disagreement. Imagine a discussion about building custom software for an important customer. If the room immediately splits into opposing opinions, and the only way to resolve the discussion is by asking senior leadership... ...your strategy has already failed. A strong strategic framework should settle many of those discussions before they even begin. Not because it provides answers to every situation. But because it establishes principles that people trust when making difficult trade-offs. The best strategies don't eliminate judgment. They improve it. Storytelling still matters None of this means communication is unimportant. Quite the opposite. Organizations absolutely need stories. Stories create identity. They build culture. They attract customers. They help people feel connected to something larger than themselves. But stories should explain strategy. They should never replace it. Marketing tells people what the organization believes. Strategy determines what the organization actually does. Confusing those two is where many organizations lose their way. The real test The effectiveness of a strategy isn't measured during an annual kick-off. It isn't measured by how many employees can recite the mission statement. And it certainly isn't measured by how attractive it looks on a slide. It's measured in ordinary moments.A salesperson deciding whether to accept a customer. An architect deciding whether to build custom functionality. A recruiter choosing between two candidates. A product team deciding what not to build.Those are the moments where strategy either exists... ...or it doesn't. Closing thought I've seen organizations spend months debating the difference between a vision, a mission, a purpose and a set of values. Ironically, none of those discussions improved a single decision. Because the names don't matter. Whether you call it a strategy, a vision, a purpose or a strategic framework is largely irrelevant. The only question that matters is this: Does it help people make better decisions without asking for permission? If the answer is yes, you've built something that can genuinely guide an organization. If the answer is no... ...you've probably written excellent marketing copy.

Employees don't want another survey. They want to be heard.

Every year, thousands of organizations ask their employees exactly the same question. "How are we doing?" The survey has many names. The name hardly matters. The process is almost always the same. Employees are encouraged to be honest. Leadership promises to listen. The results arrive a few weeks later. A dashboard appears. Scores turn green, orange or red. Trends are compared to previous years and benchmarked against other organizations. And then something interesting happens. The organization starts explaining the results before it has really listened to them. The first reaction is almost never curiosity I've seen the same pattern more than once. Leadership gathers around a table to review the results. Some comments are dismissed as unrealistic. Others are explained away. "It's only a snapshot." "People don't see the full picture." "The reorganization clearly influenced the scores." "One department pulled the average down." Sometimes those explanations are entirely reasonable. But they all have one thing in common. They explain the outcome before they explore it. That subtle difference matters. Because the purpose of listening isn't to defend your decisions. It's to understand why people experienced them differently than you expected. Measuring trust doesn't create trust Organizations often invest significant time and money in measuring employee satisfaction. Ironically, they spend far less time creating the conversations that actually improve it. A survey can tell you that trust is low. It cannot explain why. It certainly cannot rebuild it. Trust isn't restored by presenting another PowerPoint with action points. It is restored when people believe someone genuinely wants to understand their experience. Not to agree with everything they say. But to understand it. We keep scaling the wrong thing One of the biggest mistakes organizations make is assuming that more data automatically leads to better leadership. It doesn't. If anything, leadership becomes more difficult when hundreds of comments are compressed into percentages, averages and trend lines. The individual disappears. The story disappears. The nuance disappears. By the time the executive team receives the report, employees have become statistics. That may be useful for reporting. It is rarely useful for understanding people. Leadership happens at dinner tables Imagine something different. Not another annual survey. Not another company-wide town hall where only the confident voices ask questions. Imagine inviting eight employees to dinner every month. No presentation. No agenda. No managers. No HR representative taking notes. Just a conversation. People from different teams. Different ages. Different backgrounds. Different perspectives. Some who have been with the company for fifteen years. Some who joined three months ago. No expectation that everyone will agree. No expectation that every suggestion will be implemented. Just a conversation where people are free to say what they genuinely think. Not because leadership needs more data. Because leadership needs more understanding. People don't expect perfection One of the biggest misconceptions in leadership is that employees expect every problem to be solved. Most don't. People understand that organizations have budgets. Priorities. Customers. Shareholders. Trade-offs. What they struggle with isn't disagreement. It's silence. If an idea isn't feasible, explain why. If priorities changed, explain why. If you disagree, explain why. Adults can handle disagreement remarkably well. What slowly destroys trust is the feeling that feedback disappears into a system that quietly moves on. The purpose of leadership isn't agreement A good leader doesn't exist to validate every opinion. Nor should they. Leadership requires making decisions that not everyone will support. That's part of the responsibility. But responsibility comes with another obligation. People deserve to understand why decisions were made. Not because it guarantees agreement. Because it demonstrates respect. Being heard and getting your way are two very different things. Confusing the two helps nobody. The survey isn't the problem Employee surveys have value. They reveal patterns. They identify trends. They help leaders recognize blind spots. The problem begins when the survey becomes the conversation. Or worse, when it replaces it. Culture isn't built through anonymous questionnaires. It is built through thousands of interactions in which people discover whether their voice genuinely matters. The best organizations don't treat feedback as an annual event. They make listening part of how they lead. Closing Words Organizations often ask employees one important question every year: "How are we doing?" Perhaps leaders should ask themselves another: "When was the last time I had a conversation where someone felt completely free to disagree with me?" Because culture is not measured by a survey. Trust is not created by a dashboard. And leadership is not demonstrated by publishing an action plan. It is demonstrated by listening before explaining. By responding before defending. And by creating an environment where people continue speaking—not because they expect to win every discussion, but because they know someone is genuinely willing to hear it.

The future of managed services is letting go of control

For decades, managed services have been built around a simple idea: The provider builds. The customer consumes. We standardized desktops. We standardized servers. We standardized networks. We defined what users were allowed to do, locked everything else down, and called it governance. It made perfect sense. Technology was complex. Expertise was scarce. Standardization created stability. But if I look at the direction our industry has taken over the past fifteen years, I don't see a story about better infrastructure. I see a story about increasing autonomy. And I don't think we've fully realized what that means for the future of managed services. This didn't start with AI AI is getting all the attention. But the shift started long before large language models. Think about what we've introduced over the last decade. Infrastructure as Code allowed engineers to describe infrastructure instead of manually configuring it. Cloud platforms removed the need to provision hardware. The modern workplace allowed users to work from anywhere, on almost any device. Power Platform enabled business users to automate processes without waiting for IT. Platform engineering is giving development teams self-service platforms instead of ticket queues. These aren't isolated innovations. They all move in exactly the same direction. Every generation of technology removes another dependency on central IT. Every generation gives more capability directly to the people creating value. AI simply accelerates that trend. Customers don't want fewer capabilities They want fewer dependencies. That's an important difference. Organizations don't want to submit tickets to deploy an application. They want to deploy it themselves. They don't want to wait three weeks for an environment. They want it in three minutes. They don't want IT departments approving every workflow. They want to automate their own. For years, many managed service providers viewed this as a threat. I think it's exactly the opposite. Because customers aren't trying to eliminate the MSP. They're trying to eliminate unnecessary friction. The MSP is no longer the builder Imagine a product team in three years. A product owner describes a new customer portal. An AI engineering team generates the application. Another agent provisions infrastructure. Security agents validate policies. Test agents perform functional and performance testing. Deployment agents roll everything into production. None of that feels unrealistic anymore. The interesting question isn't whether this will happen. It's what role the MSP still plays. I don't believe the answer is "building the platform." Because increasingly, customers will do that themselves. Or rather, their AI agents will. The foundation becomes the product If customers can build, deploy and operate faster than ever before, then the value of the MSP shifts underneath the visible work. The platform becomes the product. Not the portal. Not the virtual machine. Not the Kubernetes cluster. The invisible foundation beneath all of it. The landing zones. Identity. Networking. Compliance. Policies. Guardrails. Observability. Knowledge. Recovery. Customers won't ask an MSP to deploy an application. They'll expect an environment where deploying applications is safe by default. That's a fundamentally different business. Governance stops saying "no" Many organizations still think governance means restricting users. Removing permissions. Blocking installations. Limiting change. That approach worked when IT was responsible for every change. It breaks down completely when hundreds of developers, business users and AI agents are continuously creating new workloads. The answer cannot be to review every deployment. It cannot be to manually approve every prompt. And it certainly cannot be to lock everything down. Governance has to evolve from permission to policy. Instead of deciding who may build, we decide the conditions under which anything may be built. Instead of reviewing every change, we continuously validate every outcome. Instead of configuring environments manually, we enforce compliance automatically. Control doesn't disappear. It simply moves to a different layer. The MSP becomes an enabler of autonomy This may be the biggest mindset shift our industry has ever faced. For years, success was measured by how much work the provider performed. Tomorrow, success may be measured by how little intervention is required. The best managed service providers won't be the ones operating every workload. They'll be the ones enabling thousands of safe deployments that never required them in the first place. Their customers will move faster. Developers will have more freedom. Business teams will automate more processes. AI agents will continuously improve solutions. And underneath all of it, the MSP quietly ensures that security, compliance and operational resilience remain intact. Invisible when everything works. Essential when it doesn't. Expertise doesn't disappear Some people interpret AI as the end of expertise. History suggests otherwise. Every abstraction has increased demand for people who understand the layer beneath it. Cloud didn't eliminate infrastructure expertise. Infrastructure as Code didn't eliminate architects. Platform engineering didn't eliminate operations. It simply changed where expertise creates value. AI will do exactly the same. The future MSP won't spend its days deploying resources. It will design the ecosystems in which autonomous systems can safely deploy themselves. Closing thought I don't believe the future of managed services is about doing more work for customers. I think it's about making customers capable of doing more themselves. Not because the MSP becomes less relevant. But because relevance is moving. From operating technology... ...to enabling autonomy. The organizations that understand this will stop asking how AI fits into managed services. They'll realize managed services are being redefined by the same force that is reshaping every other part of IT: giving more control to the people closest to the problem, while ensuring the platform beneath them remains secure, compliant and resilient. That, to me, is what the next generation of managed services looks like.