Research & Insights

Hebrews 11:1 calls faith "the substance of things hoped for." Every business investment is a leap into the unseen — but the timing question matters more than the courage question. Drawing on Hipkins and Cowie's sigmoid curve and Thomas Malthus's carrying capacity, this article argues the ideal moment to innovate, hire, or expand is the midpoint of the growth phase, not the moment of decline. The Catch 22: the time to bet big is when you don't need the cards to flop right.

Accountability is the word everyone invokes and no one seems to define. Merriam-Webster sends you down a rabbit hole that lands on four R's: respondents, results, records, and rationale. Dubnick and Justice point out that accountability is offered as the cure for everything from injustice to incompetence, yet rarely measured in practice. At its core, accountability is a storytelling exercise that uses data to assign credit or blame. Controlling the narrative is most of the ga

New role, new title, new doubt. Leadership transitions feel lonely precisely because they're the part of the job most people dismiss as a first-world problem. Research by Nicky Terblanche in Human Resource Development Quarterly identifies the five coaching techniques executives credit most during transitions: active experimentation, Socratic questioning, critical reflection, direct challenging of views, and (surprisingly) coaches sharing research-based frameworks outright.

Failing to plan is planning to fail, or so the saying goes. Then how do successful leaders so often skip the formal business plan? A study of nearly 400 entrepreneurs by Honig and Karlsson in the Journal of Management found the forces pushing leaders to write plans are coercion and mimicry, and that writing one produces no reliable profitability advantage. The real job of a business plan is not to predict the future. It is to give a team shared context to improvise together.