Reflections

St. Patrick was no stranger to uncertainty. Abducted into slavery at a time when Roman Britain was collapsing and Irish raiders were ascendant, he spent six years shepherding before escaping home, then twelve years preparing to return as a missionary. The St. Patrick we celebrate today left behind three lessons every business leader can use: build structures that outlast your own hands, make the vision tangible in ways people can hold, and use your position to address injusti

Every Thanksgiving, gratitude gets filed under "personal" while the business stays transactional. That's a missed opportunity. 2020 was brutal, but brutal years are where leaders learn the things good years hide: which customers are indispensable, where communication breaks down, what really drives demand. Stoltz and Weihenmayer call it the adversity advantage. The gratitude practice worth keeping is the one that names (out loud) what adversity taught you this year.

Every leader is a seasonal leader, whether they know it or not. Some seasons are for building, some for pruning, some for simply holding ground. The hardest part is refusing to wait out a downturn before you invest in yourself, the seeds you plant during uncertainty are the ones that make the next season count. Many of America's largest companies started in a recession because their founders understood what leadership really is: one part decision-making, one part sense-making

When the ground shifts under a business leader's feet, the temptation is to look for new tactics. The best leaders look for something else first: their values. Carl Anderson's 1997 values-based leadership framework gives executives a disciplined way to identify their non-negotiable principles, translate them into values, and examine the leadership philosophy they are actually operating from, before the next hard decision lands.

You rarely turn to the children's section for business insight. But reading The Velveteen Rabbit to my daughter this week, the Skin Horse's monologue about becoming 'Real' stopped me cold — and it reframed everything I've been thinking about this summer. Not about scaling businesses. About what we owe each other. Whether to duck and cover or jump into the current. As for me and my house, we're paddling like mad.