Strategy & Growth

If anyone tells you the journey to success is a straight line, they've either never done it or are trying to sell you something. As Mike Tyson famously put it, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. This article unpacks the Beckhard-Harris Change Equation — (D × V × F) > R — alongside the Organizational Immune System and the five resistance behaviors that derail change efforts: narcissism, culture-driven stagnation, positional power, short-sightedness, and m

There is a special kind of silence that exists in the corner office. Not the peaceful silence of a job well done, but the heavy kind that follows a major promotion, a closed funding round, a merger, or a forced restructuring. The tools that got you here may not be enough to get you where you need to go. This article unpacks Wendworks' five-gear Transition Toolkit for 2026 (Active Experimentation, the Socratic Perspective, Critical Reflection, the External Mirror, and Research

Leaders succeed when they work simultaneously from the inside out and the outside in. Mobilized Vision, Business Model, People Strategy and Development, Operations, Technology and Automation, Strategy, Leadership, and Culture that eight domains that set the table for performance breakthroughs and sustainable growth. This article unpacks each one, explains why cross-domain alignment matters, and introduces the Wendworks Organizational Health Assessment as a tool for measuring

LinkedIn's 900 million users represent one of the most powerful networking, lead generation, and brand-building platforms in the world — and one of the easiest to flood with low-value spam. This article walks entrepreneurs and senior leaders through the eight things that matter most: what LinkedIn automation actually is, the platform's love-hate relationship with it, the leading software providers, the companion tech stack of CRM, scheduling, analytics, email, and content too

Imagine standing at the helm of your business, burdened by decisions that will determine your company's fate, and feeling utterly isolated. Peer-advisory programs like Vistage, The Alternative Board, and Wellspring were built to break that isolation. This article maps the five peer advisory promises (perspective, social learning, accountability, transformative collaboration, and networking) and the "dumbest guy in the room" peril that good facilitation must solve.

Ready for things to get back to normal? You're not alone, but the leaders who force a full return to the office may create the very "Turnover Tsunami" they fear. With Wollard and Shuck's antecedents of engagement, GM's "Work Appropriately" policy under Mary Barra, and Bob Dylan's reminder that the times they are a-changin', this article makes the research case for remote-work flexibility and the leadership posture required to retain talent on the other side of the pandemic.

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.

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.

Every founder has a story about necessity forcing genius. The stories obscure the math: failures outnumber successes two to one. New research from Dencker, Bacq, Gruber, and Haas in the January 2021 Academy of Management Review reframes necessity as part of a motivational continuum, not a binary with opportunity. Basic needs, psychological needs, and self-fulfillment each demand a different focus. The process stays the same. The purpose changes. Leaders get to choose which.

Remote work untethered companies from their zip codes. In 2020 alone, Dropbox, Splunk, Palantir, Oracle, Tesla, and Apple expanded or moved operations to Austin, and Manhattan and Silicon Valley felt the pressure. When firms can pick up and move, relocation stops being a real estate decision and becomes a leadership one. Employees respond to three things: personal impact, compensation, and meaningful rationale. Cost savings alone won't earn the followership a move requires.

If 2020 taught us anything about work, the Owl Labs State of Remote Work Report has the receipts. Workers saved nearly $500 a month and forty minutes a day. Three-quarters matched or exceeded their pre-pandemic productivity while juggling school closures, childcare, and the occasional closet-office. And half would quit rather than return full-time to the office. Remote work didn't just survive 2020. It ran the table. The question for leaders now is whether they are ready for

Do opportunities exist out in the world waiting to be discovered, or do entrepreneurs conjure them into being through sheer force of will? The August issue of Academy of Management Perspectives opens with Eminem lyrics and then spends five articles wrestling with this unexpectedly practical question. The answer matters more than it sounds. How your organization talks about opportunity shapes who gets rewarded, which ideas get traction, and whether your firm keeps creating the

Venture capital gets the headlines, but the math tells a different story. Fewer than three percent of US startups are funded by VCs, angels, or banks combined. The other 97 percent grow using their customers' money, and many of them out-perform their venture-backed peers over the long haul. Dell, Microsoft, Zara, Costco, and Airbnb all did it. Here are the five customer-funded growth models every founder should know before they decide whether outside capital is actually the r

Yes, you're probably tired of remote work. But are you tired of remote work, or are you tired of remote work during a pandemic? The distinction matters enormously, and most leaders are getting it wrong. Judging the merits of remote work based on your 2020 experience is like judging Mexican cuisine based on Taco Bell. The ingredients look similar. The experience is not. Leaders who conflate pandemic fatigue with remote work evaluation will make expensive, long-term decisions o

New research from King's College London: only 16.7% of Covid patients held potent antibodies past 65 days. If the findings hold, the virus behaves more like the common cold than chickenpox, and any vaccine may offer only a short window of protection. The implication for business leaders is blunt, duck-and-cover strategies will fail. The job isn't to wait out the virus. It's to build a business that thrives alongside it.

When revenue contracts, the default reflex is layoffs. But research from Harvard Business Review and the BCG Henderson Institute tells a different story: companies that prepared, tightened operations, protected cash, and invested for growth outperformed their peers by double digits coming out of the Great Recession, often without resorting to cuts. Here are the four strategies, and why cutting staff belongs last in the leadership toolkit, not first.

Every leader talks about learning. Almost no one talks about unlearning — the willingness to stop doing what used to work but doesn't anymore. Two research studies from 2007 and 2016 spell out why unlearning is the capability that turns upheaval into creative destruction. Post-COVID gave every business a once-in-a-generation chance to see itself freshly. The real question: what are you ready to let go of?

Why did it take a pandemic to make remote work mainstream? Before COVID-19, remote work had grown 91% in a decade and 80-90% of US workers wanted it — yet only 3-16% actually did it on any given day. The barriers weren't technological. They were habit, managerial distrust, and quiet assumptions about what productive work looks like. The companies that use this moment to examine those assumptions will emerge stronger than they went in.