Most exec searches start with a job spec. I'd start with the list of decisions the CEO stops making the day the new person arrives. If that list is short, the new hire spends their first year working it out alone.

What's the clearest sign you've seen that a new strategy was landing? I mean something a team did differently on an ordinary Tuesday.

Most annual plans get written top-down in October and rewritten bottom-up in February, once the teams have read them.

An exec team that agrees in the meeting and argues in DMs afterward hasn't decided anything yet.

Founders and CEOs: what's the most useful thing a board member ever told you to stop doing?

The week before a board meeting, a lot of exec teams stop running the company to build the deck. Add up those hours once. Then ask the board which slides they read.

Most companies can tell you their revenue per head to the dollar. Ask how long it takes a problem to get from the team that spots it to someone who can fix it, and you get a shrug.

Founders: when did you stop being the person who should make the product decisions? How did you find out?

I can’t possibly add plurality to the pile of commentary about You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes film, that will continue to be here for days to come, without ruining the masterful plot. But it’s hard to overstate how important it is for any entrepreneur, storyteller, VC or indeed leader to watch that film and just to let it get you thinking.

Plenty of AI tools can draft a customer email in seconds. Then it waits two days for three sign-offs.

There was a Wharton podcast last week on how rivalry at work lifts individual performance and hurts the team. Most exec teams run that experiment on themselves every year, the week the bonus pool gets split.

Planning season. Somebody is about to write 'improve cross-functional collaboration' on a slide for the fourth year running. Pick the two teams that most need each other and give them one number they both own.

Boards now ask whether AI is changing how the company works, and a lot of CEOs answer with license counts. I'd rather hear about one team that changed how it makes decisions, and what it stopped doing because of it.

Most exec teams have one decision that's been 'nearly made' since the summer. The people two levels down have already guessed the answer and started acting on their guess.

Take the three priorities from your planning deck and count the hours your exec team spent on each last month. If one got less time than the weekly pipeline review, the team already knows that one isn't a priority.

Plenty of executive teams meet every week and never once discuss how they're working as a team. It comes up the week someone resigns.