ON SECOND THOUGHT
NEWSLETTER
Practical insights on leading for sustainable high performance (aka excellence minus the burnout and misery)
#7 Why Your Best Performance Practices Are Quietly Burning You Out
Many of the practices that made you successful in 2025 may be undermining your leadership in ways you can't yet see.
#6 When Pragmatism Quietly Becomes Moral Cowardice
The end of the year invites reflection—not just on outcomes, but on the decisions that shaped them.
In that pause, many leaders notice something uncomfortable…
#5 Feed the Right Algorithm
Social media and news aggregators often use algorithms to "personalize" content based on your past behavior. Your team members (and colleagues) often do much the same thing...
#4 The Messy Paradoxes of Leadership
Truly effective and enduring leadership has always been a bit messy and mired in paradox. We have always aspired to be kind and demanding, to ensure performance and enable employees to develop and make mistakes…
#3 Dogged Humility
As the old saying goes, “Little dogs bark all the time. Big dogs don’t have to.”
Any leader who spends significant time and energy “barking” their superiority, doesn’t truly believe it. And neither does anyone else around them…
#2 Where does all the time go? Some surprising math.
There rarely seems to be enough time to get everything done. Yet, many of us would be surprised at how much of our available time is habitually spent on pursuits of potentially questionable return…
#1 Reasons Matter
Erosion can be subtle. The ground on which we stand can shift in nearly imperceptible increments until one day what was is no longer, and we end up moving backwards…

