For as long as there have been managers, following and control came bundled. Explore what happens when AI pulls them apart — and why the leadership that survives is the kind no agent can absorb.

The one lever in this issue: Agents unbundle following from control.

The Story: The line I heard myself say

A few weeks ago I was on a panel at the HV Capital Talent Summit. The theme was “the agentic organization” — what companies look like when agent-to-agent communication handles most coordination and the org chart flattens under the weight of what AI can now do.

Somewhere in the second half of the conversation, I shared an observation from my practice:

“Many of my CEO clients are quietly reverting to a glorified, AI-powered founder mode — sort of a new-found love for being an individual contributor.”

A founder spots a problem Friday afternoon. They spend the weekend with an AI assistant — researching, refining, deciding. By Monday they walk into the leadership team meeting with a fully formed conclusion, and often with the implementation already in motion. No question posed to the team, no feedback loop, no buy-in — just the decision.

If you’ve done this recently, you know the feeling. It’s exhilarating! Finally, things are happening again! It’s the version of yourself that felt most alive ten years ago, when the company was you and a laptop and a very good idea.

Yours truly, looking like a preacher.

I think what’s actually happening is that the promise of the agentic organization is arriving as permission — permission to step back into the part of the job that felt most powerful, the sole author with the fast decision, and skip the part that felt slowest and most exposed… people.

Which is why I want to make the case that this shift is going to be slower, and messier, than the hype pieces from AI-native founders suggest.

The Insight: The manager goes away. The leader doesn’t.

Here's what I believe the agentic-org writers get right: the managerial layer really is going to thin out over the coming years, much of it replaced by AI.

But they're quietly collapsing two different things.

1. Management is coordination: the scaffolding that lets a hundred people work on one problem without colliding. Measured in headcount reporting up. Agents absorb most of it.

2. Leadership is clarity and connection: the ability to point at a direction, make people want to go there, and make each of them feel they matter. Agents absorb none of it.

In other words: management is span of control. Leadership is span of care. (Yes, I wrote about that here.)

But here's what the AI-pilled org thinkers conveniently forget: status matters to us. It always has. We're a social animal, and social systems organize themselves into rank and hierarchy. Most of the people leading today… well, they quite enjoy being top dog.

Donald Trump doesn't want to be an individual contributor — even if it might be more efficient. And neither do the people currently running most companies. Because status matters.

That's why this transition will take longer than the AI-native founders think. The people in leadership today aren't going back to being individual contributors, however senior. They don’t want to give up their power. Being a senior IC doesn't feed what the role was actually feeding.

The agentic organization is coming. I am sure of that. Some of it will happen faster than we’re ready for. But the people running these organizations aren’t going to hand over their following to an agent, and they shouldn’t.

Here's what that actually means. For as long as there have been managers, following and control came bundled. People followed you partly because you assigned the work, held the budget, knew what everyone was doing, cleared the path. The coordination was a big part of why you had a following at all.

Agents unbundle those two. The control goes to the machines. And what's left standing is the question that was always underneath it: strip away everything you used to coordinate — would these people still choose to follow you?

That's the real test of the next few years. Not whether you can move fast on your own over a weekend — even if it feels good.

The real test is whether the following you built can survive the removal of the thing that used to hold it together.

Your Quick Win: The pause before you decide alone

So here's the question to sit with this week, less to answer than to journal your way around:

when the coordination is gone, and all that remains is whether people still choose to follow you — who are you to them, then?

Yup, we’re going all out existential this week. Have fun!

Yours,

Julius Bachmann

The one lever in this issue:  The art of leverage is constructing asymmetry: capped downside, uncapped upside.

The Story: The wild west of private equity

I want to talk about the relationship between leverage and risk today. And as if the universe wanted to send me a sign, last week handed me the perfect place to start. Of all places, it was a windowless room at a private equity conference full of gray suits.

I was on stage at SuperReturn in Berlin, moderating a panel on value creation. Somewhere in the middle, Dan Aylott of Cambridge Associates said the quiet part out loud: among LPs, the lower mid-market has a reputation. The smaller the companies, the riskier the bet.

Then he backed it with data. Cambridge slices the market by fund size and looks at how far returns spread within each bracket. "The lower you go, the wider the dispersion," Dan said. Go small enough and the best funds beat the entire asset class while the worst trail everyone else. The same segment holds both. 

The mid-market is the wild west of private equity.

Here is what struck me: nobody on stage flinched. These were investors who had spent their careers in exactly this segment, and the spread was no news to them. It was the reason they were there.

Andi Klein of Triton explained why. The perceived risk of the segment and the value creation work, he said, are not two separate topics. They are one. Triton runs a value creation unit of more than sixty people, and that machinery exists because of the wide spread, not in spite of it.

The Insight: Leverage is easy. Risk mitigation is the craft.

Whoever applies a lever opens a door, and through it comes not only the good. Every form of leverage connects us with forces we do not fully control: markets, people, systems with a life of their own. It amplifies what comes through, profits as well as losses. The lever itself is neither good nor bad. It is an amplifier. The wide spread Dan described is simply what amplification looks like before anyone has shaped it.

Anyone can leverage the shit out of an asset. You can borrow against an asset, bet the roadmap on one hire, stake a year on a single market. What separates the investors on that stage from the ones LPs avoid is what they do with the downside once the lever is pulled.

Most leaders treat risk as a single quantity: one amorphous number you can turn up or down but never really steer. The investors I spoke with last week have long stopped seeing risk that way. They break it apart. 

Because "risk" in a portfolio company is not one thing; it is a dozen specific things: a key-person dependency, a fragile supply chain, an unprofitable product line, undocumented processes. Most can be named, and once named, acted on. That is what value creation work is: not lowering risk in the abstract, but reaching into the company and removing the failure modes one by one. They did not take less risk. They did the harder thing, and earned the open upside by cutting off the bad end. 

The art of leverage is constructing asymmetry: capped downside, uncapped upside.

The construction rests on a few principles. 

• Granularity: many small bets instead of everything on one card, so no single loss takes down the whole. 

• Reversibility: decisions structured so they can be undone cheaply if you are wrong, while you scale hard if you are right. 

• And sequence: capital is an amplifier, not a problem solver. The funds on that panel fix the system first, then add the fuel. Reverse that sequence and you have made the symmetric bet without noticing.

None of which is really about finance. Finance is just where risk is easiest to measure. The risks that actually count rarely fit a table: your name above the door, the trust you stake on a reorganization, the years you pour into a market that may never materialize. They follow the same physics of leverage, and answer the same questions. 

What are the specific failure modes hiding inside this "risk"?

Which can I remove, and does the upside still stand once I have?

Your Quick Win: Find your symmetric bet

Somewhere in your company, a bet is running at full amplification with no floor under it: the market entry with no defined exit point, the key hire the whole roadmap depends on, the product line you would never shut down because of the years already invested. 

Write down your three largest running commitments and ask of each: if this goes wrong, where does the loss stop? If the honest answer is "nowhere," you have found your symmetric bet. 

This week, turn it into an asymmetric one. 

Not a smaller ambition, but a well-understood downside.

Yours,

Julius Bachmann

The one lever in this issue: Where you push matters more than how hard you push.

Last time I laid out the Leverage Stack: the map for being deliberate rather than frantic about where and how you apply force. This is part two, and it goes after the single question the Stack exists to answer first – not which lever, but where do I place it? Where do I direct my efforts?

Because here's what I kept running into while researching this series. Almost every leader I work with is strong at pulling hard. Almost none of them stops to ask whether they're pulling in the right place. They mistake effort for direction. And the cost of that mistake is invisible, because the effort is real and the exhaustion is real – it just doesn't move anything.

A session last week made the principle concrete in a way I couldn't have scripted.

The Story: Everywhere he pushed, the company pushed back

Recently, I was working with the management team of a German PE-backed company, with around €500 million in revenue, being readied for a sale in 2028. One of my one-on-one sessions was with the CFO.

The investor had brought him in for the upside: accelerating growth through M&A, getting the company exit-ready, starting to engage investors. I've known this executive for years. This was the kind of opportunity he'd been working toward for a decade.

But he'd been met with resistance almost everywhere he turned. He wanted to put real management reporting in place, and the people who'd owned the numbers for years had a reason every quarter why the rebuild had to wait. He'd touched how people were measured and paid, and as it often does, it landed badly. Each move took something away from someone who'd been there long before he arrived. And the owners had started to notice he was the one making everyone uncomfortable.

So he came to me with a question. After ten years of working toward exactly this, he could feel it slipping. Have I lost my focus? Should I drop all this org-development work, find a couple of M&A targets, and just start engaging investors?

He said it almost as a confession. And I told him I thought he had the diagnosis exactly backwards.

The Insight: The three parts of a lever, and the one nobody uses

Before you can move, grow, or change a company, you have to see it for what it is: a system. People connected to people, roles, processes, resources, and the unwritten rules about how things actually happen. You don't issue commands into it. You intervene, and it reacts.

And here's the question almost nobody asks before they act: of all the places I could intervene, which one actually moves the most?

Think of any intervention as a lever, and a lever has three parts.

• There's how hard you push: your effort. The hours, the headcount, the force of will. My client was pushing on the reporting rebuild every single week.

• There's how long the lever is: the power of the tool you bring. A better system instead of a spreadsheet, a bigger budget, a sharper method.

• And there's the part nobody thinks about: where you place the fulcrum, which point in the system you choose to act on in the first place.

Leaders obsess over the first two. Push harder (hustle, burn more tokens). Buy a longer lever (raise more money, hire more people). Both feel like progress, and both scale in a straight line: twice the effort, at best twice the result. The third part is the only one that really moves the needle. Move the fulcrum, and the same push moves ten times the weight, or nothing at all.

This is what leverage actually is: the 80% of the outcome that comes from the right 20% of the work. And that 20% is a fulcrum placement, not an effort level.

Which is exactly what Donella Meadows established at MIT in the 1970s: in any system, where you intervene matters more than how hard you push. She ranked interventions from shallow to deep. At the shallow end, the things easy to reach and change: you raise a budget, reset a target. The number moves, the system absorbs it and carries on. At the deep end, the things almost nobody touches: the ones that decide how everything above them behaves. Change one and the structure rearranges, whether people wanted it to or not.

My client had spent six months pulling on the shallow ones.

He thought his job was the shallow work: find the targets, model the deals, get in front of investors. The visible work a CFO is hired for. And that work was real. But it wasn't his actual mandate. So I asked him the only question that mattered: 

Forget your title, why were you actually brought in? 

The answer came right away. Not "run finance." Make this company exit-ready. That is what he'll actually be judged on.

Naming it changes what everything else means. The reporting nobody will rebuild, the loose controls, the long-serving manager defending a model he won't touch: in isolation, each one looks like a distraction from the real work. Once the mandate is named, they invert. They aren't pulling him away from the job. They are the conditions that have to hold before the company can go to market at all.

This is what most focus advice gets wrong. It tells you to do fewer things. But his list wasn't too long. What was missing was the one sentence at the top that turns a scattered list into a sequence.

Look back at where he met resistance. The reporting, the controls, the people who'd been there for years – the pushback clustered exactly around the things he needed most. That's not coincidence. Shallow changes slide through; the deep ones push back, because they move something the structure rests on. The resistance was a map. He'd just been reading it as a warning.

Which points to the deepest place of all: the story the organization tells itself about why any of this is happening. As long as he's the only one carrying "we're selling," every bit of resistance lands on him personally, which is exactly what his feedback was measuring. Once that story is real and shared at the level that matters, the resistance has nowhere to stand. The most entrenched version of we've always done it this way meets a sentence it can't out-wait: it's happening, with or without you.

He'd been reaching for every tool except the one that would have made the others work.

Your Quick Win: Map one Intervention

Take one change you're trying to make right now. Not the whole transformation, one concrete thing: "get the leadership team to commit to the new strategy," "make forecasting reliable," "get product and sales to stop fighting."

Now lay out the points where you could intervene, from shallow to deep. A working version of Meadows' hierarchy, simplified:

1. Numbers. Budgets, targets, headcount. Easiest to change, and the system usually absorbs it without changing shape.

2. Process. Workflows, rules, who does what when. Harder, and it sticks longer.

3. Structure. Who reports to whom, who owns what, where the real decisions get made.

4. Information flow. Who sees what, and when. Cheaper than it looks, and often more powerful — it changes what people can act on.

5. Goals and story. What the organization is actually optimizing for, and what it believes it's doing. The deepest and the hardest, and it moves everything above it.

Then two questions:

1. Which rung are you pushing on right now? Be honest. Most effort lands on numbers and process, because those are the levers you're allowed to pull without asking anyone.

2. Which rung would actually make your change inevitable instead of effortful? Find the deepest point you have any access to, and move one notch down from where you've been working. That's where the same push starts moving real weight.

Yours,

Julius Bachmann

For years, my coaching model has been three words: clarity, leverage, resilience. Almost no one ever asks me about the other two.

The one lever in this issue: The lever isn't the hard part. The place to stand is.

Once a year, I put on a fancy suit to watch my friends receive awards. (This was my daughters favorite picture from the German Startup Awards 2026)

The Story: Why this took a while

For years, my coaching model has been three words: clarity, leverage, resilience. Almost no one ever asks about clarity or resilience. Everyone wants to talk about leverage. So back in January, I took the month off to study the one question my clients kept pulling me toward: what does leverage actually mean?

I had been circling it in client work for years, and I wasn't satisfied with any of the existing answers – the finance version, the Silicon Valley version, the productivity-hack version. I sent a note to this list asking what you meant when you used the word, and a lot (!) of you wrote back. Thank you Niklas, Helen, Gregor, Christian, Robin, Jessica, Tim, another Tim, Oliver, and more. Some of those replies are still sitting in a document I keep open. They shaped what I'm about to share more than you probably realize.

Then life got in the way. I finished my first book, some of my clients were going through wild times, I needed to take a hard look at my own organization, and my family needed me. The work kept going in the background, but slower than I'd planned.

What I kept coming back to was a much older image than any of the frameworks I'd been reading.

The Insight: The Leverage Stack

Think of the oldest image we have for leverage: Archimedes with his lever, claiming he could move the world if you gave him a place to stand.

Archimedes.

Almost everyone remembers the lever. Almost no one remembers the second half of the sentence: 

Give me a place to stand.

When a CEO asks me about leverage, they're almost always asking about the lever itself: should I raise capital, hire, automate, get on more podcasts... For sure, these are real questions. But a lever on its own doesn't do anything. It needs a place to stand – solid ground underneath the person pulling it – and it needs the right conditions around it to actually move what it's trying to move. Without those, the lever is just a stick.

There's a name for this: the leverage stack. Three layers, and they have to be worked in order. 

The leverage stack as I’ve developed it in January.

The lever you already know about – capital, systems, people, reach. These are the four types most existing conversations about leverage focus on, adapted from Naval Ravikant and others. I will go into these types in a later episode. But first, the two layers most conversations skip.

The enabling foundation underneath the lever – the place to stand. This describes all the conditions that have to be met before a lever can do useful work. There are two sides to check: 

1. the system you're trying to move (likely your business), and 

2. you, the one moving it.

The target system has to be stable enough to take the pressure and legible enough that you can see where to push. A lever on a system you don't understand is a guess. A lever on a system that snaps under load is a disaster. Don't raise a growth round on a team that's barely holding together.

You, on the other side of the lever, have to be clear about what you're actually trying to do, honest about your own capacity to operate the lever, and rested enough to handle what it will demand of you. A lever in the hands of someone who isn't ready breaks the person before it moves the system. That same fundraise won't do you any good if you're trying to save your marriage.

This is the layer almost everyone skips, because it feels like preparation rather than progress. It is also the one most leaders stumble over eventually.

The enhancing conditions around the lever — "multipliers." These compound on top of whatever lever you're pulling. They don't replace it; they make every pull either easier (or harder). A few examples:

• Reputation: when people already trust you, capital comes cheaper, the best people say yes faster, and customers extend credit before you've earned it on the merits.

• Time horizon: a founder thinking in decades compounds in a way a founder thinking in quarters structurally cannot.

• Ecosystem and community: a founder in a dense ecosystem – the right city, the right industry cluster, the right room – runs into the right people, the right capital, and the right opportunities by accident, while a founder elsewhere has to manufacture every one of those encounters deliberately.

Multipliers are “meta” in that they apply across all four lever types. The same reputation that makes capital cheaper also makes hiring faster and distribution easier.

Foundation, lever, multipliers – these are the three layers of the leverage stack. A place to stand, a way to push, and the conditions you're operating in.

Your Quick Win: Check your place to stand

Pick the biggest lever you're currently pulling on – maybe an important hire or a strategic initiative. Before you pull harder, answer four questions, fast, on the back of something:

1. Do I actually understand the system I'm trying to move, and how it will behave once leveraged?

2. Am I standing on solid foundations while I am pulling this lever?

3. What are the enhancing conditions that I am operating in with regard to this lever?

If you can't answer one cleanly, that's where the work is. Not on the lever. Underneath and above it.

Yours,

Julius Bachmann

The one lever in this issue: Conformity is a decision. We just rarely treat it as one.

Spent the entire week learning about org development from a sociological perspective in Hamburg! What a privilege.

The Story: 73 Seconds

A cold January morning. The organization was a showpiece — a symbol of human progress, technical excellence, the pride of a nation. From the outside, everything looked perfect — state-of-the-art technology, experienced teams, strict protocols.

Until it didn’t.

73 seconds. That was all that remained of years of preparation, billions in investment, and the future of seven people who had gone to work that morning. The direct cause was a brittle rubber O-ring that failed under low-temperature conditions — exactly as predicted.

The day before the launch, engineers had warned. Allan McDonald, the project manager, and Roger Boisjoly, the O-ring expert, protested. They told leadership the seals would fail below freezing. Robert Lund, the deputy director of engineering, backed them and escalated to his boss, Jerry Mason.

Mason’s reply ended the discussion: “Take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat.”

Lund relented, and the warning was set aside. The launch was approved.

Challenger, exploding shortly after launch.

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after lifting off from Cape Canaveral. Seven astronauts died.

This was the predictable output of a culture that systematically rewarded the avoidance of responsibility. No one planned to sabotage the mission.

The engineers who had spoken up — McDonald and Boisjoly — were later quietly moved to other departments, which they experienced as a kind of punishment.

The Insight: The Script of Conformity

There’s a script even more powerful than passivity. The script says “don’t disagree” — at least not when disagreement might threaten the group's harmony or goal.

The fuel for this script is one of our oldest fears: the pressure to belong. The fear of being cast out, of being labeled difficult or “not a team player,” becomes one of the strongest motivators for irresponsible silence. And it produces that familiar, painful inner conflict: we know exactly what’s right, but the wish to belong is louder. Because humans are wired to belong.

So we accept being wrong over being alone.

When this script becomes the unwritten rule of an entire organization, what emerges is a complicity of silence — and it can take down the largest, most important projects humans ever attempt.

The question worth sitting with: in your organization, what gets rewarded when someone takes off their (proverbial) engineering hat and puts on their management hat?

Your Quick Win: The Hat Test

Before your next leadership meeting, run this five-minute check:

1. Name the decision on the table. Write it in one sentence.

2. Ask the hat question. “What would I say about this if I only had my expertise hat on, with no political consideration?” Write the answer.

3. Compare it to what you actually plan to say. Note the gap.

4. Identify what’s closing the gap. Is it new information — or social pressure?

5. If it’s pressure, say one sentence of the harder version out loud in the room. Not the whole thing. Just one sentence that wouldn’t have made it through the filter.

One sentence is often enough to break a script.

Yours,

Julius Bachmann

The one lever in this issue: Stop optimizing for spotlight focus — the kind your inner critic loves — and protect a window for the scattered, distracted, slightly intoxicated kind.

The Story: A Pool Mantra and a Contradiction

My daughter Zoe is learning to swim. In style with her wondrous mind, she gets distracted — a lot. The other week, I found myself paddling backwards in front of her, repeating the same thing over and over: focus on your arms, focus on your legs. It's become a pool mantra.

And somewhere in that quasi-meditative state, while I'm admonishing her to focus, the dots connected. Dada. Pollan. The pool. Zoe's wandering eyes.

I was performing focus while accidentally entering a completely different kind of it.

The Insight: Spotlight vs. Streetlight

Pollan talks about two modes of consciousness in his recent interview with the NYT. Spotlight focus: narrow, directed, productive. The kind we celebrate, optimize for, and call discipline. It's how adults get things done.

Then there's streetlight, or lantern consciousness — scattered, wide, associative. It's how kids perceive the world. It's also how we perceive it under certain psychedelics, which Pollan knows a thing or two about.

I know it from a different context: Songwriting late at night or when I'm hungover, when traditional discipline is too tired to show up. My best songs tend to come from exactly those windows. My inner critic seems to suffer most from sleep deprivation and intoxication. (Maybe he's connected to my liver.)

Here's what struck me in the pool: we've built an entire school system — and a professional culture — around training the streetlight out of children. Sit still. Pay attention. Stay on task. We reward the spotlight and pathologize the wandering. And we're doing this at exactly the moment in history when narrow, linear, output-focused thinking is becoming the thing AI does better than us.

Scattered focus — distracted, curious, inspired, a little all over the place — is not a bug. It's where the connections happen that nobody programmed.

Zoe wasn't failing at swimming. She was succeeding at something else. I was just too focused to see it. Until I “lost” track myself.

Your Quick Win: Schedule Your Streetlight Window

You probably already protect time for deep work. Try protecting one window this week for the opposite.

1. Pick a low-willpower moment — late evening, early morning before coffee kicks in, a slow Sunday. When your inner critic is tired. If not, add some wine.

2. Remove the output expectation — no deliverable, no agenda. This is not a brainstorming session. It's closer to a wander.

3. Give it a loose prompt — one question, one problem, one thing you're curious about. Then let your attention drift around it rather than drilling into it.

4. Capture without editing — voice memo, notebook, whatever. Don't judge what surfaces. Your critic will want to. Let him sleep, or drink.

5. Do it for 20 minutes — that's enough. Lantern consciousness doesn't need long windows. It needs undefended ones.

We, the getting-things-done, celebrating-our-work-ethic people, tend to focus on the wrong skill. Deep work has a scheduling philosophy, a genre of books, and a productivity cult. Creative, scattered, wide-open focus has none of that.

Maybe it doesn't need one. Maybe it just needs a window.

Yours,

Julius Bachmann

I'll be honest with you: many of my newsletter ideas start in my personal life.

Not the cringe kind of “here’s buying groceries taught me about leadership”… but sometimes (actually, like twice a week), the most mundane situations help me recognize a pattern. Then, the next morning I'm sitting with a client - all the professional CEO advisor - and I see the same damn pattern playing out in their company.

That's what happened last week.

The one lever in this issue: You can share the work. You cannot share the ownership.

That’s us - pic by Grit Siwonia.

The Story: Fully Present, By Force

I spent several days home alone with my 1 and 4-year-old kids. No “co-leader”, no backup, no one to catch what I dropped. Read: My wife Jessie took a well-earned vacation with her friend to Ireland.

It was exhausting. And it cracked open something I've been trying to articulate for a long time about the nature of responsibility.

The first thing I noticed was how quickly I stopped trying to do anything extra. No optimizing, no multitasking, no sneaking a glance at my phone while pretending to watch them play. Limited capacity has a way of clarifying priorities instantly. When you know the whole thing rests on you, you stop attempting anything you can't actually carry. You do the basics. You do them well. And oddly, that feels like enough.

The second thing I noticed was how present I became. Not because I'm a particularly mindful person, but because there was no exit. No "I'll half-pay attention here because my partner will pick up the thread." No quiet hope that someone else would handle the difficult moment at the kitchen table. It was just me and two small humans who needed me fully. So I showed up fully. The quality of those 48 hours - genuinely - was higher than many weekends where we were both there but each half-somewhere-else.

The third thing I noticed was the absence of drag. Hungry? Pasta. Tired? We sleep now. Dispute over cups? Ruling is final. I'm not glorifying this - a benevolent dictatorship is still a dictatorship. But there is something clarifying about a loop that goes directly from observation to decision to action, with nothing in between.

When my wife came home, I was genuinely relieved. I had missed her. The system is warmer, richer, and more sustainable when we are together. But I also noticed - immediately - how the weight redistributed. And with it, almost imperceptibly, how my attention did too.

That observation stuck with me.

The Insight: Responsibility Does Not Split

Here is the belief I keep coming back to, both at home and with my clients:

Responsibility cannot be shared. Work can.

It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it is decidedly not: When two people share the work, the system becomes more productive. When they share the mental and emotional load, they feel less alone. And when they share responsibility - meaning both hold 100%, simultaneously - the system becomes more resilient. When one makes a mistake, the other catches it. When one falls ill (ten days of Influenza A, anyone?) or jets off to Ireland (well deserved!), the other is still there holding down the fort.

But here is what co-leadership cannot do: make you less than 100% responsible.

If you are truly co-leading, you are not each holding 50%. You are each holding 100% - because at any point, you need to be able to cover for your partner. Workload, mental load, and emotional load: all that can be shared. Ownership cannot.

The emotional experience of having a partner makes this easy to forget. You feel supported. You feel less alone. And that feeling - which is legitimate and good - quietly creates a dangerous assumption: that your partner will catch what you miss.

This assumption is where things start to fall apart.

It happens in small moments, and at unpredictable times - a standard quietly lowered, a task left slightly incomplete, an issue noticed but not quite followed through on. Nobody decides to let things slip. It just becomes possible to let things slip, because someone else might catch it. Over time, both people are doing this. The cracks don't announce themselves. They accumulate.

This is what it looks like when two people (business or life partners) have each quietly taken less than 100% - and assumed the other would cover the gap.

The relationship suffers next: Resentment doesn't need a dramatic incident. It just needs a long enough pattern of things falling through the cracks.

The instinct at this point is to course-correct back to 100%. To have a clarifying conversation, stage an intervention, and recommit.

But there is a more radical - and more effective - move: take one person temporarily to zero.

I don't mean this as a punishment, or a recovery retreat - it's a forcing function. When one co-leader is fully absent, the other can no longer assume anyone will catch what they drop. The gap closes - not because you negotiated it closed, but because it had to. Full ownership becomes the only option.

When my wife flew to Ireland, life (via Zoe and Theo) showed me, very quickly, what 100% responsibility actually feels like. No ambiguity.

The same logic applies at the company level. One of my CEOs is preparing to raise growth equity over the coming weeks. For the next few months, he will be largely consumed by investors and roadshows - not running the business day to day. Rather than treating this as a problem to manage, we are treating it as a developmental opportunity. His C-level team will need to run the business on their own. Fully, not "mostly" or "with check-ins."

His absence forces their ownership.

And when he returns, he steps back into a team that has genuinely levelled up - not because he trained them in a workshop, but because they had to hold the full weight themselves.

Stepping away, consciously and temporarily, is one of the most underused leadership moves I know.

(And yes - this is what my wife's vacation to Ireland taught me about leadership. I couldn't resist. Also, she brought presents back!)

Your Quick Win: Ownership Audit

This works on a napkin. You don't need a workshop.

Draw two columns.

Column A - Shared (but shouldn't be): List every area of your business where you and another leader are both "responsible." These are the domains where, if something fell through the cracks, neither of you would be clearly accountable. Some of these will be areas where you share the work - that's fine. But if you're also telling yourself you share the responsibility, you're lying to yourself. Name one owner. If you can't, that's your gap.

Column B - Truly owned: List every area where one person holds undivided ownership. No ambiguity about who answers for it.

Now look at Column A. For each item: who actually owns this? Name one person.

The goal isn't to cut your partner out. It is to make ownership explicit - so that "we're both responsible" never quietly becomes "neither of us is fully responsible."

One final question worth sitting with: Is there a domain in your business that would benefit from you stepping away for a defined period - not to abandon it, but to force genuine ownership into the people who need to grow into it?

That might be the most valuable thing you do this quarter.

Yours,

You might have optimized for autonomy. You likely forgot to optimize for presence.

This week at START Summit: A panel about leading from presence vs. leading from pain.

What You Will Learn:

• Why "span of control" is a relic of industrial thinking — and what to replace it with

• The difference between a team that runs on trust and one that runs on relationship

• A 3-question audit to find where you are the real bottleneck

The Story: The Question Behind The Question

One year ago, my piece on Jensen Huang's 60 direct reports struck a nerve. The response confirmed what many of you feel: trapped between outdated management dogma and the pressure to lead differently.

The conversation surfaced a deeper question: "If not 7, and not 60, what is the right number?"

Then I read a sharp take in The Economist that addressed this directly. There is no optimal number, it argued. The ideal span of control simply "depends" — on complexity, talent, culture, the energy of the manager.

The analysis is impeccable… but I found it a little unsatisfying.

Why? It describes the symptoms of a high-functioning organization rather than the root cause. "It depends" is the right answer to the wrong question. The conversation is about the architecture of trust and care, not about the “mechanics” of control.

Soundtrack: An oldie but goldie. Fell asleep to this on the plane back from Zurich.

The Insight: Three Spans, One That Actually Matters

Most leadership thinking stops at span of control. A few have moved to span of trust. Almost none have asked the harder question underneath both.

Span of Control asks: how many people can I personally direct, review, and correct? It's a relic of industrial management — rooted in oversight, built on the assumption that value comes from intervention. It's about managing people.

Span of Trust asks: how many people can operate autonomously because they have clarity on goals, context, and decision rights? This is better. It's the architecture of a well-designed system. Reinhard Sprenger captures it precisely: "In the context of increasingly flat hierarchies, the word 'control' must probably detach itself from the 'span' and be replaced by the 'span of trust.'"

But here's what span of trust doesn't tell you: it can be built entirely with structure. Clear OKRs, documented processes, well-designed decision frameworks. It is, if we're honest, sophisticated coordination — a cold system that works without anyone really showing up for anyone else. People can feel the difference between a system that is designed for them and a person who actually cares about them.

Which brings us to the question almost no leadership framework asks: Span of Care.

Not how many people can operate without you. But how many people can you genuinely be present for — not as a function, but as a human being? How many relationships can you actually sustain, invest in, and show up for with real attention?

This is where biology enters the conversation. Robin Dunbar's research shows our brains are built for roughly 150 stable relationships — with a much smaller inner circle (5-7 relationships) of genuine closeness. Span of care is not a leadership philosophy but a cognitive and emotional capacity limit. It is finite. And pretending otherwise is where leadership quietly breaks down.

The leverage point is this: most leadership failures aren't failures of strategy or system. They are failures of capacity — leaders who have built a wide span of trust but a hollow span of care, and whose teams feel the difference every day.

Your Quick Win: The 3-Question Span Audit

Spend five minutes this week with a pen and paper. Answer these honestly — not for your team, but for yourself.

1. The Clarity Question: If you disconnected completely for two weeks, how many of your direct reports would make the exact same priority calls you would have made? A low number means you've built dependence on your judgment, not on shared understanding.

2. The Trust Question: How many decisions landed on your desk last week because of a gap in process or permission — not because your specific expertise was required? Each one is a structural bottleneck you've chosen to keep.

3. The Care Question: For how many of your direct reports do you know what is genuinely hard for them right now — not professionally, but as a person? If the answer is fewer than half, your span of care has shrunk below your span of trust. That gap is where engagement quietly dies.

Today’s Soundtrack from yours truly.

I wrote "True North, Zoe" before my daughter was born. At the time, I told myself it was a gift for her. Looking back, I think I was trying to name something I wanted her to carry — something I'd seen too many people set down along the way.

I've been singing them to her ever since. I'm not sure she knows yet what they mean. I'm not sure I do either.

This Sunday is International Women's Day.

It arrived this week alongside a message from my friend Lauren Currie, who told me her book is finally out — a decade of work distilled into a practical, honest guide to building confidence for women. When I read what it was about, I felt like it was answering the song.

Lauren Currie OBE

Lauren's book, Be UPFRONT, is built on a simple but important premise: confidence isn't a trait you're born with or without. It's something you practice — especially in the moments the world tells you to shrink, soften, or stay silent.

That's the world I'm watching my daughter grow into. And it's also the world I'm hoping, with people like Lauren in it, is slowly changing. I don't have a framework for that. Just the honest wish that she grows up knowing her own voice — and finds a world ready to hear it.

Lauren's book Be UPFRONT is out now.

If you know a woman who needs it, or if you are that woman, I think it'll mean something.

"That should be common sense." If you find yourself saying this, you haven’t hired the wrong people—you’ve failed to lead them.

Today’s soundtrack: Leif Vollebeck covering Prince — he’s touring Europe right now.

What you'll learn:

• Why "common sense" is the laziest excuse in leadership.

• What most CEOs actually mean when they say they're being "candid."

• A 5-minute audit to turn unspoken frustration into shared clarity.

The Story: Hall Pass for Bad Behavior

I was recently catching up with a fellow writer—someone who spends a lot of time in the messy reality of scaling engineering organizations. We ended up debating feedback cultures, and I was lamenting "Ruinous Empathy"—that startup trap where everyone is so nice that no one says the hard things, and the company slowly dies of politeness.

He stopped me. The pendulum has swung too far the other way, he said. Too many founders now use "Radical Candor" as a hall pass to vent their frustrations when things go wrong. They yell. They critique. And they call it "keeping the bar high."

When we dug deeper, we realized: the root cause of this frustration isn't performance. It's projection. It almost always starts with the same sentence: "I shouldn't have to tell them that. That's just common sense."

The Insight: What Accountability Actually Means

"Common sense" is the biggest lie in leadership.

In a startup, there is no such thing as common sense. There is only shared context. And as the founder, you are the sole architect of that context.

When you say, "It's common sense that this client email should have gone out today," what you really mean is: "I have 28 prioritization criteria in my head that I have never written down, and I'm angry that you didn't telepathically download them."

That's not radical candor. It’s just venting with a fancy framework around it. And it happens because we misunderstand what accountability actually means.

Most teams think accountability means holding someone accountable after the fact. Naming the mistake. Pointing out the omission. Most teams can't even do that—there isn't enough psychological safety or commitment to each other to speak up in the first place.

But that's only half the picture. Real accountability starts before the task, not after. It lives in the expectation setting—the conversation about what good looks like before anyone gets to work. Very few teams master this part. And it's the part that unlocks everything else.

Because when we rely on unspoken expectations, we set our teams up to fail. We force them to guess. And when they guess wrong, we punish them for a lack of "instinct"—when the real failure was a lack of instruction.

True high performance isn't about hiring people who "just get it." It's about building a system where "getting it" is inevitable because the expectations are explicit.

Your Quick Win: Write It Down, Share It Tomorrow

The next time you feel a spike of frustration because someone didn't do something the "obvious" way, stop. Do not give feedback yet.

Instead, run this 3-step audit:

1. The Pause: Catch yourself saying (or thinking), "They should have known that."

2. The Write-Down: Write down exactly what they should have known. Be specific. (e.g., "They should have known that we never ship code on Fridays," or "They should have known that we prioritize speed over polish on internal tools.")

3. The Check: Ask yourself: "Where is this written down? When did I explicitly say this in a team meeting?"

If the answer is "nowhere" or "I implied it once," you don't have a performance problem. You have a clarity problem.

Your move: Take that specific expectation you just wrote down and turn it into a principle. Share it with the team tomorrow.

Stop relying on common sense. Start building shared context.

Brief note: what’s new

What You’ll Learn:

• The Performance Floor: Why "sweeping transformations" fail while "standard-setting" succeeds.

• The Self-Correction Loop: A framework for moving from top-down policing to peer-driven performance enforcement.

• The Cost of Tolerance: How to quantify the silent "performance tax" that mediocrity levies on your A-players.

Today’s soundtrack: With all the talk about Greenland, I’ve been reminded of this song.

The Story: The High-Bar Immune System

I recently sat with two CEOs grappling with the same beast: Performance Culture.

The first was mid-pivot, attempting a "sweeping transformation" across hundreds of employees. He was trying to legislate intensity from the boardroom. It was an expensive, uphill battle of memos, KPIs, and forced rankings.

The second CEO was at a different crossroads: a potential merger. As he looked under the hood of his competitor, he had a realization that changed his mind about the deal. "Our culture is simply a different species," he told me. "My team is self-policing. They have a visceral reaction to slacking. If someone isn't pulling their weight or behaving below the standard, the team calls it out and self-corrects before I even hear about it."

One CEO was playing the role of the police officer; the other had built an immune system.

The difference isn't just "vibe." It’s the realization that performance culture is the lowest common denominator of behavior you allow to exist. If you tolerate a "brilliant jerk" or a "likable underperformer," that becomes your new ceiling.

You read that right: the floor becomes the new ceiling.

The Insight: The "Systemic Fallback" of Performance

We often talk about "reaching for excellence," as if performance is an upward reach. It’s not. As James Clear notes regarding personal habits, you don’t rise to your goals; you fall to the level of your systems. In an organization, your "system" is the collective behavioral floor.

In a true high-performance culture, the "high bar" isn't a goal - it's the minimum requirement for entry.

High-performing entrepreneurs often make the mistake of thinking they can "inspire" a culture into existence. But culture isn't what you say in a town hall; it's what your team does when you aren't in the room. When a team "self-polices," they aren't being "mean" - they are protecting the integrity of their own work. They realize that excellence is a fragile ecosystem, and one person "not behaving up to standards" is a direct tax on the energy and output of the entire group.

To scale, you must move from Executive Enforcement to Peer Accountability. If the CEO is the only one defending the standard, the standard will eventually break. The bigger the organization, the sooner this will happen.

Your Quick Win: The "Standard-Setting" Audit

To stop the "performance slide," you need to identify where the floor has dropped. Spend 15 minutes on this today:

1. Identify the Accepted Mediocrity: Name one specific behavior currently tolerated in your org that would be unacceptable at a company you admire (e.g., missed deadlines without notice, lack of prep for meetings).

2. Define the High-Bar Response: What would a "self-policing" team do in response to that behavior? (e.g., A peer calling it out in the moment: "We don't show up to this meeting without the data ready.")

3. The Reset Script: At your next leadership meeting, run a quick retro on the same specific behavior. Ask: "What is the lowest level of performance we are tolerating with regard to this behavior?”

The next crisis won't hit like COVID. It's creeping—and most of us are still looking away.

What you'll learn:

• The shift from assurance to deterrence—and what it means for your business

• Why your Eastern European engineers, your investor base, and your supply chain are all exposed

• Four vulnerabilities most European founders have never stress-tested

At the start of the year, The Economist ran another piece: The headline was familiar by now: Europe needs to prepare for war.

But it's not just headlines anymore. The US just dropped into Venezuela to snatch Maduro—while declaring they don't want foreign entanglements. The Indo-Pacific and Taiwan are eerily quiet. For how long? Russia is gnawing at Ukrainian defenses and sabotaging infrastructure in northern European waters, airspace, and who knows where else we haven't discovered yet.

I used to skim these articles. I used to watch geopolitics like House of Cards — fascinated and excited, but it was far away. It was on TV and in the news.

But now I am increasingly concerned.

Europe’s generals are warning people to prepare for war

But western European societies are in denial

Over the past two years, something shifted in my practice. Defense businesses started appearing in my client portfolio. Existing clients pivoted into defense markets. And the CEOs I work with—many leading tech businesses in the German ecommerce value chain, companies born from that first wave of Berlin startups after the 2008 financial crisis—started asking different questions.

Not "how do we grow?" but "how do we survive what's coming?"

The Story

In March 2020, I was still deploying capital as an institutional investor when COVID hit like a hammer. I watched deals collapse overnight. I sat in calls where we revoked letters of intent—moments I'm not proud of. Together with the Bundesverband Deutscher Startups, I ran broadcasts on financial crisis planning. We were figuring it out in real-time, all of us.

That experience taught me something about crisis. It arrives in two forms.

The hammer: sudden, undeniable, forcing immediate action.

The creep: slow, ignorable, easy to rationalize away. (Remember the frog in the pot?)

The current security crisis is the second kind. We have time to prepare. But too many are looking away. As a society—especially in Germany—we've learned to numb ourselves to the trauma of war. It's understandable. It's also dangerous.

The Insight

There's a phrase from security analysts that captures the shift we're living through: the transition from assurance to deterrence.

For eight decades, European businesses operated in an era of assurance. Stability was assumed. Peace was the default. You could build a company without ever asking: what happens if this breaks?

That era is ending.

Now we're entering an era of deterrence—where stability must be actively defended. At significant cost. This isn't about tanks rolling into Berlin. It's about a permanent state of hybrid warfare: infrastructure sabotage, cyberattacks, geoeconomic coercion, the slow weaponization of everything from energy to talent.

What does this mean for your business?

It means vulnerabilities you've never audited are suddenly existential. Your Ukrainian engineers might receive conscription notices. Your investor base might rebalance away from Europe overnight — especially if you run a fund with professional LPs who deploy globally. Your suppliers might go dark. Your energy costs might swing by multiples, not percentages.

And here's what makes this different from COVID: the bailout isn't coming.

During the pandemic, governments froze the economy. They funded non-essential businesses to preserve the social fabric. That was the right call for a hammer crisis with a clear end.

A prolonged security crisis doesn't work that way. Fiscal policy shifts from economic preservation to sectoral prioritization. Defense, energy infrastructure, strategic manufacturing—these get unlimited debt. Germany has already carved out permanent exemptions from the Schuldenbremse for military spending above 1% of GDP.

Everyone else competes for what's left.

The capital flowing into Defense Tech right now—up 312% in the DACH region (NGP Capital Report) —isn't stimulus. It's an Iron Bubble. One in twelve VC dollars globally now flows to defense. That concentration means if you're not in a strategic sector, you're facing a capital drought while your competitors raise at inflated valuations.

Four Vulnerabilities to Audit Now

Most founders I work with have never stress-tested their business against geopolitical risk. Here's where to start:

1. Your Talent Pipeline

The DACH tech ecosystem runs on Eastern European engineering talent. Poland, Romania, Ukraine, the Baltics—over 3.5 million ICT specialists. Many of your best people hold passports from countries with active or expanding conscription frameworks.

Romania has proposed legislation requiring citizens abroad to return within 15 days during mobilization. Poland is reviewing dual-citizenship exemptions. The Baltics have high-readiness reserve models.

The question isn't whether you have engineers from these countries. It's whether your critical functions have single points of failure. Can your systems survive if three key people disappear in the same month?

2. Your Capital Structure

Who are your investors? Where are they based? How exposed are they to the denominator effect—that brutal rebalancing that happens when European asset values drop and investors pull back to rebalance or re-domesticate capital?

North American LPs provide roughly 19% of European fundraising. Family offices, particularly those concentrated in the region, face the highest default risk during geopolitical shocks. In a crisis, capital calls don't just continue—they spike, sometimes 5x in the first 30 days as GPs scramble to stabilize portfolio companies. We saw this in 2020.

3. Your Value Chain Dependencies

This is about whether your business can function even if you're fine but your upstream suppliers or downstream distribution channels aren't.

Map it. Who supplies you? Where are they located? What's their exposure to energy shocks, logistics disruptions, or regional conflict? And downstream: where are your customers concentrated? How do your products reach them? What happens if a key logistics partner goes dark?

The German e-commerce companies I work with have complex supplier networks that most have never stress-tested against a European security crisis. They never needed to think about it — and a risk department is something corporates have… but not a tech company with 500 people? Still, this is a liability until you understand it.

4. Operational Business Continuity

I recently sat in on a board meeting of one of my clients—a €50M software business. The CTO reported on their efforts to guarantee availability and uptime. Even the management team seemed surprised at how essential this work was.

In peacetime, this is operational hygiene. In a prolonged security crisis, it becomes strategic. Power redundancy, autonomous backup, internet failover—the basics of business continuity suddenly determine whether you're operating at all.

Most companies haven't asked these questions seriously. Now is a good time to start.

Your Quick Win

Pick one of these four vulnerabilities. Just one. Schedule 90 minutes this week to map it.

Not to solve it. Just to see it clearly.

Who are the three people whose departure would cripple a critical function? Which LPs in your fund have the highest regional concentration risk? Where does your supply chain touch geography you've never considered? What happens to your operations after 48 hours without grid power?

Most of what you find won't require immediate action. Some of it will. All of it will change how you think about the next three years.

I didn't write this to alarm you. I wrote it because I've seen what happens when leaders refuse to look. In 2020, the companies that moved fastest weren't the ones with the best plans—they were the ones who acknowledged the threat early enough to respond.

We have more time now than we did then. The question is whether we'll use it.

Julius

We toss it around in board meetings and coaching sessions as if we all mean the same thing. But do we?

Depending on who you ask, leverage is a very different tool:

• To a Financier, leverage is Debt. It is the use of borrowed capital to amplify returns. It is high stakes, high risk, and mathematical.

• To a Physicist, leverage is Mechanical Advantage. It is Archimedes and his fulcrum: "Give me a lever long enough... and I shall move the world." It is about moving massive objects with minimal force.

• To a Tech Founder, leverage is Scale. It is code and media that replicate with zero marginal cost.

But when I talk to my clients—and when I look at my own life—I feel these definitions are missing the human nuance. They miss the emotional weight of leverage, the relational friction, and the courage required to wield it.

The January Experiment

One of the privileges of my new reality as an author is the ability to disconnect to think.

So, I am taking all of January off. No client calls. No podcasts. No noise.

I am dedicating the entire month to deep work on this single topic: The true nature of Leverage for the modern entrepreneur.

I have my own theories. But I also have something better: You.

There are now 6,500 of you reading this newsletter — CEOs, investors, and operators. You are the practitioners who wield leverage every day.

I want to know what you see.

Theo Katzman is my artist discovery of 2025.

The Ask (Takes 2 minutes)

Reply to this email with one or two thoughts:

1. How do you define leverage? (Is it efficiency? Debt? Speed? Freedom?)

2. What is the single best resource you’ve ever found on the topic? (A book, an article, a podcast episode, a mental model).

I will be curating the best insights and sharing them when I return.

Warmly, Julius

P.S. Are you obsessed with this topic? If you have a unique thesis on leverage that you’re dying to debate, I’m opening a few 30-minute slots in January specifically for "Idea Jams." No coaching, no pitching — just a raw exchange of ideas.

Happy Holidays - belated - from my family to yours!

Today’s soundtrack: Rosalia is singing in 13 languages on her new album. Wild.

What you'll learn:

• Why "permissionless" leverage (Code & Media) is rarely the bottleneck for scaling entrepreneurs

• The "Fifth Form of Leverage" that actually determines if your Capital and Labor perform

• How to replace your 2026 to-do list with a strategic "Leverage Audit"

I organized a “Founding Fathers” Dinner this week in Berlin. Lots of fun!

Naval Ravikant famously outlined four forms of leverage: Labor, Capital, Code, and Media.

In the tech world, we are obsessed with the last two—Code and Media—because they are "permissionless." They create infinite output with zero marginal cost.

But here is the reality check for a scaling entrepreneur:

You rarely struggle with the permissionless levers.

• "Code" is just your Product. You have built it.

• "Media" is just your Go-To-Market. You have channels for it.

The bottleneck usually lies in the levers that do require permission: Labor and Capital.

But unlike software, you can’t just code humans to perform. You can't program investors to wire funds.

This is where the model breaks down.

We assume that if we hire the smart people (Labor) and raise the money (Capital), the leverage automatically works.

But it doesn’t. I see entrepreneurs every day who have the headcount and the bank balance, yet they are completely stuck.

Why?

Because Labor and Capital are useless without a transmission mechanism. A force that turns potential energy into kinetic energy.

That mechanism is the Fifth Type of Leverage: Relationships.

Think about Labor. You don't manage "labor" as an abstract resource. You manage a specific set of relationships with direct reports.

• If that relationship is high-trust, your leverage is efficient. A 5-minute call leads to a month of aligned execution.

• If that relationship is low-trust, your leverage is broken. A 5-page memo leads to confusion and drag.

The same applies to Capital. Capital isn't just money in the bank; it's the confidence of the people who gave it to you. That confidence—that relationship—is the only thing that allows you to deploy risk effectively when the market turns.

The Leverage Audit (Not A Planning Session)

This is why I don't use my Annual Review to generate "To-Do Lists."

A To-Do list is linear. It focuses on tasks. An entrepreneur's job is exponential. It focuses on people.

If you spend your holidays planning projects instead of auditing the relationships that power those projects, you are optimizing the engine while ignoring the transmission.

The 2026 Annual Review is designed to fix this.

We redesigned the questions to focus on the Four Concentric Circles of Responsibility:

1. Self: The foundation of your capacity.

2. Loved Ones: The emotional anchor.

3. Team: The "Labor" enablers.

4. Community: The ecosystem.

When you audit these circles, you don't get a list of tasks. You get a map of where your leverage is blocked—and who you need to align with to unblock it.

How to use the guide this year:

• The AI Guide: I’ve trained a custom AI to act as your sparring partner. It will help you identify which relationships are capping your leverage.

• The Notebook (German language + a version is available that includes an English-guide insert): For those who want to disconnect to reconnect.

The most productive thing you can do for 2026 isn't to add more tasks. It's to clear the friction in the relationships that carry your ambition.

Onwards. Together.

Julius

Trust isn't the unfixable "black box" most leaders believe it to be. This newsletter breaks trust down into a three-part psychological framework from 1985, giving you a precise diagnostic to actually fix it.

What you'll learn:

• Why the vague feeling "I can't trust my co-founder" is a useless management cliché—and how to replace it with a precise diagnostic.

• The 1985 psychological framework that breaks trust into three distinct, measurable components.

• A three-question "Quick Win" to pinpoint exactly where trust is broken in any high-stakes relationship (and what to do about it).

The Story: The Black Box of Leadership

I was in a coaching session with a CEO last month. He was visibly frustrated with his Chief Technology Officer, a partner he'd worked with for eight years.

"I just don't trust him anymore," the CEO said, rubbing his temples.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "He's just... I can't rely on him. The vibe is off. I'm always double-checking his team's work."

His response is the moment every leader dreads. Trust is the black box of leadership: a mysterious, all-or-nothing component that we believe powers every high-performing relationship, but one we're terrified to open up and inspect. We just know when it stops working.

This is the "trust trap." For most leaders, trust is a vague, monolithic feeling. And in most organizations, there's a tragic, unspoken assumption: once it's gone, it's gone forever. The relationship is deemed unsalvageable. You're left with a binary choice: fire them or suffer.

This belief is so common because we treat the black box as un-openable. But "I don't trust him" is a failure of diagnosis, not a final judgment. It’s as useless as a doctor telling you, "You're sick." It's a symptom that provides no path to a cure.

The good news is that trust can be broken down and rebuilt. The problem isn't that it's impossible, it's that the tools for it aren't well-known. We can move from feeling to diagnosis. And as it turns out, a team of researchers already gave us the schematic for the black box back in 1985.

The Insight: The Three-Legged Stool of Trust

In 1985, researchers John Rempel, John Holmes, and Mark Zanna at the University of Waterloo published a paper, "Trust in Close Relationships". They wanted to know what trust actually is.

They discovered it isn't one thing. It's a three-part model, a "three-legged stool." If any one leg is wobbly, the entire structure collapses.

The three components are:

1. Predictability: This is the most basic level. It's the "consistency and stability of a partner's specific behaviors, based on past experience"
   
   (= the sales report always lands in your inbox at 5 PM on Friday, as promised.)
   
   This is trust based on data. Does this person show up on time? A lack of Predictability sounds like: "I never know which version of him I'm going to get."
   

2. Dependability: This is a deeper, dispositional trust. It's the confidence in your partner's character in the face of risk
   
   (= she takes full ownership for a team mistake in the client meeting, even though it wasn't her fault.)
   
   It's about their integrity. Can I rely on this person to keep a promise, even when it's hard? A lack of Dependability sounds like: "He's consistent, but I'm not sure he has my back when it really matters."
   

3. Faith: This is the highest, most resilient form of trust. It's the feeling of confidence in the relationship's ability to handle an uncertain future
   
   (= your top competitor just raised $100M. You're worried about the market, but you have zero worry about whether your partner will be creative, resilient, and supportive through the coming crisis.)
   
   It's the belief that your partner will be responsive and caring in new, unknown situations where no data exists. A lack of Faith sounds like: "Things are fine today, but I'm terrified of what will happen when we have to face a real crisis together."

My client's problem wasn't a vague "trust" issue. After we walked through this, he realized the problem was Faith. He could predict his CTO's behavior (always defensive) and depend on him to hit old deadlines. But he had zero faith that his CTO could lead the team through the company's next unknown, complex pivot.

He didn't have a "trust problem." He had a "faith-in-the-future" problem. That's a problem you can actually solve.

Your Quick Win: The 3-Minute Trust Diagnostic

Stop using the word "trust" for one week. It’s too vague. Instead, when you feel that "vibe is off" with a direct report, co-founder, or investor, run this 3-minute diagnostic.

Pick the relationship and ask:

1. Do I have a PREDICTABILITY problem?

   • Symptom: "Their behavior is variable. I can't be sure what they'll do or say next".

   • Solution: Create bright-line rules, clear SOPs, and explicit, written agreements. This is a systems problem.

2. Do I have a DEPENDABILITY problem?

   • Symptom: "I'm not confident they'll keep their promises to me when things get tough".

   • Solution: Test this with small, well-defined "trust batteries." Give them a high-stakes (but non-critical) task with a clear promise attached and see if they keep it. This is a character problem.

3. Do I have a FAITH problem?

   • Symptom: "I feel insecure facing new, unknown situations with this person. I don't know if they'll be there for me".

   • Solution: You must have the hard conversation. Put the "unknown future" on the table. "When we face our next crisis, what can I really expect from you?" This is a vulnerability problem.

By replacing one big, emotional problem with three small, logical ones, you move from being a victim of your feelings to a leader with a plan.

Last week, the cloud servers for my screen-blocking app went down. (You probably felt it too because some most cloud based tools went to hell…) For 48 hours, I was digitally naked—a jarring reminder of how thin the barrier is between high-performance and doomscrolling.

What you'll learn:

• How your ambition creates challenges for your focus.

• How you try to convince yourself that your are productive when you are actually just avoiding the important stuff.

• Why you should not rely on time limits or deleting apps.

The Story: Productive Procrastination

My experience is a perfect example of what my friend, Stephan Schmidbauer (author of The Attention Master newsletter), calls 'productive' procrastination.

He’s not talking about TikTok. He’s talking about us. The "research" that’s really avoidance. The "networking" that’s just a dopamine chase. (I literally spent 30 minutes on LinkedIn  building an invite list for a dinner rather than writing coaching debriefs.)

We lie to ourselves that flipping between news outlets or our work apps is beneficial, but it's just a trap. We're not "keeping up"; we're just feeding an itch.

This isn't a personal failure. It’s a trap baited with our own ambition. Stephan graciously gave me permission to share his core insight, which I’ve adapted for you.

The Insight: The Ambition-Avoidance Loop

Stephan's post nails why ambitious people—founders, leaders, investors—are most at risk. We don't procrastinate with digital junk food; we procrastinate with activities that look like work.

He identifies a three-part trap (he calls it "The Founder's Dilemma") that creates a devastating feedback loop:

1. The Nature of Your Work: As a leader, your most important tasks are open-ended, uncertain, and have no clear steps (e.g., "solve GTM strategy," "hire a key exec," "secure the next round"). This uncertainty creates stress and a high perceived risk of failure.

2. The Urge for Responsiveness: Your status and identity are often tied to being responsive. Answering emails, a quick Slack reply—these actions feel like work and are instantly rewarding. They confirm your importance.

3. The Ego & Identity: Your work is a huge part of your identity. You need to feel effective. "Gathering information equals work," so "research" confirms your identity.

Here is the Ambition-Avoidance Loop:

The urge for responsiveness (2) pulls you into your phone and inbox. This constant context-switching drains your mental energy.

Now, when you face your real job—the hard, uncertain, high-stakes tasks (1)—your willpower is shot.

Instead of pushing through that messy, uncomfortable middle, it's far easier to switch to something that feels useful, like "clearing the inbox" or "checking the news." This "useful" task flatters your ego (3) and offers a tiny dopamine hit, relieving the stress of the real task.

You’ve successfully avoided the important work, all while feeling perfectly "productive."

(While I learnt this from Stephan a while ago, I cannot claim that I have mastered it fully. But I am getting better.)

Your Quick Win: Blocking + Schedules

We can try to outrun fake productivity with 'anti-productivity' hacks, but that will just melt the machine. It's futile.

You may have tried setting time limits, but that doesn't eliminate the constant context switching. You also can’t quit your email, Slack, and research apps cold turkey, and studies have shown that deleting apps only leads to a rebound shortly after.

The solution to this dilemma is "access windows." 

Have you ever noticed that when you're offline, such as in the mountains, you stop thinking about your phone? Many parents use this strategy with their children. They tell their kids that they can only use their phones at FIXED times of the day for limited periods. Once your brain has accepted this rule, it's at peace during the other times.

Instead of checking your newsfeed or email dozens of times, create schedules for them. For the rest of your workday, make hard blocking the default. This is also a mindset shift. Essentially, you decide to "opt in" to the risk of distractions only at times where it’s absolutely necessary. Before, you constantly had to opt out of distractions, a constant drain of willpower and energy.

If you don't want to rely on willpower to follow your own rules, I highly recommend the Lemio App. I use it, too, and it lets me do what I described earlier.

One last note: If you're interested in topics such as mastering attention and leveraging dopamine for yourself and your business, I highly recommend Stephan's webinar this Thursday - Nov 06 - at 5:30pm CET. I'm sure many of you will like the topic.

The CEO's guide to dopamine: Why peak focus is a system, not willpower

Even high performers are losing peak hours to dopamine drain. But there's a workday redesign to thrive.

He was the secret behind the transistor, the laser, and information theory. So why have you never heard of him?

What you'll learn:

• The story of Bell Labs' "secret weapon" and the psychological principle that unlocked multiple Nobel Prizes.

• The critical distinction between a "coach" who provides answers and a "transformative presence" that elevates your own thinking.

• A 5-minute audit to identify this force in your own life - and how to cultivate it in your leadership.

Sketch of Harry Nyquist by Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science, RIT

The Story: The Sounding Board of Geniuses

In the mid-20th century, Bell Labs was a cathedral of innovation. It was a place overflowing with titans like Claude Shannon, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley- men who bent the physical world to their will.

But among these giants walked a quieter figure, an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. By all accounts, Nyquist wasn’t the most brilliant inventor in the building. He didn’t publish groundbreaking papers at the same clip as his colleagues. Yet, the Nobel laureates and legendary physicists who stalked those halls consistently sought him out.

They would walk into his office with a problem that had tormented them for months, a knot of logic they couldn't untangle. They would talk. Nyquist would lean back, listen intently, and ask a few simple, almost naive-sounding questions.

“What’s the core challenge here?” “Could you walk me through your assumptions one more time?”

Often, halfway through explaining the problem to Nyquist, the scientist would stop mid-sentence, a look of revelation on their face. "Never mind," they'd say, "I've got it." Then they would walk out and go on to win a Nobel Prize.

This happened so often it became a known phenomenon. The "Nyquist effect." What was his magic? He wasn't providing solutions. He wasn't coaching them through a framework. He was creating a space of such profound, non-judgmental attention that these geniuses could finally hear themselves think. His presence acted as a mirror, reflecting their own thoughts back to them with absolute clarity, stripped of ego and noise. He didn’t add anything; he revealed what was already there.

The Insight: The Difference Between Helping and Serving

What Nyquist was doing gets to the heart of how we can best show up for others. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass offered a profound lens for this: the critical difference between helping and serving.

Helping, he taught, is often a dynamic of inequality. It’s based on the assumption that someone is weak and you are strong. When we "help," we can inadvertently create a sense of obligation or even reinforce the other person's feeling of inadequacy. The ego is involved-I am the one with the answer; I am fixing you.

Serving, by contrast, is a relationship between equals. It comes from a place of shared humanity. When we serve, we don't see the other person as broken or lacking. We see them as whole and resourceful, and we trust in their capacity to find their own way. Service isn't about imposing our solutions; it's about offering our presence and creating a safe space for their own wisdom to emerge.

Nyquist wasn’t helping his colleagues; he was serving their genius. He operated from a place of trust in their abilities, and his quiet presence allowed them to access their own deepest insights.

This distinction was so powerful that it changed how I view my own work. I stopped thinking of myself as a coach and started thinking of myself as a transformative presence, serving the genius of my clients. This is probably what the most valuable relationships in our lives share. Think of your best advisors, board members, colleagues, and friends. Their true value isn't just in the advice they give, but in their way of being with you—serving your potential by trusting your wholeness.

I learned about this story in David Brooks' book, "How to Know a Person"

Your Quick Win: A 5-Minute "Service" Audit

You can start cultivating this dynamic today. It begins with noticing.

1. Identify Your "Servers" (2 min): Who in your life truly serves you in this way? This is the person whose presence makes you feel more capable, not "helped" or "fixed." It could be an advisor, a friend, or a board member. Their belief in you is implicit.

2. Deconstruct the Feeling (1 min): When you're with them, what does it feel like? You probably feel seen, trusted, and more connected to your own abilities. Their value isn't just in what they know; it's in their way of being with you.

3. Practice Serving (2 min prep): In your next one-on-one, consciously shift your mindset from "helping" to "serving." Catch yourself before you jump in to solve their problem. Instead, hold the belief that they are whole and have the answer within them. Your role is simply to listen with such quality that they can find it themselves.

Ask one less "what if you tried..." question and one more "what are your thoughts on how to move forward?" question. The shift is subtle, but the impact is profound.

Your biggest impact as a leader isn't your strategy - it's the emotional wake you leave behind.

(Want to learn about one of the highest ROI investments I've made in my career? Scroll down to the bottom of this email.)

What You’ll Learn

• The 'Emotional Wake' framework: A powerful model for understanding the invisible ripple effect of your leadership presence and why you are 100% responsible for it.

• The 'First Team' Principle: Why your company's success depends on your executives abandoning loyalty to their departments when they enter the boardroom.

• The art of self-differentiation: How to take ownership of your emotional impact in a way that is authentic and doesn't require faking positivity.

Photo by Konstantin Tsibin: Nugush River (2015)

The Story

I recently received a speaking request from a healthcare company on a topic that sits at the very heart of my work: our responsibility for the energy we contribute to our relationships, both at work and at home.

As I prepared my talk, I kept coming back to a scene I've witnessed countless times: a boardroom of brilliant executives, each a master of their domain, sitting in a heavy, unproductive silence. On paper, they are a team. In reality, they are a collection of departmental ambassadors, each carefully guarding their turf, their resources, and their priorities.

The core of my message to them was this: "If you want to lead this company together, the first thing you must do is leave your loyalty to your own department at the door. In this room, your 'first team' is not the one you manage; it's the one you are a part of right now."

But this structural shift is only the beginning. The real work is more subtle. It’s about understanding the personal contribution you make to the room's energy, moment by moment.

The Insight

This isn't about the Emotional Debt I've written about before - the cost of conversations you avoid. This is about your Emotional Contribution - the active energy you bring into every single interaction. The most effective way to understand this is through the framework of your "Emotional Wake."

Think of your leadership presence as a boat moving through water. It leaves a wake—a ripple effect of your mood, words, and actions. That wake is either calm and orderly, making it easy for others to follow, or turbulent and chaotic, throwing them off course.

You are 100% responsible for your wake. You cannot blame the "choppy waters" of a stressful quarter; your job is to steer with intention.

At any given point during the day, we have a choice to get swept up in the emotions of the team or in the turmoil of our own emotions. But it isn't just that; it is ultimately a choice. Because at every point, we are co-responsible for the emotional stability and energy of the system that we're part of. This applies just as much to our teams as it does to our families. And in fact, our societies.

This responsibility is a choice, rooted in the hard science of co-regulation. Our brains are built to unconsciously sync with the nervous systems of those around us. As neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Siegel explains, we are constantly “shaping each other’s minds.” Your internal state is never private; it’s a direct input into the collective nervous system of your team.

So, if your mood is contagious, how do you lead authentically on a bad day without infecting the room?

The answer is a skill psychologist David Schnarch called self-differentiation. It’s the ability to hold onto your own emotional state while remaining responsibly connected to the group—to feel a storm internally without creating a turbulent wake for everyone else. It’s the difference between polluting the room with your feelings and reporting on them for context.

• An undifferentiated leader feels stressed and creates a wake of stress, infecting the room.

• A differentiated leader feels stressed, acknowledges it, and chooses their wake. They might say, "I'm feeling the pressure on this timeline, which is why it's critical we stay focused. Let's start with the single most important variable."

One is a reaction. The other is leadership. It is the mature ability to distinguish between, "I feel down," and, "I must pull everyone else down with me."

Your Quick Win

I’m writing this after a morning with my kids that felt like a violent tornado tearing through my sanity. In those moments, the temptation is to get swept up, scream at my little ones (they don’t know better!) and let that chaotic energy become my wake for the rest of the day.

You see: I'm not making this up. Life will put us in these situations whether we are getting the kids ready for the day or the C-level ready for a board meeting.

The practice below is the tool I use to manage my own wake when the waters get choppy.

Managing Your Wake: A 3-Minute Pre-Meeting Briefing

1. Identify Your Current (1 minute): Check in with yourself honestly. What is your internal emotional state right now? Name it. "I am feeling impatient." "I am worried about this launch." This is not for judgment, but for awareness.

2. Chart the Course (1 minute): What is the ideal outcome of this meeting? Based on that, what kind of emotional wake will help the team get there? Be specific. "We need a wake of calm, clarity, and confidence to make this decision well."

3. Steer Intentionally (1 minute): Choose one or two specific behaviors that will create your desired wake. This is your tactical plan. "To create a wake of clarity, I will start the meeting by stating the single problem we are here to solve. To create a wake of confidence, I will make sure to listen fully before I speak."

(Also, I had a quiet cup of coffee with my wife after dropping the kids at Kita.)

This small, private act of preparation is the most leveraged thing you can do to shift the dynamic of your entire team. It’s how you stop being a passenger in your team's culture and start being the one who steers.

A Special Recommendation: The Coach Behind the Curtain

Before you go, I want to share one of the best investments I’ve made in my career.

For the last four years, I've worked with my writing coach, Rachel. It is, by far, the longest-standing coaching relationship I’ve ever had. Many of you have told me you enjoy the clarity and voice of this newsletter, and Rachel’s guidance has been an indispensable part of developing it.

Several friends, clients, and even my wife have since started working with her, because her work goes far beyond simple editing. She uses writing as a vehicle for personal development, helping you uncover and articulate your most valuable ideas.

If you enjoyed the earlier issue featuring Dr. Matthew Jones, author of The Co-Founder Effect, or if you follow the work of YouTube creator Ali Abdaal, you’re already familiar with the quality of her impact. Rachel was a key collaborator on Matthew’s book and was also involved in Ali's New York Times bestseller.

In her own words, here's how she describes her work:

You can see a range of the wonderful writers she’s worked with on her testimonial page, learn more about her, or visit her newsletter archive for exercises and essays on writing.

If you’ve been thinking about taking your writing and thinking to the next level, I couldn't give a stronger recommendation. Just reply to this email, and I will personally connect you.

Rachel and I, hard at work.

You keep asking how to motivate your people. You’re asking the wrong question.

What you'll learn:

• We’re getting “Motivation” All Wrong: Why the tools you use to inspire—bonuses, praise, perks—are systematically destroying your team’s intrinsic drive.

• The Leader's Core Worldview: How your hidden assumptions about your team (Trust vs. Mistrust) dictate your company's ceiling.

• A 3-Part Framework for a High-Performance Environment: The psychological "nutrients" that create the conditions for genuine ownership, replacing the need for external motivation.

Why am I asking?

The Story: Title

A CEO I coach, let’s call him David, was frustrated. "I've hired A-players, I pay top of market, we have a great mission... but I still have to push them to take real ownership. How do I light a fire under them?"

His question is one I hear constantly. It’s the background radiation of modern leadership. And it’s based on a flawed premise.

The German management thinker Reinhard K. Sprenger argues that when leaders talk about "motivating," they usually mean applying one of the "five Bs": Belohnen (Reward), Belobigen (Praise), Bestechen (Bribe), Bedrohen (Threaten), and Bestrafen (Punish). In a corporate context, this translates to bonuses, "good job" emails, perks, performance pressure, and PIPs.

The problem isn't the tools themselves. The problem is the underlying worldview, the Menschenbild, that they reveal. David wasn't asking how to unleash his team's potential; he was implicitly asking how to manipulate them into doing what he wanted. He was assuming their internal fire was out and that his job was to be the spark.

But what if the fire is already there, and his attempts to "help" are just smothering it?

The Insight: Title

In the 1970s, psychologist Mark Lepper conducted a now-famous experiment. He observed a group of preschool children who loved drawing with colorful felt-tip pens. (My kids do, too, preferably on the floor. Theo also tried the walls…) They were, in psychological terms, intrinsically motivated. They did it for the pure joy of the activity.

Lepper divided the children into three groups:

1. The "Expected Reward" Group: Was told they would receive a special certificate if they drew.

2. The "Unexpected Reward" Group: Drew without any promise and were surprised with the same certificate afterward.

3. The "No Reward" Group: Drew and received nothing.

The real test came a few weeks later. The researchers placed the felt-tip pens back in the classroom and observed. The children from the "Unexpected Reward" and "No Reward" groups jumped back into drawing with the same initial enthusiasm.

But the children from the first group—the ones who had been promised a reward—showed dramatically less interest. The external incentive had extinguished their internal fire. They had unconsciously learned a dangerous lesson: "I draw not because it's fun, but to get a certificate." The external motivation had "discounted" the value of their internal joy.

Thanks for all of your intrinsic motivation, Theo. We will be paying better attention. =)

This reveals the core flaw in how most companies think about performance. We try to add motivation from the outside, failing to realize we are destroying what is already inside.

The alternative is not to abandon leadership, but to redefine it. Instead of being a motivator, your job is to be the architect of an environment that nourishes the three psychological nutrients identified by Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory:

1. Autonomy: This isn't chaos or a lack of rules. It’s the feeling of being the author of your own actions. It’s the shift from "I have to do this" to "I choose to do this." It's about giving your team ownership over the how.

2. Competence: The need to feel effective and capable. Your people need to feel they are winning, mastering challenges, and seeing their actions make a tangible impact. Without it, they feel helpless and disengaged.

3. Relatedness (or Social Embeddedness): The deep human need to feel connected, valued, and part of a tribe. This is about ensuring the work is done in the context of meaningful relationships and a shared mission.

When these three needs are met, the question of "How do I motivate them?" becomes irrelevant. The motivation is already there. Your only job is to get out of its way.

Your Quick Win: Title

Stop trying to motivate individuals. Start diagnosing your environment. For the next week, instead of asking "How can I push my team?", ask these three questions. This is your 3-Minute Environment Audit.

1. To Audit for Autonomy: "Where in our system are smart people waiting for permission instead of taking initiative? What process can I remove today to give them more ownership?"

2. To Audit for Competence: "Who on my team hasn't had a clear, meaningful 'win' in the last 30 days? How can I structure their work so they can experience mastery and impact this week?"

3. To Audit for Relatedness: "When was the last time we had a conversation that wasn't about a metric or a deadline, but about why our work matters to each other and to our customers?"

The answers will give you a concrete roadmap to stop being a cheap motivator and start being a world-class leader.

Excellent. This is a rich and thoughtful foundation. The user-provided text contains a strong narrative (the children's experiment), a robust psychological framework (Self-Determination Theory), and a provocative philosophical underpinning from Sprenger.

However, the raw material is not yet in the sharp, high-impact format our audience of CEOs and investors demands. It reads like a book chapter—thoughtful but too leisurely for a CEO's inbox. My job is to distill its essence, weaponize its insights, and frame it as a strategic tool, not just a psychological exploration.

The core idea—that leaders' attempts to "motivate" often backfire—is a perfect fit for this newsletter. It challenges a fundamental assumption of management. The standard is met.

Here is the edited and restructured newsletter episode.

You keep asking how to motivate your people. You’re asking the wrong question.

What You’ll Learn