Each issue is grounded in peer-reviewed research and written for executives who make consequential talent and succession decisions.
Leadership Matters — Issue 02
Every CEO transition is a known event. Every board has known for years it was coming. And yet fewer than one in five organizations has a succession plan they consider adequate. This is not a planning failure. It is a systems failure — and the cost is measured in billions.
Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends; Ciampa & Watkins, 1999
Leadership Matters — Issue 03
Private equity firms spend extraordinary resources on financial engineering and operational improvement. The research shows that leadership quality at the portfolio company level is the single largest unmanaged variable in determining whether a deal achieves its return thesis.
Acharya et al., 2013; Kaplan & Strömberg, 2009
Leadership Matters — Issue 04
Google's Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the defining characteristic of high-performing teams. But safety without direction is comfort, not performance. The research on peak performance teams reveals a more nuanced picture — one with profound implications for how boards should think about team architecture.
Duhigg, 2016; Edmondson, 1999; Hackman, 2002
Leadership Matters — Issue 05
Organizations face an increasingly urgent question: how do you identify who can lead in a future that looks nothing like the past? Traditional performance metrics reward execution in stable environments — but they consistently fail to predict who will thrive amid disruption, complexity, and rapid change.
Corporate Leadership Council, 2005; McCall, 1998
Leadership Matters — Issue 06
The most experienced leaders do not make better decisions by thinking harder. They make better decisions by thinking differently — deploying pattern recognition, cognitive simulation, and structured intuition in ways that junior leaders cannot replicate.
HBR; Klein, 1998; Kahneman, 2011
The most expensive talent mistake organizations make is promoting high performers into roles that require high potentials — and vice versa. These are not the same capability. They are not even on the same continuum.
Organizations that deploy validated psychometric assessment to distinguish these four profiles make better promotion decisions, reduce leadership failure rates, and build succession pipelines that are actually ready when they are needed.
The Underlying Question
"Organizations are facing an increasingly urgent question. How do you identify who can lead in a future that looks nothing like the past?"
Traditional performance metrics reward execution in stable environments. They consistently fail to predict who will thrive amid disruption, complexity, and rapid change. Data does not replace leadership judgment — it sharpens it.
Exceptional in the current role.
Consistently exceeds targets. Masters the technical demands of their position. Reliable, trusted, and promotable — on paper. But peak performance in one role does not predict readiness for the next. The surgeon who is the best in the hospital is not automatically the best hospital administrator.
Critical insight: Assessment need: Learning agility screening before any promotion decision.
Operating at the ceiling of their domain.
Rare. Exceptional. Often the person everyone points to as the standard. But peak performance is domain-specific. These individuals have reached the outer edge of what is possible in their current context. The mistake is assuming this ceiling-touching performance transfers to a fundamentally different role.
Critical insight: Assessment need: Honest career architecture conversations grounded in data.
Built for roles that don't yet exist.
Learning agility is the defining characteristic. They absorb new contexts quickly, update their mental models under pressure, and perform in conditions of genuine ambiguity. Lombardo and Eichinger's research is unambiguous: learning agility is the single most predictive indicator of leadership potential.
Critical insight: Assessment need: Validated HiPo identification — not gut feel or tenure.
Deep expertise. No desire to lead.
Exceptional individual contributors who have mastered their craft and want to go deeper, not broader. Forcing them into management is one of the most common and costly talent mistakes organizations make — losing a brilliant contributor and gaining a reluctant, ineffective manager.
Critical insight: Assessment need: Values and motivation assessment — not just capability.
Most leadership failures are not caused by incompetence. They are caused by strengths overused under pressure — the decisive leader who becomes autocratic, the visionary who loses the room.
Peter Senge's vision of the learning organization was correct in principle and largely unrealized in practice. Thirty years later, the behavioral science exists to build it. Here is what it actually looks like.
Boards spend more time selecting auditors than selecting CEOs. The research on board governance reveals systematic biases that cost organizations billions — and are entirely preventable.
Each issue delivers research-based intelligence on leadership selection, succession planning, and organizational performance — written for boards, PE operating partners, and senior executives.
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