Performance-Based Worth: When Your Title Becomes Your Identity
Performance-Based Worth: When Your Title Becomes Your Identity August 26, 2026 Ask most executives who they are, and they’ll tell you what they do. CEO. Managing Director. VP of Operations. Founder. The title comes out before the person does. And most of us don’t notice that — because in the world we’ve built our careers […]
The Five Lies We Told Ourselves on the Way Up
The Five Lies We Told Ourselves on the Way Up August 19, 2026 Nobody climbs to the C-suite on cynicism. You get there on belief. On drive. On a set of stories you started telling yourself early — about what the title would mean, what it would feel like, what it would finally prove. Here’s […]
AI Won’t Save You From Burnout — But It Might Help You See It Coming
AI Won’t Save You From Burnout — But It Might Help You See It Coming August 12, 2026 Here’s an irony I keep sitting with: the same technology that’s stressing executives out is also getting good at detecting when they’re burning out. Let that land for a second. 73% of CEOs now report stress or […]
What Jason Marchand Taught Me About Hitting Bottom at the Top
What Jason Marchand Taught Me About Hitting Bottom at the Top August 5, 2026 I want to tell you about a CEO named Jason Marchand. Jason is fictional. But everything that happens to him is real. That’s the tension at the heart of Crash and [Burn] LEARN — the business fable I wrote to capture […]
Busy Isn’t a Strategy
Busy Isn’t a Strategy July 29, 2026 I remember weeks when every hour was accounted for and I still ended Friday feeling like I’d accomplished nothing. Back-to-back meetings from 7am. Decisions made on the fly between calls. A hundred emails that all felt urgent. A strategy deck that kept getting pushed to next week because […]
The Stress Test Your Career Never Warned You About
The Stress Test Your Career Never Warned You About July 22, 2026 Q3 always arrives the same way. The summer slows down, the inbox doesn’t, and suddenly the back half of the year is staring at you with everything that didn’t get done in H1 still sitting on the list. If you’ve felt that particular […]
The Denial Tax: Why the Warning Signs Were Always There
The Denial Tax: Why the Warning Signs Were Always There July 15, 2026 The signals don’t arrive all at once. They come in slowly — one disrupted night of sleep, one moment of irritability you write off as a tough quarter, one Sunday afternoon where the thought of Monday lands heavier than it should. They […]
What Six Years of Pressure Has Done to Your Leaders
What Six Years of Pressure Has Done to Your Leaders July 8, 2026 Do the math with me for a second. Then 2021. Then 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. Count it out on your fingers. That’s six years. Six years since the world tilted, since the pandemic became what executive advisor Christy Rutherford calls a pivotal […]
The Leadership Loneliness Nobody Talks About
The Leadership Loneliness Nobody Talks About July 1, 2026 There’s a moment that happens to most executives somewhere on the climb up. You close a big deal. You land the promotion. You finally get the title you’ve been working toward for years. The team is celebrating. Champagne, maybe. Congratulations flooding your inbox. And then you […]
Why Your Brain Sabotages Your Vacation: The Deep Dive
Why Your Brain Sabotages Your Vacation June 24, 2026 This week, Alex and Emily are discussing what summer actually reveals about executive burnout and why the most driven leaders are often the worst at resting. They walk through the four most common traps that turn executive vacations into relocated stress, from the “I’ll check in […]