1️⃣ The one leadership question most leaders never ask themselves.
Leadership comes loaded with pressure, scrutiny, and long hours, and most leaders describe that weight without hesitation. What do you love about leadership? It takes longer to answer. Not the perks or the title, the actual reason you keep doing it. Keith Coats says this question comes before all the harder one’s leaders face, and skipping it costs clarity, motivation, and purpose.
Read his latest article and ask yourself the same question before your next big decision.
2️⃣ Growth under pressure starts with room to think.
Every company wants innovation, resilience, and agility. None of it exists without free time. Push a team to 100% or 110% of capacity, and you get none of it, not creativity, not adaptability, not resilience. A team growing stronger under pressure needs room to think first. Watch Graeme’s reel on LinkedIn, then ask yourself where your team actually finds free time.
This is the shift Graeme talks about in his Antifragility keynote, helping leaders create teams built to thrive in disorder instead of only surviving it.
3️⃣ The best line in a recent leadership roundup says resilience is designed, not demanded.
A recent Grit Daily roundup pulled together leadership trends from voices across HR, tech, and construction. One line stood out. Stephanie Lemek says resilience is not something you demand from a team. It is something you design for them. Push through, bounce back, prove you’re tough enough, this old deal treats burnout as a willpower problem.
Lemek’s point is different. It is a design problem at the top. Read the full roundup for more perspectives from other contributors.
4️⃣ A forklift driver built one of Nike’s most important programs.
Sam McCracken drove a forklift in a Nike distribution centre. No title, no budget, no mandate, only a problem inside Indigenous communities he could not ignore. This problem became Nike N7, now worth millions in support for Indigenous organisations. Dean van Leeuwen calls people like McCracken transformational intrapreneurs and says they are one of the most important leadership advantages of the AI era. If we want transformation to scale, we need fewer programmes and more protagonists.
Read Dean’s full article on LinkedIn and subscribe to his Ignite Change Newsletter.
5️⃣ NASA nudged a moon by one percent. It changed everything.
In September 2022, NASA flew a spacecraft seven million miles and smashed it into Dimorphos, a small moon orbiting an asteroid called Didymos. The impact shifted its path by about one percent, enough to redirect a real asteroid away from Earth if we ever needed to. It is one of the scenarios in Graeme Codrington’s ThrowForward Thursday series and his Strategic Imagination Toolkit. You do not wait for the worst case to happen. You test, trial, and prove you are ready long before it does.
Watch the short clip here. It was recorded three years ago, and the point has only gotten more relevant since. Download your mini–Strategic Imagination Toolkit for FREE and start building that instinct in your team today.
None of this happens by accident. Decide today what you want your team ready for and start building it now. As always, we hope something in this week’s reads stood out. If it did, contact us and let’s start a conversation.