Find Your Purpose

This Week:

• Your Wake Up Call: Find Your Purpose

• Your Culture Hack: Stop Fetishizing “Leadership”

• Your Real World Insight: Human Capabilities Should Be Our Focus

• Plus recommended reading: Worth noticing

Your Wake Up Call: Find Your Purpose

Your Culture Hack: Stop Fetishizing “Leadership”

Here’s something I’ve noticed. Leaders are not magical beings. Go figure! They aren’t even all very good at what they are supposed to be doing! (I said it.) But when you read about leadership, they sound so important. Working in organizations shows us that there are good leaders and bad ones. Most of the bad ones are not incompetent, but deeply, depressingly unwise. (The worst are both incompetent and unwise and those do a tremendous amount of damage.)

Writing on leadership tends to blur the distinction between having responsibility and taking it on well, which is the heart of “leadership” used as an honorific. The reality is this — it takes both competence and moral excellence — wisdom — to be a good leader. It is more about the person you are than what you do.

An aside — for all you parents who raised your kids but fear you missed the “wisdom” part of the child training curriculum — you didn’t miss it. Whatever was there the whole time, you know, the who-you-really-are-as they watch-part, that was it. Don’t worry, this part of the curriculum continues for a lifetime.

In hiring, promotion, and evaluation, as in choosing who you spend your time with, insist on wisdom. Do not assume it comes naturally with “progressively responsible roles.” It does not. Do not trust the algorithm. It has no idea what it feels like to experience the wisdom of another person. In our tech heavy, data driven, control the variables world, a long list of accomplishments and demonstrated competencies is standing in (poorly) for the thought processes and qualities of reflection that tell you who a person really is. Wisdom is demonstrated in what actually informed a person’s most difficult decisions, and the honesty to share it.

Moreover, there are serious questions about whether wisdom can be taught. Having great bosses and role models and (even) parents is helpful, but none of that makes a person wise. It takes internal work. Wisdom is a choice, a practice, a touching, fraught, uniquely human pursuit.

From the outside, wisdom appears as a kind of depth, not just knowing what can be done but knowing what should be done. In Wisdom in Leadership: Do We Have the Time to Be Wise, Melanie Hughes surveys literature on the topic, concluding that wise leaders make time for the reflection needed to make wise decisions. This takes a whole different level of thinking about what matters that goes beyond expertise in operations or product development or marketing.

The best CEOs and board chairs have had experience across multiple dimensions of the work of the organizations they lead, but are too wise to behave as “the expert.” That is a small box. Wise leaders do not live in small boxes, they grow and create growth by leaning on experts, eliciting their best work, and taking their advice well.

Practically speaking, wisdom in leadership looks like being able to hold human paradoxes. Yes, all of life is paradox. I’m sorry if I was the first to mention it. It is hard to hear if you were hoping for control. Wisdom is remaining open and flexible, while grounding yourself firmly in the non-negotiables — honesty, mission, purpose. This is very hard to teach, but not hard to spot if you know what you are looking for.

Here is what to look for. Wise leaders are good at:

• Self-management: Not reactive, but able to be influenced, wise leaders have patience and the ability to control themselves and their reactions even as they experience them.

• Learning is always happening: Wise leaders learn constantly what is most important for them to learn. They are not rigid nor are they impressionable.

• Sharing information and decision making: Wise leaders share information and authority with others, holding power while empowering those around them.

• Respect: Neither excessively proud nor insecure, wise leaders respect themselves and others and they show it in all possible ways.

• Navigating Complexity: Flexibility, where that makes sense must be combined with holding oneself and others to standards — discerning quickly what matters is a hallmark of successfully navigating new situations well.

Recommended Reading

• Inside the Invitation Only Stock Market for the Wealthy, Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2025. If you haven’t noticed this shift, you should pay attention.

• When Everyone Knows that Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life by Steven Pinker 2025. A fascinating read on what remains unsaid among people who share knowledge, and why it does.

• The Department of Education announced December 12th that Pell Grants will be made available for workforce education programs.  

• Read the Garner report on Agentic AI and how it is revolutionizing customer service. Change and adaptation is accelerating and not optional.

Your Real World Insight: Human Capabilities Should be Our Focus

I’m going to go way out on a limb and make a bold claim. There is no substitute for real relationships with real human beings. There it is. Here’s another — we need more real connection. We are living through an experiment by “tech bros” that is killing what matters. If the grownups had been asked in advance, we probably would have said “No; just no.” But what can be built often will be, and now there is opportunity in identifying what people need most and finding new ways to provide it.

McKinsey, the consulting firm that is still laying off staff to try to account for their decreasing value, notes in their Fall 2025 survey on AI adoption by US businesses that redesigning workflows is a key success factor, noting that half of the most successful adopters are doing just that. We can expect continuing job losses based on getting people out of work that AI can do better, faster, and more inexpensively.

As a stock market reflects huge optimism about the opportunities of AI, our practical experience with it suggests that human judgment is more valuable than ever. AI can write, but its writing is better suited to documenting SOPs and workflows than corporate communications. (Hey AI - it is not good when your writing is called “slop”!) Agentic AI is way more responsive to actual customer concerns than many people, because it doesn’t feel loyal or hurt or well, anything. But when it comes to building relationships and offering advice, the lack of heart and skin actually creates danger.

All of this suggests that as we rethink how we do business we should be bold and ambitious about what motivated people can create together, prioritizing new opportunities for people to do and give and be more — even as much of the work we occupied ourselves with goes away.

Humans are better at work that takes wisdom, thoughtfulness, and intuition. Making strategic decisions, reimagining the way things are done, communicating and building relationships with one another, making and fixing objects, food, and art, creating what is new.

As we shed work that we no longer need to do, there is an invitation in this moment to build totally new communities to replace the transactional organizations of the past.

We can use for our hearts and minds to build the lives, and world we would want to inhabit in this next chapter, which has certainly begun.