Here is the uncomfortable version of how to get a leadership team out of its comfort zone: most executive teams are not avoiding the hard conversation. They’re having it, often well, often with real candour. The problem sits one layer down, in the beliefs nobody...
Nearly every executive team AJ works with can produce a moment of genuine, visible agreement: heads nodding around the table, a slide with three priorities everyone signed off on, a sense that the hard conversation finally happened. Executive team alignment looks, in...
Every leadership offsite agenda gets built the same way: someone opens a shared document, invites the team to add topics, and the day gets ordered by whoever submitted first, whoever shouted loudest in the planning call, or whoever has the most urgent-sounding...
Executive teams don’t run out of things to disagree on. They run out of time before anyone’s willing to be the one who disagrees. That’s the distinction that matters, and it’s worth being precise about it before we go further: how to break...
Executive Summary A kickoff that ends in a standing ovation but not visible change afterwards is a format problem, not a speaker problem. The real test isn’t how the room feels when leaving. It’s what’s different three days later. A good agenda...
Executive Summary Bain has found leadership teams shift, on average, only about 2% of budget to new priorities after a strategy reset, most of the plan stays theoretical. The planning to action gap isn’t a discipline problem, it’s a design problem: the...
