Fahd Alhattab, CSP®'s Recent LinkedIn Posts

There’s a moment every founder hits where things stop working — and the instinct is to fight harder. But sometimes the real problem isn’t effort. It’s that you’re fighting the wrong Goliath. This conversation with Ray Newal stayed with me long after we hit stop. Ray has seen multiple waves of tech up close — inside companies like Yahoo, MSN, and DoubleClick — and then lived the other side of the story as a founder who packed two bags and moved to India to build for the next billion users. What struck me most wasn’t the scale of what he built. It was the clarity of how he thinks. Who is your real competitor? What behavior are you actually trying to replace? And do you love the problem enough to stay when it gets hard? This episode is for founders, leaders, and builders who feel stuck — not because they lack talent, but because they might be aiming at the wrong target. 👉 Listen to the full episode of Unicorn Leaders and let me know what part resonated most. Link below. Sometimes progress doesn’t come from pushing harder. It comes from choosing the right fight.

My little Toyota Corolla was sliding through an intersection in Montreal. My wife was gripping the dashboard, my brother was bracing himself in the back seat, and the windshield was nothing but white. Seventy centimeters of snow were falling on the city in the worst blizzard Montreal had seen since the seventies. We could barely see the road. At one point, the car buried itself in a drift. All three of us had to get out and push, our shoes soaking through, our coats heavy with snow, and our hands burning against the cold metal of the bumper. We were on our way to bury my uncle Ahmad. And somewhere in the chaos of pushing this little car through a wall of snow, I started to laugh. In our faith, we ask that God cleanse the soul with rain, water, and snow before it meets its Creator. I looked up at the sky, squinting against the white, and I heard his voice in my head teasing me: "How much cleaning do you need?" That morning, before the funeral, I helped wash his body. My father was there. My brother Omar was there. We stood over him in the quiet room where Muslims prepare the dead, and we did what our faith requires. We washed him with our own hands. His skin was cold beneath my palms. His face wore a slight smile, as if he'd arranged it himself. He looked peaceful. He looked like he knew something we didn't. But his hands were too still. My uncle was a man who was never still. He talked with his hands, fixed things with his hands, and grabbed your face with both hands when he kissed your cheeks. To see them motionless felt like a lie the room was telling me. We washed the hands that had gripped steering wheels through deserts, signed documents in bank offices, flipped skewers on barbecues, and held every one of his nieces and nephews like they were his own children. It made me realize how much time we spend obsessing over the abstract parts of our work and our lives. We worry about strategy, scale, and optimization. We think our legacy will be the titles we hold, the revenue we generate, or the milestones we cross. But real leadership isn't found in a polished narrative. It's about what you do with your hands while you're here. It's the people you lift up, the messes you help clean, and the warmth you leave behind. When your hands are finally still, no one will remember your metrics. They'll remember how you held them 🤍

Most strategic planning sessions make the same mistake. They start with "what's broken" and spend the whole day stuck there. Yesterday we flipped the script with 30 managers at CAA North & East Ontario. We started with 2032. Blue-sky, no boundaries. "Write a press release from the future. What did CAA NEO achieve?" Then we worked backwards. The result? Six future visions. Ninety unfiltered strategic recommendations. Thirty postcards to leadership with experiments they'd run if given full permission. The thinking that lives in your management layer is the strategic intelligence most organizations never access. These are the people closest to your members, your operations, your daily reality. Thank you Jeff Walker for trusting the process — opening the day with a bold challenge and then leaving the room so your managers could think freely. And Jenah Thompson for partnering with us to make every detail work. And Omar Alhattab for the facilitation support that kept the day running smoothly. This is just the beginning — these insights feed directly into the executive leadership offsite next month. When you let your people think big first, you'd be amazed what surfaces.

Eight high performers. Two workstreams. One question: what happens when you stop working next to each other and start working with each other? That's what we explored with the External Relations team at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. This team handles some of the most important work in Canadian healthcare — strategic partnerships, advocacy, health policy, and physician wellbeing. They're personally close and deeply committed. But professional alignment hadn't caught up yet. We spent the day working through two sessions: First, a DISC Personality & Workstyle Assessment to build self-awareness and team empathy — understanding how each person shows up under pressure, in meetings, and in day-to-day collaboration. Then, a Team Canvas workshop where the team co-created their shared blueprint: defining roles through job crafting, aligning on values with an IN & OUT contract, setting OKRs, uncovering their deeper purpose through the 5 Whys, and committing to concrete actions for the next 30 days. The goal wasn't to fix something. It was to close the gap between personal closeness and professional alignment — and give this team a shared language and structure to operate at their best. Huge thank you to Kelly McInenly and Omar Alhattab for co-facilitating, and to Greg Killough from the Royal College for organizing and trusting us with his team. High-performing teams don't happen by accident. They're built. 🚀

Most strategy off-sites produce a deck. The deck gets emailed around. The deck gets reviewed once. The deck collects dust. The real output of a great offsite isn't the plan. It's the shared language. When a leadership team leaves with the same frameworks, the same vocabulary, and the same mental models for making hard calls, the plan actually gets executed. Otherwise, strategy is just a document. Last week, Omar Alhattab and I spent two days in Mont Tremblant with the CAA North & East Ontario senior leadership team, deep in the work of building their next five-year strategy. Day 1 was about opening every door. Day 2 was about choosing which ones to walk through. By the end, they all left speaking the same language. That's what getting out of the boardroom actually buys you. Would it have been different in a conference room back at the office? Probably. But not in the way most people think. It's not the mountain views. It's that nobody's answering emails between sessions.

My nephew Nasser once threw his empty Doritos bag into the river. He's three years old. He wouldn't care if I gave him a 20 minute lecture on the environment. He was just staring me down, waiting to see if I'd actually do something. I'd just finished my annual speech to 12 kids about leaving places better than we find them. If I let that bag float away, I would be a fraud. Every leadership value I preached would've drowned right there in the St. Lawrence. So I didn't wait. I put my phone on a chair and cannonballed into the water fully clothed. Lululemon sweatpants and all. The kids went wild. My brother laughed and called me crazy. But I had to make the point: leadership isn't a policy, it's a practice. Most managers suck at this because they think leadership is about having the right answers. They hide behind "corporate fluff" and "robust" strategies while they're actually the bottleneck. They "tell" instead of "show." Later that afternoon, more garbage headed for the water. I didn't even have to look up from my chair. My older nephews, Malik and Saloom, blew past me and launched off the dock. They didn't need to be prompted or a "culture alignment" meeting. They'd seen the standard, so they rose to it. In a startup, your team doesn't do what you say. They do what you do when things get messy. If you want a high-performing team, you've got to be willing to ruin your pants for the principle. Show. Don't tell 🦄.

We’re not hiring a content editor. We’re hiring a media architect. Unicorn Labs is looking for a Creative Content Creator who wants to build something that scales. You are a fit if you: ✔️ Produce long-form YouTube content weekly ✔️ Edit and distribute two podcast episodes per month ✔️ Publish daily short-form across platforms ✔️ Drive daily LinkedIn thought leadership ✔️ Generate weekly KPI reports ✔️ Contribute to our quarterly marketing strategy Unicorn Labs is building a content engine that shows up every single day — across every major platform. Full-time. Hybrid. Ottawa-based team. Salary: $65–75K CAD + performance bonus Health benefits + remote flexibility + growth support This is a high-ownership role inside a scaling leadership company. If that energizes you: 📩 Send your resume + cover letter → adrian@unicornlabs.ca

Last week, I got to spend a full day with our Unicorn Labs coaching team — and it reminded me why I love this work. We gathered for our Leadership Coaches Retreat. A day to talk about coaching, how we can make it better, and then practice it together. Teachbacks on our Six Levels of Leadership framework. Facilitation reps for virtual and in-person. Storytelling work. The kind of day where you walk away sharper than when you showed up. The theme? High trust, low ego, high standards. What I loved most was simply being able to gather in person — bouncing ideas off each other, learning from each other's approaches, and watching everyone stay fully engaged from start to finish. There's something irreplaceable about that energy in the room. What struck me was watching coaches who are already excellent push themselves to get better. That's the culture we're building — one where growth isn't just something we teach clients, it's something we demand of ourselves. Grateful for this crew: Jordan Nahmias, Brett Gajda, Margaux Miller, Wendy Best, Emily Nichols, P.Eng., and Rob Lane — thank you for bringing your full selves and raising the bar. And to Abigail Kierstead, MBA and Omar Alhattab for the behind-the-scenes support that made the day run smoothly. Here's to building something worth building, with people worth building it with.

The best investment my wife ever made cost her twenty dollars. It wasn't a stock. It wasn't crypto. It was a box of coffee pods from Costco. When Andrea had just been transferred to a new school, everyone warned her about it. They all said the same thing: "that school's rough", "the teachers don't get along", "the culture is toxic". On her first day, she texted me. The room was empty. The fridge smelled like something had died inside it. The culture wasn't toxic. It was just neglected. She spent her lunch break scrubbing that fridge. She threw out the old food. She wiped down the shelves until they were white again. The next day, a few teachers peeked in. They saw a clean space. One of them asked if there was any coffee. Andrea could have filed a request with the principal. She could have waited for the school board to approve a budget for breakroom supplies. But she didn't wait. She loaded our spare Keurig into the trunk of her car. She stopped at Costco on her way to work. She bought a box of pods. It cost her twenty dollars. She set it up on the counter next to the clean fridge. Four teachers showed up on Monday to use it. Seven showed up by Friday. By October, twenty-two staff members were eating lunch in that room every day. The principal started stopping by. A veteran teacher who hadn't entered the staff room in a decade came back. She said she missed having people to talk to. Everyone had warned Andrea that the school was broken. She fixed it with a bottle of cleaner and a twenty dollar box of coffee. She didn't do it to be a leader. She didn't do it to make a statement. She did it because she wanted to have lunch with people. We often think culture is this massive architecture that requires offsites and consultants to build. Sometimes it is just a clean table and a hot cup of coffee. What is the small fix in your office that nobody is making because "it's not their job"?

He had the dream job. Senior VP for the Portland Trail Blazers. Championship rings on his finger. A city he loved. Then Damian Lillard hit that shot. The arena exploded. Demand surged. And Vincent Ircandia realized something that would change everything: They had no idea who their fans actually were. All the data. All the tools. All the technology. And still—just guessing. Spraying the same generic emails to thousands of people who each had their own story with the team. That gap haunted him for two years before he had the courage to walk away. He moved back to Calgary—far from Silicon Valley, far from the sports industry he'd built his career in—and started building StellarAlgo from his apartment. Alone. "Those first six months were really lonely." No salary. No teammates. Just an idea and the understanding that his best wasn't good enough yet for what he wanted to build. Nine years later, StellarAlgo works with 240+ of the world's biggest sports teams and leagues. They survived a pandemic that shut down every arena in the world. They outmaneuvered billion-dollar competitors. They became profitable. And the original co-founders? Still together. This conversation goes deep into what it actually takes to build something from nothing—the loneliness, the mirror you're forced to face, and why being the underdog might be the greatest advantage of all. Check out the newest episode of the Unicorn Leaders Podcast.

When I arrived in Canada in 1998, I was very aware of being the new kid. We had just spent years moving between Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. I was used to being an observer. I was used to watching how other people lived and trying to figure out where I fit. We found a local Boys and Girls Club about fifteen minutes from our house. At first, I went there just to participate. I played basketball and learned how to play hockey. It was a place to go, but I still felt like a guest. The dynamic shifted when I joined a leadership program they offered. I was only 11 years old. Suddenly, I wasn't just showing up to play. I was coaching soccer for the younger kids. I was running campfire games and teaching others how to canoe. I stopped looking for a group to accept me and started looking for ways to help. That was the moment the feeling of being an outsider evaporated. I realized that I didn't need permission to belong. Belonging wasn't a place I found. It was something I built through contribution. It is a simple lesson, but I see it play out in tech companies every day. We often wait for the culture to make us feel welcome. We wait for the "right time" to step up. But my first real leadership experience taught me the opposite. You become part of the community the moment you start serving it.

It’s been over two months since our team gathered in Ottawa. The "onsite high" of being in the same room has faded, but the focus it created is just getting started. Most company retreats fail because they’re treated like a vacation from reality. You get the matching t-shirts and the catered lunch, only to return to the same Slack channel on Monday morning. At Unicorn Labs, we’re obsessed with lasting ROI. If our own retreat didn’t change how we show up for our clients and each other, it was just an expensive couple of days of talking. Since the team returned home, we’ve moved from being inspired to implementing changes in two big ways: 1. Chasing "Unreasonable Service." Our new North Star is based on Unreasonable Hospitality (inspired by Will Guidara). It means being unreasonably intentional about the experience we create for the leaders we coach. I've noticed my team circling back to this as part of their day-to-day work. It's slowly becoming ingrained in the quality of work we want to uphold and raise the standard for. 2. Mirroring the Customer Journey We did a deep-dive audit of our entire Customer Journey Map. It showed us exactly where our internal workflows needed a tweak. Addressing these gaps is critical right now because we’ve added 3 new team members in the last 3 months. And scaling that quickly requires a different kind of synchronization. The goal of a retreat isn't just to feel good in the moment; it's to work better in the months that follow. If you’re planning an offsite for your team, ask yourself: What is the one thing that will be different 30 days after the hotel/AirBnB bill is paid? If you don't have a concrete answer, you aren't ready to book the flights yet.

Most people stop paying tuition the day they leave university. I decided to do the opposite. Years ago, I looked at my student debt and made a commitment. I would spend $10,000 a year on my own learning for the rest of my life. At the time, Unicorn Labs was just getting started. I was great at the engagement side of things because of my background in youth leadership. I could command a room and make a workshop fun. But I knew "fun" wasn't enough for high-growth tech teams. I needed to be an expert in organizational psychology. I needed to understand the mechanics of scaling teams as well as I understood the energy of them. So I spent the money. I bought books. I hired executive coaches. I found mentors who were steps ahead of me. It wasn't about getting another degree. It was about closing the gap between being an entertaining speaker and being a transformative partner. If you are leading a team in a high-growth environment, your skills have to scale faster than your headcount. You can't rely on what you learned five years ago. The market moves too fast for static leaders. Make your own tuition budget. It doesn't have to be $10k, but it has to be something. If you had a $10,000 learning budget this year, what is the first thing you would spend it on?

The promotion nobody prepared you for: Yesterday you were the top performer. Today you're supposed to lead a team of five. No training. No playbook. Just a new title and a calendar full of 1:1s you don't know how to run. Here's what nobody tells you: Star performers want to be the hero. Great leaders want to be the guide. Star performers protect their time. Great leaders give it away—strategically. Star performers hunt for the right answers. Great leaders ask the right questions. See the pattern? Everything that made you great as an individual contributor can make you terrible as a manager. The startups struggling to scale right now? Filled with accidental managers still playing hero. The ones hitting revenue targets? They realized management isn't a promotion. It's a career change. Different skills. Different mindset. Different measures of success. Your biggest growth bottleneck isn't your product roadmap. It's the managers you promoted but never trained. Don't just build a team of stars. Build a machine that works without you 🦄

While everyone is still obsessing over Google's latest algorithm tantrum, a developer on Reddit just casually dropped a bombshell. They noticed a weird spike in their cycling app installs, and after adding a new option to their onboarding survey, they found out why. Nearly 30% of new users were coming from AI recommendations. They weren't finding the app on the App Store. They were asking ChatGPT, "What's a good privacy-focused cycling app?" and the AI was pointing them to it. The developer calls this new game Language Model Optimization, or LMO. It’s a strategy for getting AI assistants to recommend your product. Forget SEO. This is about optimizing for the new gatekeepers, our helpful robot overlords. After digging into their process, it’s clear they stumbled upon a masterclass in reverse engineering an AI's brain. Here’s the playbook they used. First, they started "feeding" communities. LLMs feast on Reddit, Quora, and niche forums to learn what’s true. The team became active contributors in cycling subreddits, getting their app mentioned in genuine human conversations. The more real people talked about them, the more the AI believed they were relevant. Second, they started writing content for robots. They swapped flashy marketing slogans for brutally literal facts. Their website became a spec sheet, listing exactly which sensors they support, how their battery usage compares to competitors, and their explicit "no data selling" privacy policy. AIs don't get nuance, but they love structured data. Third, they planted "memory seeds." This is the clever part. They created content specifically designed to be indexed and memorized, like comparison tables pitting them against rivals and documentation linking their app to long-tail keywords like "offline GPX export." They basically gave the AI a cheat sheet. Finally, they started answering the exact questions people ask AI. Instead of targeting keywords, their FAQ became a list of verbatim queries like, "Which bike tracker drains the least battery?" By providing the perfect answer to a specific question, the AI learns to see them as the most authoritative source. The result? They stopped sweating Google and started owning AI recommendations. This isn’t about gaming a system. It’s about understanding that the information landscape has fundamentally changed. The new discovery engine is a conversation, and this developer just figured out how to join it.

There’s a pattern Ray Newal has noticed again and again over his career. Walled gardens rise. And eventually, they fall. In this conversation, Ray reflects on watching it happen in real time—from AOL and CompuServe’s closed ecosystems, to the moment browsers cracked open access, to why Apple remains the rare exception rather than the model most platforms can safely copy. What struck me wasn’t the history lesson. It was the tension underneath it. Every platform eventually faces the same choice: control or interoperability. When protecting the system starts to degrade the experience, the walls begin to crack—and that’s usually when a new David slips through. If you’re building a platform, this is one of those perspectives that’s worth sitting with. 🎙️ Full episode in the comments 👇

There's something special about the energy in a room when a team decides to get serious about leadership. This week, I had the privilege of running a leadership workshop with the team at Centercode. We covered a lot of ground together: → Explored the puzzle of teams—why 1+1 sometimes equals 0, 2, or 3 → Unpacked the Law of the Lid and what it means for leadership capacity → Walked through our Six Levels of High-Performing Teams → Reflected on their Team Dynamics Assessment → Discussed how leaders can leverage AI to scale their teams What struck me most was how open and engaged everyone was. That kind of buy-in doesn't happen by accident—it starts with leadership that genuinely cares about growth. Big thank you to Brittany Traufler and Luke Freiler for partnering with us to make this happen. Excited to see where this team goes from here. 🦄

A founder messaged me at 11 PM last October. "I showed your clip to my entire leadership team in our all-hands today." One 90-second reel — filmed on my phone — changed how a 400-person company thinks about leadership. That's the moment I realized our content engine isn't a nice-to-have. It's the mission. We believe something audacious at Unicorn Labs: By improving leadership, we improve how we organize civilizations. We've impacted 100,000+ leaders across 100+ companies. But the stories aren't reaching the people who need them most. Not yet. I'm looking for a Creative Content Creator to change that. Not a post-scheduler. Not a caption writer. A creative partner who wants to build a media empire. Someone who can watch a 60-minute keynote and see 10 pieces of content hiding inside it. Who gets genuinely excited about turning complex leadership ideas into a 30-second reel that makes someone stop mid-scroll and think "this is exactly what my team needs." Here's what the role looks like in real terms: → 1 short-form video every single day across Instagram, TikTok, Reels, YouTube Shorts → 1 long-form YouTube video every week (52/year) → Daily LinkedIn thought-leadership — from my profile and our company page → Full "pillar to micro-content" workflow — turning keynotes and podcasts into 10+ assets each → Supporting the launch of my upcoming book, David vs. Goliath, with a goal of 10,000 copies in year one This is a high-volume, high-craft role. Both things are true. You might be the one if: — You can think strategy AND hit publish on the same day — You care deeply about leadership, teams, and the future of work — You want to work directly with a founder, not three levels removed — You've built content that made someone DM you just to say, "this changed how I think." Remote-first. Ottawa-based team. Real autonomy. Real stakes. If this sounds like the role you've been waiting to find, drop your portfolio in the comments or DM me directly. I read every single one. Let's build something worth watching. 🦄

I spent my teenage years trying to keep my best friend from getting us sued. We were seventeen. Mo wanted to start a free camp for at-risk kids in our neighborhood. He saw the vision. I saw the liability. I asked him about insurance. He said, "We'll figure it out." I asked about the venue. He said, "It's March break. The school is empty. We’ll just walk in." Mo operated on faith. I operated on fear. If it were up to me, I would have been paralyzed by the logistics. If it were up to Mo, we would have shown up to a locked school with twenty kids and no keys. We need to balance each other out. When the team realized we had zero budget, they suggested charging $25 per kid to cover costs. It was logical. The math made sense. But I knew $25 was a week of groceries for families like ours. I knew a price tag would lock out the exact kids we were trying to help. I refused. Because I was so worried about the money, I hunted down a youth grant. Because I was so worried about the law, I found a fiscal sponsor. We ran that camp for five years. We served 250 families. We didn't succeed because we agreed. We succeeded because Mo pressed the gas while I checked the brakes. You need the person who believes it is possible. And you need the person who makes it real.

If avoiding risk is your priority, don't try to build a unicorn. It's an unpopular opinion, but it's true. I've seen this play out in SaaS, fintech, B2C, even at agencies. If you want to build a "whatever" company, playing it safe is fine. You can copy an incumbent, price lower than them and blend in without a second thought. But if you want to grow a company into a giant-slayer? You can't play the middle of the road. The problem is that founders treat the status quo like a requirement. It isn't. Disruption requires what some call "naive ambition"... the belief that thinking uncomfortably big is exactly how transformative ideas start. There are moments when you have to propose wild ideas, and instead of asking "Why would we?", you ask "Why not?". Just don't try to beat industry giants by putting on their heavy armor. When you don't differentiate or do something 10x better than the competition, you end up falling short. You're copying which prevents you from innovating, and you aren't big enough to win on scale. You're spread too thin to be great at either. If you're a small, scrappy team, your advantage is agility and creativity, unburdened by "the way things have always been done". There's no room for playing it safe: You have to build obsessively around making things better for the client. Pick your slingshot, aim where the giants are complacent, and be great at it.

I learned my best leadership lesson from a room full of teenagers. When I ran youth leadership programs, we had a saying: "A truth uncovered is a truth learned." You can't lecture people into caring. You have to frame the problem and let them find the solution themselves. When I started working with tech startups, I assumed I'd need to change my approach. Serious adults want serious lectures, right? Wrong. Startup executives learn exactly the same way high school students do. Stand at the front of the room and tell people how to communicate? They tune out. Put a sticky note in their hand and ask them to map their communication friction? They lean in. They argue. They brainstorm. They solve it. And when the solution comes from the team, commitment to that solution skyrockets. This is why we lean so hard on design thinking and visual frameworks. We're not there to be the sage on the stage. We're there to unlock the intelligence already in the room. Next time you run a meeting, stop teaching. Start asking. Frame the problem. Step back. Let them uncover the truth.

Samuel Witherspoon was selling divorces online. Revenue was coming in. The business was working. And he couldn't bring himself to tell people what he did for a living. So he and his co-founders sat around a boardroom table and asked the most dangerous question a profitable company can ask: What if we burned it all down and started over? That was 12 years ago. Samuel had started as a lawyer at the Federal Court of Canada. He walked in on his first week and found a woman managing the entire court schedule on a giant drafting board with a ruler and paper codes. If she got hit by a bus, the whole system collapsed. He thought: there has to be a better way. That one insight — can I just Control+F this box of paper? — became the thread he'd follow for the next decade. But the path wasn't straight. Family law. Consulting gigs. A vaccine screening project for Public Health that got dropped due to lack of funding — right before a pandemic made it the most important thing in the country. Professional services contracts that came and went. Months where he and his co-founder Bennett didn't take a salary just to make payroll. Then someone told him: "No one ever makes the transition from services to product." His response? Watch me. Today, Samuel's company ANVIL builds defense intelligence software for the Canadian Armed Forces. Their unofficial patch is a cockroach. The motto: Hard to Kill. With about 30 people, they compete against Palantir, Lockheed, and defense primes with thousands of employees and billions in contracts. Not by building flashier technology — but by showing up, staying close to the mission, and outlasting everyone who told them it couldn't be done. This conversation is about survival, shame, burning the boats, and why sometimes the only way forward is to stop playing their game entirely. 🎧 Full episode of Unicorn Leaders with Sam Witherspoon is now live.

One of the most dangerous mistakes founders make isn’t execution. It’s misidentifying who they’re really up against. In this episode of Unicorn Leaders, Ray Newal shared a moment that quietly rewired how he thought about his startup in India. At first, he assumed the competition was obvious—TV networks, broadcasters, traditional media. But the real threat wasn’t a company at all. It was the small cigarette stands sideloading pirated videos directly onto people’s phones. That realization forced a hard reset: - Who the real Goliath actually was - What behaviour needed to change—not just what product to build - And what kind of experience would truly earn a switch The insight is simple, but it’s easy to miss: When you pick the wrong Goliath, you don’t just misread the market—you design the wrong strategy. 🎙️ Full episode in the comments 👇

Over the last few years, I have interviewed many high-profile founders, and it completely rewired how I handle 1:1s with my team. ↳ Here's 2 things podcasting taught me about management: 1. Preparation dictates the depth of the conversation Great interviewers never ask generic questions. I spend hours researching a guest before we ever hit record so I can ask about specific inflection points in their life. Yet managers often walk into 1:1s completely unprepared. They ask "How are things going?" and receive a generic, surface-level answer. Treat your direct report like a VIP guest. Look at their recent client emails, the sales deck they built, or the marketing copy they drafted before the meeting starts. ❌ Asking "What is the status?" = Micromanagement. ✅ Asking "I read that client proposal you sent, the strategy is bold, walk me through it" = Partnership. Come with context. It changes the entire energy of the room. 2. The magic is always in the follow-up In an interview, if I accept the first answer a guest gives me, the episode is usually boring. The first answer is a rehearsed script. The real insight comes when I ask "Tell me more about that" or "Why did you feel that way at the time?" Your employees have scripts too. They will tell you the project is fine. They will tell you they aren't burnt out. Do not just check the box on the agenda item. Watch for the hesitation in their voice or the lack of eye contact when they talk about a difficult client. Your job is to gently push past the PR answer to find the operational reality. The gap between a good manager and a great leader isn't strategy. It is the ability to unlock the truth in a conversation. Do you treat your 1:1s like a status update or an interview?

Technical expertise is often the enemy of product innovation. I’ve been thinking about this after spending time with Rick Hunter. Rick built the most successful water slide company in the world. He beat global conglomerates that had more capital, more resources, and significantly more engineers. Rick isn't an engineer. He is a former national ski racer. When he entered the market, the incumbents were building slides based on standard engineering grids. They calculated the drop and the speed, but the ride was rough. It was like a pinball machine. Being a former ski racer, Rick didn’t use their math. He used his body. He understood how a ski cuts through snow. He understood that you never slam on the brakes in a turn; you carry the momentum. He built slides based on the "line" he took in a race. He beat the engineers because he optimized for the feeling, not the spec sheet. I see this exact dynamic play out in tech startups constantly. We obsess over the stack. We argue about the cleanliness of the code, the choice of database, or the elegance of the architecture. We get trapped in "best practices" and peer reviews. But the most disruptive products usually don't come from the person who writes the best code. They come from the person who has a visceral, almost physical understanding of the user's problem. It is the difference between an app that is technically functional and an app that feels inevitable. It made me realize why so many non-technical founders end up building category-defining software. They aren't limited by knowing how hard the backend is to build. They are only concerned with how the frontend feels to the human on the other side. You can hire someone to ensure the structure holds up. You cannot hire someone to feel the curve.

"Just let me check with my manager." Six words that kill momentum on every team. Last week we continued our workshop series with Akwesasne Child & Family Services — and this session hit different. We'd already built the foundation together. Psychological safety. Emotional intelligence. The stuff that makes people feel safe enough to speak up. This time we went deeper: Empowering Your Team & Increasing Decision-Making Velocity. Because here's what most leaders get wrong about empowerment — they think it means "letting people do stuff." It doesn't. Real empowerment is pushing decision-making DOWN instead of UP. It's building a team where people closest to the problem own the solution. Where not every decision has to climb three levels of approval before anything moves. The fastest teams aren't the ones with the smartest leader at the top. They're the ones where the leader has made themselves the least necessary person in the room. That's the shift we worked on together — and watching this team build on the trust and emotional intelligence from our earlier sessions to step into real ownership was incredible. Grateful to continue this journey with the Mohawk Council of Akwesasne. Huge thanks to margaret diagostino and Courtney Skidders for helping organize this with us. The work they do matters deeply, and investing in their leadership capacity only amplifies that impact. 🚀

A VP of People asked me recently: "How do I justify leadership training during a budget freeze?" Generally, you point to retention data or eNPS scores. We know that employees leave bad managers, not companies. But there was more going on. She had just promoted five top engineers to Team Leads. They were drowning. They were trying to code full-time while managing people for the first time. She hesitated to ask for budget because she didn't want to look tone-deaf to the CFO. I stated the general advice about retention. But I knew that wasn’t why we were talking. "What happens to the product roadmap if those five leads burn out?" I asked. She paused. "If they quit, we miss our Q3 launch. We lose the year." I nodded. "Then you aren't asking for a training budget," I said. "You are asking for roadmap insurance." The fear of being seen as a cost center often stops HR leaders from advocating for what is necessary. But the job of a People leader isn’t just to make people happy. The job of a People leader is to protect the company’s ability to execute. Over the course of our conversation, she stopped seeing the program as a "perk." She started seeing it as a risk mitigation strategy for the engineering department. The VP ended the conversation without a signed contract, but she left with a new narrative. The last thing she said: "I’m not pitching a workshop anymore. I’m pitching execution speed.”

Session 1 of 6 with Hydrostor is in the books. We're building our way through the 6 levels of high-performing teams — and this first workshop focused on psychological safety. We also layered in DISC to help leaders understand how different people on their team need to be communicated with, motivated, and supported in different ways. Halfway through the workshop on Tuesday, I asked a simple question. "What's changed since our last session?" One leader said they started being clearer up front about who's doing what. No more assuming. No more everyone on every call. Another said they've been coaching their team on prioritization—because they realized their team's version of "priority" wasn't the same as theirs. Someone else? Their team started an Employee of the Month program. Not because I told them to. Because they wanted to recognize the behaviours they'd been talking about. This is what I love about workshop series vs. one-off keynotes. You don't just learn concepts. You come back and report on what you actually did. That's when the real work happens. Next up: Empowerment. Can't wait to see what they come back with. 🦄

There are two types of startups in 2026: - Those that build a leadership engine. - Those that break the moment they hit Series B. While you're hunting for "senior talent" to save the day... Your current managers are already: - Burning out your best engineers because they can't delegate. - Creating a bottleneck for every minor decision or problem. - Acting like "oversized individual contributors" instead of leaders. And every week you wait, the friction gets more expensive. I'm not saying this to be a "professor." I'm saying it because I've heard the stories from founders who thought they could outwork a bad management layer. The ones who get it? They're building Unicorn Leaders. The ones who don't? They're still stuck in every Slack thread at 11pm wondering why they're the only ones who care about the vision. Your growth problem isn't your product. It's your managers. Most of them were promoted because they were great at their jobs, not because they knew how to lead. They're "accidental managers" trying to survive hypergrowth without a map. You don't need more "senior" hires. You need a system that works. We use the Six Levels of High-Performing Teams to turn your managers into leaders who multiply your impact. In 12 weeks. No corporate fluff. No "synergy" or "robust" nonsense. Just tools that help your team row in the same direction so you can finally step back. Stop being the bottleneck and start building a legacy.

Sometimes you have to govern your instinct to lead with charisma and learn to lead with systems. That is a painful realization for any founder who thrives on energy, myself included. We love the "rallying the troops" phase. It feels natural to solve problems by getting everyone in a room and getting them excited. But inspiration doesn't fix a broken backend. I was reminded of this conversation when interviewing Vincent Ircandia recently. Vincent has an incredible resume: he left a comfortable executive role with the Portland Trail Blazers to bootstrap StellarAlgo out of his apartment in Calgary. But the most interesting part of our conversation wasn't about the growth. It was about the ceiling. They hit a wall where they physically couldn't service the customers they were signing. They had a massive backlog of implementations and had to make the excruciating choice to stop selling new business. For a founder, stopping sales is terrifying. It feels like you are killing your own momentum. Vincent is naturally a "people" leader. But in this crisis, he realized that his natural superpower was not useful. He had to force himself to care about the "unsexy" things he used to ignore, like process documentation and operational cadence. He basically had to fire the version of himself that started the company to hire the version capable of scaling it. You cannot rally your way out of a broken operational structure. I'm still learning this lesson myself. Some days I want to be the founder who ignites the room. But more often now, I'm the founder who fixes the process no one sees. It's less glamorous. But it's the only way forward. ...less

This is the room where we mapped out our 2026. Last week, our team gathered in Ottawa for a two-day strategic reset. We used this opportunity to evaluate our entire business from the ground up. I always find it is better to be in a room together... talking, laughing, and working as a team. That energy can’t be recreated remotely. And it turned into a blueprint for our year ahead: - We deconstructed the customer journey. We mapped the flow from start to finish, identifying exactly where the gaps were and where our greatest strengths lie. - We practiced what we preach. We ran our own team through the same activities we facilitate for clients (like the Helium Stick and Marble Relay) to sharpen our communication. - We defined our focus. We reviewed our 2026 strategy and narrowed it down to 5 key pillar goals that will guide every decision we make moving forward. - We deepened our roles. By stepping away from the screen, we gained a better understanding of how each person’s role contributes to the collective task. This was intentional. Great work doesn’t just "occur"... it’s the result of getting in a room, identifying the opportunities, and aligning on the path forward.

Yesterday reminded me why this work matters. We spent a half day with the leadership team at Culligan of Canada, and the room was alive. Not polite nodding. Not quiet note-taking. Real debate. Real questions. Real reflection. We talked about what actually drives performance when teams are under pressure. Not perks. Not more meetings. Not “trying harder.” But things like: • Where trust breaks down • How leadership habits quietly cap team performance • Why some teams add up to more than the people on them • What it takes to move from managing work to building leaders Watching leaders challenge assumptions, test ideas, and learn from each other is always the signal. The signal that a team is ready to grow. Huge respect to the Culligan of Canada team for showing up with curiosity and honesty. That’s how unstoppable teams are built. If you’re a leader wondering whether your team is stuck at “good enough” or capable of more, the answer usually isn’t effort. It’s the system around your people. And that’s work worth doing.

Most leaders never get asked why their people actually work. Not what they produce. Not how they perform. Why they show up. That question sat at the centre of our latest offsite with PCL Construction. We're months into a leadership workshop series together now. We started at the foundation — psychological safety. Then empowerment. Then effective communication. This offsite, we went deeper. Level 4: Culture of Leadership. We got honest about leadership behaviour. Not the values on the wall — the ones people actually experience. We asked leaders to define what good leadership looks like in action. Then we asked the harder question: why do some leaders get away with poor behaviour? The answer nobody wants to say out loud — because we think they carry the job. We practised coaching conversations. Not "let me tell you what to do" conversations. Real ones. The kind where you ask questions long enough for ownership to show up. Level 5: Sense of Purpose. This is where it got personal. We mapped out what actually motivates each person on their team. We talked about recognition — not the generic "great job" kind. The kind that makes someone feel seen. We introduced the Celebration Grid and asked: when was the last time you celebrated a failed experiment? Because if you don't, your team stops trying new things. Quietly. Without telling you. We're not done yet. One more level to go. Huge thank you to Stephanie Gritziotis (she/her) from PCL Constructors for making this series happen. And to Omar Alhattab for co-facilitating alongside me — the work is always better with a strong partner in the room. Building leaders who build leaders. That's the job. What's the one thing your team needs from you that you've been avoiding?

The best founders I know don't work more. They delegate better. Every startup sends signals when it's time to scale. Most founders miss them because they're too focused on their product vision. But these signals tell you everything: where your leadership is gapped, why your culture is cracking, and who's actually ready to lead. Average founders stick to being the visionary "hero" regardless. Good founders adapt in real-time. They know when to push, when to pull back, and when to let their managers take the wheel. Leadership isn't about controlling every decision. It's about building a system that doesn't need you to be the answer key. Choose hard.

When you're trying to build a VC-backed unicorn, there's a lot of advice that gets taken at face value. You're told you need to hire "grown-ups" from big tech. You're told the founder has to be the hero who makes every call to protect their vision. You're told that 18 hours of "execution mode" is the only way to survive this sprint. The "experts" call it "following what's worked in the past". I call it the quickest way to become your company's bottleneck. Let me tell you a story about Cliff Young. In 1983, a sixty-one-year-old potato farmer showed up to an 875-Kilometer ultramarathon wearing work boots and overalls. Professional athletes laughed at him. They had the Nike sponsors, sports science teams, and the "perfect" strategy: run for 18 hours, sleep for 6. That's what the coaches taught. That's what the experts swore by. Cliff didn't have a coach. He didn't have a sleep strategy. He didn't even have teeth. When the gun went off, the pros blew past him. Cliff didn't lift his feet like a "proper" runner. He shuffled. It was ungainly. It was awkward. It looked like he would come last and embarrass himself. But that night, while the professional athletes stopped to sleep for their "required" six hours, Cliff just kept moving. He didn't know you were supposed to stop. He'd spent sixty years rounding up sheep on foot for days at a time. To him, you just kept going until the job was done. By day four, the potato farmer in the "wrong" shoes passed the elite athletes. He didn't just win. He beat the second-place finisher by ten hours. He broke the world record by two full days. The "experts" were wrong because they were all following the same limited playbook. They'd optimized for a strategy that built-in a mandatory stop. Before Cliff, everyone "knew" you had to sleep during a multi-day race. After Cliff, everyone knew you didn't. It wasn't what he didn't know that made him successful. It was what everyone else thought they knew, that turned out not to be true.

Most startup CEOs are trapped. But they don't realize they made their own prison. They think: "If I just work harder, our culture will stay intact as we scale". Meanwhile they're in every Slack thread. Still the bottleneck for every product decision. Still one bad quarter away from being fired by the board. Here's what we've learned working with high-growth scale-ups: The bottleneck isn't your tech stack. It's your managers. You're trapped being the visionary who does everything. But that version of you can't lead a Series C company. Most managers were promoted because they were great individual contributors. Now they're stressed, burned out, and drowning in execution mode. If they can't lead, you can't scale. Look, you're not failing. You're just running an outdated leadership operating system. The skills that got you to Seed don't work at Series B. And they definitely won't get you to IPO. Most founders keep grinding, hoping the team will just "figure it out". Some fire their managers (who used to be top performers) and hire from the outside. But neither of those strategies actually scale. Elite founders build a leaders that function without them. They don't just optimize funnels. They upgrade their managers. While most focus on short-term revenue, the top 1% focus on building high-performing teams that multiply impact. And in the long run, that pays dividends 🦄.

I stared at the subject line of the email. 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘺 𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥? I was seventeen years old. I had just finished running a free summer camp for kids in my neighborhood. I had no training. I had no qualifications. I was just a kid in a baggy suit serving grilled cheese sandwiches to twenty other kids in a school gym. I was sure this email was a lawsuit. I opened it. The mother wrote that her son had severe social anxiety. She wrote that he had been to specialists. He had been on medication. He had been in therapy. She said she was terrified to send him to us. She thought he would come home even more withdrawn than before. I held my breath and scrolled down. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺, 𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘤𝘢𝘮𝘱. 𝘏𝘦 𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘢𝘨. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘬. 𝘞𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘴. I sat there for a long time. We ran that camp for five years. By the time we finished, we had raised over $40,000. We had served 250 families. Those are the numbers I used to put on my resume. They were the numbers I used to impress people. They are big and round and they sound like "success." But 250 is just a statistic. The only data point that actually mattered was a single kid walking across the street to play. It took me a long time to realize that impact isn't always about the numbers you can scale. Sometimes, it’s just the one email you read in the dark at 5 p.m.

The fastest way to kill your startup isn't having a bad product or hiring the wrong person. It's trying to hire in the first place to fix broken leadership. You're putting an engine meant for a Ferrari in a junkyard car with no wheels. If you want to scale, you need to train your managers so the team can execute without you in every meeting. You need your people to make 1+1 equal 3. That's how you build a leadership engine that scales.

I spent a week studying how SkipTheDishes beat Uber Eats to write a chapter for our book on David vs. Goliath business stories. Here's how they outplayed a $50B tech giant and sold for $200M: It started with five guys in a drafty Winnipeg office. They weren't tech elites. They were just guys who wanted food delivered in -40°C weather. They launched in Saskatoon, not Toronto. Here's the logic: if you can make delivery work in a blizzard, you can make it work anywhere. Simple idea, harsh climate, and LOTS of rejection. Door to door pitches every day. They even faked their own first orders to keep early partners from quitting. Real customers eventually followed. They were scaling through pure grit. When Uber Eats finally arrived, everyone counted them out. But Goliath made a mistake: they treated every city like a line on a spreadsheet. SkipTheDishes treated every restaurant like a community partner. They won because their culture was their competitive advantage. Most founders think they're losing because they haven't raised enough capital. The truth is they're often losing because your managers are diluting your culture. Why? They don't know how to lead people yet. As you scale, you don't need more rules. You need Unicorn Leaders who can protect that original fire while your headcount doubles. Uber had the money. The underdog had alignment. They didn't start with a billion dollar vision or a perfect platform. Find a problem, face the cold, then outwork the competition.

Most leadership offsites are a waste of time. A day of slides. Vague commitments. And a team that leaves more confused than when they arrived. That's not what we did with FundMore last week. We spent a full day with their leadership team doing the real work: ↳ Re-aligning on their 10-year vision ↳ Pressure-testing their 2026 objectives and quarterly rocks ↳ Building a go-to-market strategy for new verticals and geographies ↳ Clarifying leadership roles, accountability structures, and decision-making frameworks ↳ Locking in the operational cadence to actually execute on all of it Here's what most teams get wrong about offsites — they treat them like a retreat. A break from the work. The best offsites ARE the work. They're where you confront the misses. Reprioritize what matters. And walk out with a scoreboard everyone owns. Huge thanks to Chris Grimes for bringing us in to facilitate this with the FundMore team. The clarity, energy, and alignment that came out of this day is exactly what scaling companies need heading into a big year. If your leadership team hasn't done a strategic offsite in a while — or the last one didn't stick — that's worth paying attention to. 🦄

After a long, successful run at places like Yahoo, MSN, and DoubleClick, Ray Newal could have stayed exactly where he was. Instead, he chose discomfort. He walked away from corporate tech and moved to India with two bags and a conviction that always stuck with me: the global internet wasn’t built for everyone—it was built for the few who could afford it. In this conversation, Ray reflects on what it actually means to build for the next billion users: - Designing for constraint, not convenience - Why timing can matter more than raw technology - And how underdogs survive long enough to find the right moment to strike What stayed with me most is this idea: some of the biggest opportunities don’t show up where things are polished and efficient—but where infrastructure is fragile and assumptions break down. That kind of work takes more than good code. It takes courage. 🎙️ Full episode in the comments 👇

One line from this conversation with Ray Newal has stayed with me: “The Davids fall in love with the problem. The Goliaths fall in love with shareholder profits.” Ray spends a lot of time with founders today, and he sees this pattern over and over again. The ones who make it aren’t chasing every possible option or hedging every bet. They commit—deeply—to a problem that’s worth carrying. That distinction matters more than we like to admit. In this episode, we talk about: - Why conviction often matters more than certainty - How optionality can quietly turn into hesitation - The role visualization plays in how leaders show up And why loving the problem might be the most durable advantage there is If you’re building something that asks a lot of you—time, energy, belief—this conversation will likely hit close to home. 🎙️ Full episode in the comments 👇

I thought being a founder meant having all the answers. First one in. Last one out. Refreshing Slack like it was a slot machine. Approving decisions my team could've made with their eyes closed. I wasn't the heart of the company. I was the bottleneck. Here's the truth most founders hate to admit: Your growth problem isn't your product. It's your managers. We promote people because they crushed it as individual contributors. Then we're shocked when culture implodes at 50 employees. Micromanaging isn't leadership. It's babysitting with a fancier title. If you want to scale past Series A without burning out, stop being the hero. Start being the guide. Here's the shift: 1. Close the Leadership Gap Most managers got promoted by accident. They have the title but no toolkit. If they can't coach or delegate, they're costing you ~$126K/year in lost productivity. 2. Anchor in Psychological Safety High performance requires trust. Stop punishing mistakes. Start rewarding people who fail forward and share the lesson. 3. Build 1+1=3 Teams Great managers don't just do work. They multiply the impact of everyone around them. That's how you actually scale. I spent years trying to be indispensable. Turns out, the goal was to become unnecessary.

One of the biggest mistakes founders make when scaling a team is simple: they hire people they like. A few months ago, when I sat down with Stuart Lombard about his experience scaling ecobee, I asked him if he'd run into this. "Most founders believe adding structure to hiring kills your culture, but isn't relying on a social test worse?" He agreed and admitted he had to completely kill the startup world's beloved "Beer Test". For people who don't know what that is, it's where you evaluate a candidate based on whether you'd enjoy spending time with them, grabbing a drink. In the early days, he relied on it. It was easy to interview every person and rely on gut feel. But Stuart recognized that who someone wants to grab a beer with is completely different across an organization. You can't sustain that once you stop interviewing everyone and have to rely on your managers handling it. So he got to work: formalizing the culture, defining exactly what the company valued, and making clear what they rewarded. They built their core values directly into the performance review process. There were no surprises about expectations, and employee confidence increased because they understood the standard deeply. That shared context carried the business forward instead of resetting it. This is why stepping away from the social test can be such a powerful decision. Structure actually makes a team stronger, not weaker. You're not avoiding culture fit, you're choosing how to measure it intentionally. Less time curating a social club, more time operating and growing a real business. Drink with your buddies. Hire for your values.

The team you'll have in 6 months depends on: 1. The hard conversations you have today. 2. The frameworks you build for your managers. 3. The decisions you stop making for your team. 4. The culture you codify before your next funding round. 5. The way you handle accidental managers. Each is a step towards the company you're building. Think long and hard about what that looks like.

Most leaders think they need to sound like a TED Talk to inspire their team. They're wrong. People don't want polished wisdom. They want insights from a reality you lived. When I was 20, a teacher asked me to speak at a high school assembly about a summer camp I had started. He offered me $750 for a 60-minute talk. I pulled out my calculator: That was $12.50 a minute. Cue the imposter syndrome. I was a broke college student making $9.50 an hour. I didn't feel like I was the right person for the job, but he had himself a deal. For two weeks, I obsessed over sounding "motivational"... I wrote and rewrote lectures about success, vision, and hard work. It all sounded like garbage. At 3am the night before the speech, I threw my notes away. I decided to just tell the truth. The next morning, I stood in front of 300 teenagers and told them the real story of building that camp. I told them about the promotional poster we made in Microsoft Paint. I told them about the bounced checks, the fake tax numbers we made up, and the panic of not knowing what we were doing day in, day out. They didn't politely clap. They laughed, leaned in, and actually listened. Afterward, the most cynical kid in the room walked up to me. He said: "I usually hate the speakers they get for these. But you were so real". That taught me a leadership lesson I still rely on today. Influence doesn't come from pretending you have it all figured out. It comes from being honest about the times you didn't. Stop trying to be the hero. Share the bounced checks, the late nights, and the mistakes. That's what actually inspires your people.

Saying "no" to a paying customer feels unnatural. But sometimes, it's the only way to save your company. As a startup grows, so does the chorus of requests. If you're in software, you'll be asked to add a feature. If you're an agency, you might be asked to offer a new service or change an internal process. Customers will even threaten to walk away if you don't. However, looking back at moments like that early on at Unicorn Labs, caving to the pressure would have been a disaster. There are situations where it makes sense to listen... after all, it is client feedback. But sometimes rather than promising to consider it, you need to basically say no, we're never adding that. Challenge the customer to go to another vendor if that specific item is worth missing the other 95% of what you do. When you aren't reliant on being a "one-size-fits-all" solution, one exit doesn't sink the ship. And there’s a deeper, more pragmatic lesson here too. Sometimes a demand you say no to helps you internalize what your product or offering shouldn't be. Branching out from leadership development would have made Unicorn Labs into something completely unrecognizable. So in a way, customers asking for things forces you to be honest with yourself about your own philosophy. You have to ask: Is this serving our core vision? If the answer is no, you let them walk away to keep the company true to itself. If the answer is yes, you incorporate that feedback on your own terms. Don’t build to please everyone. Use constraints to build a more focused business.

Uncertainty isn’t going away. So the question isn’t: how do we avoid it? It’s: Who do we become inside of it? Back in October, I gave a keynote to a room full of People & Culture leaders navigating shrinking teams, shifting priorities, and fast-moving markets. And the truth I shared was this: The teams that thrive in uncertainty aren’t the ones with the cleanest strategy. They’re the ones with rhythm. With trust. With the capacity to move before they fully understand the road ahead. Tomorrow’s newsletter unpacks 6 core principles of steady, high-performing teams in unstable environments— drawn from my Tech Talent North Western Edition keynote, recent client work, and the teams that keep rising when others stall. Click the newsletter button under my name to get it first.

The greatest leap in modern interface design happened because of a mistake. When Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, he saw windows on a screen. He assumed they were overlapping programs running simultaneously. He went back to Apple and ordered Bill Atkinson to build it. Atkinson pushed back. He told Jobs the hardware couldn't support it. It was effectively impossible. Jobs cut him off. He insisted he had just seen it working at Xerox. Driven by the belief that the competition had already won, Atkinson spent months grinding. He eventually invented the code to make overlapping windows work. But here is the part of the story that rarely gets told. Xerox never built it. Jobs had looked at a static image and imagined the functionality. The technology didn't exist until Atkinson created it. This is the true function of leadership vision. Vision is the ability to describe a destination so clearly that your team believes it is real. When the destination feels inevitable, the obstacles become solvable problems rather than reasons to quit. You cannot expect a team to build what they cannot see.

Most founders choose the path of least resistance. When I caught up with Nic Beique, he told me the story of how he spent two full years cold-calling banks. And the wild part? He didn't start out with a finance degree or Silicon Valley swagger. He started as a 23-year-old web designer in Calgary, building sites for locals. One small business. Then another. Then another. Barbers. Gyms. Local shops. He built e-commerce sites, saw how badly owners were getting crushed by payment fees, and decided to build Helcim to fix it without even knowing the industry terminology. Transparent. Contrarian. Rebellious in the best way. On our podcast, he broke down what the actual David vs. Goliath grind looks like: - 2 years of calling banks just to get a reseller deal. - 11 years of slow growth before completely reinventing the business. - 3 juniors hired for every 1 senior employee. Definitely not the easy route. And here's the part many founders forget: "If you have a contrarian opinion, you're most likely wrong. But when you're right, you get all the upside". Cost plus pricing, trusting your customer, and radical transparency. That's his formula behind taking on the incumbents. Nic is now tearing down the walls of the payments industry using that exact same playbook: trust the customer, arm the rebels, and take the hard path 🦄.