Your Talent Strategy Has to Keep Up with Your AI Transformation(HBR)

   The entry-level job pipeline is thinning globally, and the consequences of eliminating these types of roles in favor of AI are compounding. Eliminate entry-level roles, and you reduce the headcount that justifies mid-level managers. Reduce mid-level managers, and you shrink the pool feeding director and VP pipelines. What looks like a staffing efficiency decision is […]
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How great leaders create a shared identity(FC)

In October 1956, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the nascent Hungarian Revolution and the national aspirations it represented, the communist empire seemed at its apex. With a strong leader, a command economy, and an iron will, it seemed undeniable that the West, with all its messy deliberation, would be unable to compete. Yet Zbigniew Brzezinski, […]
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AI speeds cybercrime by exposing flaws, and other cybersecurity news(WEF)

Six forces shaping the future of the regenerative blue economy(WEF)

6 skills everyone needs in the AI era(FC)

Eighteen months ago, most business leaders were still debating whether AI could write a convincingly human-sounding email without hallucinating. Today, artificial intelligence systems are managing codebases, conducting research, screening contracts, and operating as autonomous agents inside enterprise workflows. Some capabilities that senior technologists expected to arrive in three to five years have arrived in months. At the […]
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Why Open Door Policies Rarely Make Employees Speak Up(Forbes)

Open door policies” often fail because leaders confuse symbolic availability with genuine psychological access. While leaders intend to be approachable, employees view speaking up as a risk calculation, fearing negative consequences or being judged. The literal open door doesn’t remove the high emotional threshold. Employees are heavily influenced by observed leader reactions to bad news […]
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Everyone wants to kill the middle manager role. The data says don’t do it(FC)

There’s even a name for this—the “Great Flattening”—and it’s everywhere. Some 41% of employees say their companies trimmed management layers last year, according to Korn Ferry’s survey of 15,000 professionals worldwide. Middle managers accounted for more than 31% of all layoffs in 2023. And it’s not likely to stop, but to accelerate instead: Gartner predicts that through 2026, 20% of organizations […]
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AI Is Exposing Why Organizations Promote The Wrong Leaders(Forbes)

Organizations are redesigning work for AI while still promoting managers for a pre-AI world. The criteria that built their leadership pipelines may now be working against them. The traits that helped managers succeed in a pre-AI workplace — confidence, visibility and decisiveness — were optimized for environments where leaders were expected to project certainty, move […]
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NEW GIBS Article: Attributional sense-making of distrust in professional service firms: Working in a coopetitive paradox By Neve Abgeller, Mark N. K. Saunders, Rory Donnelly, Tony Dobbins

Abstract Distrust is an inevitable yet often overlooked feature of relationships in professional service firms (PSFs), where simultaneous demands to collaborate and compete produce a coopetitive paradox shaping everyday organizational life. Drawing on 50 in-depth qualitative interviews using the critical incident technique, we examine how professionals attribute meaning to the development of distrust in their […]
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How To Maintain High Performance And Stay Visible To Leadership(Forbes)

Exceptional performance can open doors in the workplace, but only when decision-makers know where the impact is coming from. For rising professionals, this creates a delicate balancing act: devoting enough time and attention to producing high-quality work while also ensuring that senior leaders can see, understand and remember their contributions. The most effective approach is […]
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