Merry Christmas 🎄🎄

I miss Minneapolis in the winter. ❄️ There is a tradition there of ice fishing at night. To catch anything, you have to take an auger and bore through 12 inches of solid ice to get to the water below. I’ve come to realize this is the perfect metaphor for the 'Success Dilemma.' In every successful organization, a layer of ice forms. It is the frozen layer of bureaucracy that separates the leadership from the real, raw insights of the frontline and the customer. Now, there are limits to stretching a metaphor too far, but hopefully it makes sense. Wise CEOs know they have to "bore holes." They launch forums, drive initiatives, and role model frontline focused behavior to cut through that bureaucratic layer. But the moment the initiative ends, the gap closes up again. Why? Because of The Expert Trap. Senior leaders work incredibly hard to climb the organizational hierarchy. They put in the hours to get promoted, step by step, until they become the "experts" in the Head Office. But somewhere along the way, a shift happens. They start to view these senior positions not as a greater opportunity to serve others, but as a hard earned reward for themselves. They often view the frontline as the place they graduated from. To go back down, to admit they need to learn from a 20 year old new hire, feels like a regression. They believe their success has earned them the right to stay "above" the details. But in the era of AI, "expertise" itself is being redefined. It is evolving from simply knowing the answers to having genuine wisdom. And you cannot acquire wisdom by being isolated in a comfortable office. You have to be right where the work is happening, alongside the people doing it. The hardest job in the AI era belongs to the CHRO. I’ll explore why traditional HR 'expertise' is becoming a liability. People Leaders must pivot from protecting the hierarchy to challenging core orthodoxies of the business model. The tough but meaningful work will be to navigate the ‘success dilemma’ with the CEO and the leadership team. More on that in the new year, 2026, as I launch a podcast and live discussion platform with some inspiring guest hosts. For the next month, as we get into the Christmas and New Year holiday season, I will be visiting stores in the UK and the US, chatting with store employees and customers & also shopping! 🛒. I will pivot to sharing my thoughts, learning and reflection on ‘retail’ along the way. 🎄🎄

I’ve been reflecting on a paradox I see often in the most admired and awarded leaders. It is what I call the 'Success Dilemma.' As leaders reach the pinnacle of their careers, they often lose the very superpower that got them there: openness. The mindset shifts from curiosity to the protection of a 'legacy.' They unintentionally surround themselves with people who challenge them less, creating a dangerous feedback loop. There is a common red flag for this. It is the almost instant response to a new idea or challenge: "We are already doing that." It is a reflex. It shuts down the conversation without any reflection on the nuance of the idea or why it was suggested in the first place. This isn’t a new problem. Back in my days with Strategos and @profhamel, we realized that breaking through these executive orthodoxies required extreme measures. We used to take CEOs and leadership teams on physical learning journeys designed to jolt them out of their comfort zone, for example, taking British Insurance Executives to have discussions with community leaders in Mumbai's Dharavi residential area. We had to take them out of their world to help them see their own business differently. The smartest founders and strongest leaders I work with today manage to avoid this trap. They share a common trait: they remain genuinely open to new ideas. Their confidence comes with humility. They seek out challenges, even when it pushes against their own "expertise." They actively seek fresh perspectives from people new to the industry, valuing behavior and insight over titles. That ability to stay open, especially when you are being told you are the expert, is the real hidden superpower.

"It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that ain’t so." (This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain. Researchers debate the source, but the sentiment is perfect so let's stick with the legend). This quote perfectly defines the 'Success Dilemma.' The dilemma is the tension between openness and protection. Openness requires curiosity and the admission that you don't know the answer. Protection offers safety and the defense of the legacy you have already built. The more successful you become, the more terrifying openness feels. I witnessed this firsthand during my time at @BestBuy . At the time, the leadership "knew for sure" that people bought music in stores, and they assumed they would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. To protect that legacy, they acquired Musicland, a 1,300-store chain of mall-based retailers including Sam Goody and Suncoast. But if you walked out of the boardroom and into the stores, you saw a different reality. The frontline staff, mostly 18 to 30 years old, weren't talking about mall footfall. They were burning CDs, downloading MP3 files and using @napster . The future of music wasn't in the mall. It was on a hard drive. But even that was just the beginning. The landscape kept shifting. From the disruption of Napster (which, ironically, Best Buy eventually bought and sold trying to catch up) to the global dominance of Spotify, and now to the immersive live experiences. The journey is dynamic. You can never stop and say "we have arrived." You have to stay open because the future is always being shaped by the next discontinuity, as we are all facing with hashtag#ai. Tom Kelley articulates this breakdown perfectly. As a partner at @ideo , the author of Creative Confidence, and a global evangelist for design thinking, Tom uses this specific story in a case study for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) to highlight the danger of the dilemma. Stanford Technology Ventures Program (@ECorner): Best Buy's Failure to See Napster. Best Buy leadership didn't miss the shift because they lacked data. They missed it because they chose protection over openness. They also missed it because they built a big wall between the corporate headquarters where strategy gets 'created' and the stores where consumers buy products from employees. stvp.stanford.edu/videos/cas…

Been in this situation before? You are a leader in a well-funded (potentially overfunded) startup. You have a new idea, or perhaps a challenge to a core assumption that feels outdated given how the market has shifted. You bring it up in the leadership meeting. The reaction is almost physical. The energy leaves the room. People slump in their chairs. There is a collective groan of "not this again." Then comes the reflex response: "We have been through all this. We worked incredibly hard to build consensus on this strategy. We have to tread carefully." The CEO and founder, fresh off a successful Series B or C raise, nods in agreement. The logic seems sound: We just raised $50M on this specific narrative. Everyone is aligned. Why rock the boat? This is a massive red flag. It is the signal that the 'Success Dilemma' has started to play out. We often think this dilemma is a disease of "bureaucracies", large, aging corporates, charities, or not-for-profits protecting a 50-year legacy. But I see the exact same pattern in 3-year-old startups. Here, the "light" that blinds you isn't a legacy business model. It is the glare of your own headlines, awards, and sudden adulation. The consensus you built to raise the round becomes a cage. The pitch deck becomes a bible. To change course now, to admit that the market context has shifted since the seed round, feels like a betrayal of the story you sold to investors. So, the team chooses protection (defending the agreed narrative) over openness (adapting to the new reality). They stop optimizing for product-market fit and start optimizing for investor narrative fit. The irony is painful. The capital was supposed to buy you the runway to experiment and pivot as necessary. Instead, the success of the fundraise has purchased you a blindfold. I have seen this firsthand years ago whilst at Vantage Point Capital Partners and now as an investor in university spinouts. Very few MBA programs at universities help founders with this as they often face the success dilemma themselves. If your team has "no energy" to revisit core assumptions because "it was agreed years ago," you aren't running a startup anymore. You are running a bureaucracy with a ping-pong table. Success demands the humility to realize that the market doesn't care about your valuation, your consensus, or your exhaustion. It only cares about the value you deliver today.

I have been writing about the 'Success Dilemma', the tendency for successful leaders to switch from "building" mode to "protecting" mode. To protect that legacy, leaders often unintentionally build walls. They surround themselves with people who fit the culture, who respect the hierarchy, and, crucially, who challenge them less. They trade friction for comfort. They trade debate for 'Toxic Harmony’. I have seen exactly where this leads. I’ve sat in countless Executive "Away Days" over the years, as a consultant, an executive, and a CEO. The pattern is seductive. The agenda is managed. The time is constrained. By the end of the day, there is a collective sigh of relief. The team has "aligned." They have a 3-year plan. But often, this isn't a genuine, innovative strategy process. It is simply financial planning in disguise, a contrived ritual designed to maintain the peace rather than unearth the truth. Here is the problem: The market doesn't care about internal harmony. When the context shifts, as it currently is with the acceleration of AI and a new geopolitical reality, that polite, harmonious team becomes a liability. They are often too invested in the "agreed plan" to point out that the cliff edge is approaching. This leads to the ultimate question regarding the leadership environment. Three months after that strategy session, when the data starts to turn, does anyone on the team have the courage to walk into the CEO's office and say: "I think we are cooked unless we really challenge the assumptions behind this strategy." Or do they stay silent because the strategy was "agreed"? The danger is that success convinces leaders they don't need to be challenged anymore. But if they have built a team that is too polite to disagree, you haven't built a strategy. They have built a blindfold.

It's been an amazing journey for @netflix. Few people know that @BestBuy once had a significant stake in Netflix in return for a distribution deal!