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These have been interesting times at the Collective. Best made plans that are not seeming like they are going to work out the way I hoped, but newer, more interesting opportunities seem to be blooming. With all this floating in the mind palace, it’s possible that the best things that resonated with me this week are somewhat related to the same topic.

Starting off with one of our favorite writers on this medium - Bruce Daisley a.k.a. . Not sure how I missed it when it came out. The post is mostly about a keynote address Bruce gave at a conference, and the whole presentation is worth the 18 or so minutes of the linked video.

The downside of technology & automation is that human agency - the feeling that one has the power to decide and choose a course of action - at work is getting redundant. 30 years ago, 62% of British workers felt they had a great deal of task discretion at work, and that number fell to 34% in 2024, even before the whole AI hype started. But more than the keynote slide deck, I found this little tidbit at the end of the post very illuminating:

Two thirds of respondents said that AI was helping them switch to higher value work - but that there was frustration about the lack of corporate ambition (emphasis mine). At the heart of the research was the ‘Transformational Paradox’ where employees are ready to reinvent their jobs but find themselves slowed down by the organisation and systems around them.

The whole post is worth it:

Make Work Better

Work turned me into a non-player character (& no one told me)

Last week I was fortunate to speak at an impressive event by market research agency Watch Me Think…

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3 months ago · 66 likes · Bruce Daisley

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Ambition.

That glamourous little word, that really has so many different meanings. For me, ambition is associated with one thing - clarity of thought. If you are clear in your thought process, then your ambition is meaningful and not just a castle in the sky.

’s blog - The Balancing Act - elaborates further on this topic. Everything is just downstream of your ambition. The example given here is one such - the one person billion dollar company. There are two outcomes listed in that ambition, both of which could conflict at some point. Is it a one person company or is it a billion dollar company? Having the clarity of thought on the core ambition of the company is thus important, and then everything then flows through from that. The whole post is a must-read:

Balancing Act

Everything is downstream of ambition

I met a star engineer in New York last week. Considering leaving his job to start something in a new domain where he has no unfair advantages. I spent 45 minutes brainstorming ideas with him, but mostly pushing to make sure he wasn’t running away from something and founding a company for the sake of founding a company…

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23 days ago · 23 likes · Nikunj Kothari

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Which then brings us to the next question - whether you are doing it for yourself or leading a team of individuals, how do you bring about this clarity of thought?

I’ve always found the game of tennis as much a mental and metaphorical challenge as it is physical. There you are, all on your own, trying to figure out the solution to the problem being posed by the opponent. But at the end of the day, your job is not to be beat the opponent, it is the get the ball on the other side of the net within the boundaries of the court. One of my favorite books of all time is “The Inner Game of Tennis” by W. Timothy Gallway. Point being, when tennis coaches write about clarity of thought, I tend to listen.

writes about a very interesting perspective on this clarity of thought - you provide clarity by removing information, and not adding to it. And it computes in real life as well. Every day, every minute, you are inundated with information coming your way. How do you know decide what to consider, and what to pass? What else is this agency, if not filtering out the noise and then letting the individual make the choices they need to?

Key quote:

I tend to think about information in three categories. Something can be interesting, something can be important and something can be actionable. They are not always the same thing.

An opponent serving more frequently to one location might be interesting. If that tendency becomes significantly stronger at break point, it becomes more important. If knowing that tendency allows our player to make a clear adjustment to their return position or anticipation, it becomes actionable.

That final step is the one I care about most.

What can the player actually do differently because we know this?

And:

The best plans, in my experience, sit somewhere between two questions:

What does the opponent dislike?

And:

What does our player do best?

The answer has to respect both.

Mike James

The Best Coaches Know What NOT to Say

Why clarity in tennis often comes from removing information, not adding more…

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24 days ago · 2 likes · Mike James

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If you’re new here, you can probably tell by now that I find a huge crossover between the world of corporate performance and that of competitive sport. Most of my newsletters tend to have at least one or two articles related to sport and then I make the metaphorical point of connecting the dots with life in the corporate world.

One of my favorite newsletters on the topic of performance development is The Peak newsletter on The Athletic which covers the mental side of sports. Last week’s newsletter had a post on 3 small habits that mental performance coaches talk about having the most meaningful impact - and it all ties in very well with the rest of the articles on this newsletter:

1. 5 - 10 minutes of quiet, alone time

2. A form of daily journaling

3. Focus on behaviors & actions and not feelings

Essentially, take some dedicated time out for yourself. Align yourself with your ambition. Reflect on it in a daily format, and focus on actions and behaviors for the next day, instead of feelings and opinions.

Rinse. Repeat.

It might sounds simple and actionable - maybe that’s what this coach is trying to do here - but it’s not easy. If it was, everyone would be doing it

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Last, but definitely not least!

Along with looking at sporting analogies for the workplace, another one of our favorite activities here on the newsletter is to discuss the future of work and the workplace. And in 2026, any and every conversation about the future of work and the workplace eventually ends up with a conversation about Artificial Intelligence.

Heck, I even started this set of articles with how AI is actually helping people with doing higher value work!

I do not profess to be an expert in the technology, I don’t even know how to operate ChatGPT or Claude. I have used it some, but I don’t think I can say I am even an intermediate user. I am of the firm belief that AI in the workplace will be net positive. What I mean by that, is that there will be some benefits and some inconveniences, but all things considered society will be ahead of where we would be without it. And I say that, not because of my experience of it, but of the fact that that’s pretty much how technology has evolved throughout humanity.

Or as and call it “AI as Normal Technology”.

A few weeks ago, Prof. Narayanan gave a keynote address at the International Conference of Machine Learning in Seoul titled “What will be left for us to work on?”. He has posted his slides and a summary of the talk on his blog, and the whole thing is a must read. A couple of slides that stood out for me:

• Are the skills we possess going to be redundant? Or will AI amplify our potential? Framing this choice is important, because based on that we will have actionable insights. If we are going to be redundant professionally, then it’s best to probably build our wealth to assure ourselves of our current standards of living. But, if it is going to amplify our potential, then our focus should be on getting better and building those skills which help us get better.

  

• If AI is going to make our skills redundant, why then are entire professions not extinct? Turns out that existing professions are not just staying where they are, they actually getting better thanks to AI. Case in point, radiologists and software engineers. What technology is doing, is making the execution time no longer the bottleneck. So specialists have more time to plan, and manage the post execution delivery, because that’s where they bring in true value.

The entire address and slides are eye-opening and make a very strong case, that an AI-first world will actually force us to be better in what we do, and the options available for things to do will actually increase. The key is to connect the dots, maybe use AI for that :).

AI as Normal Technology

What will be left for us to work on?

I had the honor of giving a keynote at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul last week titled “What will be left for us to work on?” I addressed the widespread anxiety about how we should adapt as AI capabilities increase. I was thrilled by the talk’s reception, so I have made my slides available…

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2 months ago · 288 likes · 25 comments · Arvind Narayanan

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Post script: The plan is to have more regular posts on this blog, almost like a full-time job, and create a more engaged community especially on the topics of leadership and the future of work. I shared this blog on a few sites, and one feedback I seem to have gotten is to keep the newsletter short. I appreciate the feedback, but I also think to clarify thoughts one needs to provide context, and keeping things short doesn’t quite work always. I would love to hear feedback on the comments & chats to understand whether this free-flowing “Best things I read” version works for you.

Starting this week, the focus of the Qacchua Collective blog is to be more proactive, and showcase Leadership Principles and other offerings that we offer through our regular service. For more information on the services that Qacchua Collective can offer, feel free to visit our website. Would love to hear feedback through the comments section, and subscriptions are always welcome :)

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If you are like me, you have probably never heard of Keegan Bradley. I am here to rectify that error.

Well, let me take that back. I had heard of him, but I had no idea what he looked like or what he did. I follow sports, some more than others. Golf is one of those sports that I don’t follow that much. I can only identify three current golfers on the basis of a picture alone1. Keegan Bradley is NOT one of them. But Keegan Bradley is relevant to this blog in a way that all the other golfers on the planet are not.

That’s because Keegan Bradley had to make a leadership decision.

You see, Keegan Bradley was the captain of the 2025 US Ryder Cup team. The Ryder Cup and its following is the closest thing that the game of golf gets to a “World Cup”. Every 2 years, 12 Americans and 12 Europeans play different matches of golf over a period of 3 days. Then for the next 23 months and 27 days, everyone is preparing for the next Ryder Cup, and then 12 Americans and 12 Europeans play golf for 3 days and so on. In the golfing world, it is such a big deal, even the President of the United States was watching the matches live at the golf course.

Anyway, the way the 12 Americans are chosen, is that there is a ranking list that is updated after every regular golf tournament. On the cut-off date, the top 6 automatically qualify, and the captain gets to choose 6 other players that he thinks will be best suited to the match that year. While the captains are well-known golfers, very rarely are they playing enough tournaments to qualify for the Ryder Cup on merit, so they tend to be “non-playing” captains. Keegan Bradley, on the other hand, is very much an active golfer. He had fairly decent form too, having won more top tournaments in the past 12 months than anyone other than Scottie Scheffler. At the time, he was 11th in the whole world, and the 8th best ranked American golfer, and that too likely because his captaincy responsibilities meant he couldn’t play as many tournaments as he normally would have.

So he had a decision to make: Does he pick himself as a player or not?

This was not an easy decision to make. Had the US Ryder Cup team had any other captain, they probably would have chosen Bradley and there wouldn’t have been a peep. But the captain’s job is not easy. They have to monitor all the matches going on, and be there for their team members when the day isn’t going the best. At the elite levels, golf is as much a mental game as it is physical. Could he motivate his team while also having to focus on his own contributions as a player? But on the other side, there was history beckoning. No other player in recent history had been a playing captain. And then he was, after all, the second best player on recent form coming in to the tournament. By denying his services, was he denying the team of its second best player? After all, at the elite levels, the margins are ridiculously small.

The decisions of a Ryder Cup captain are discussed, and second guessed for years. No American captain had lost the Ryder Cup on American soil for 14 years, and even that required a “Miracle”. American captains don’t lose on American soil. Whichever way Bradley chose, it was clear that the decision would be playing a role in defining the narrative around the 2025 Ryder Cup, and how his captaincy would be judged, especially if they lost.

Which they did.

Quite heavily, in fact. The final tally said the Europeans won 15-13, but it wasn’t close at all. We never know if they could have done any better had they fielded their “best” team, because Keegan Bradley did not pick himself as a player.

So, did Keegan Bradley make the right decision?

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My intent of paid subscriptions is NOT to make money to pay my bills, but rather to gauge if there is a wider audience for my writing. Not to mention that the Substack algo promotes writers who activate paid users more than those who do not.

I recently found out that Substack has the ability to create lifelong discounts, and so I will be starting every post with the discount link that entitles readers to a 95% discount on a paid subscription. Effectively, that is cheaper than a Starbucks coffee.

Buy me that coffee!

Due to time constraints, this edition of the newsletter is operating under a slightly different format. I would love to hear feedback if this version works better for everyone.

5 Best things I read since last time

“If only my boss(es) had listened to me, when I said this six months ago!!”

The number of times I’ve heard this phrase in my 20+ years of working in the professional setting is far too many to count. I have often caught myself saying this too, and I am sure there must have been times when people reporting to me have said this about me.

This is not to say that leadership is easy, if anything it is getting tougher. When I started my career, the director level were someone who spent their entire career in the same department. If you tried to spin technical jargon their way, they’d embarrass you in public in minutes. That is not the case any more. A leader now gets information from so many spots, that keeping track of that is so much tougher. As a function head, often you do not have the ground level background to know the details of what every individual in your organization does. You don’t need to be perfect, just good enough.

What then differentiates a great leader from a good one?

Starting off: Allan Schoenberg on the Global Legal Post kicks us off with the key differentiator for organizations and executives in the age of AI - interpretation.

Key point:

For decades, organisations rewarded specialisation. The best in-house lawyer became general counsel. The best corporate marketer became chief marketing officer. The best technologist at a company became chief information officer. This pattern reflected an era when expertise was the scarcest and most valued resource.

Today, information to acquire expertise is abundant. Artificial intelligence can summarise research in seconds. Dashboards deliver real-time metrics.

The challenge is no longer gaining information. It’s interpreting it.

Which kind of makes sense? The rate at which technology is growing, the use of AI will not be the differentiator for the organization. Depending on your budget, you could use OpenAI, or Anthropic, or some Chinese LLM, and your information will be roughly the same. If you map it on a cost-benefit analysis, the AI will be a wash. Put it this way, the use of Microsoft Excel was a competitive advantage for a very short period in human history. It will be, now more so than ever, the humans interpreting the information that will form the competitive advantage for the organization.

Do read the whole thing:

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Executives are becoming increasingly generalist, with very little fundamental knowledge of what their subordinates are working on. Their skill is more to connect the dots and not actually “know” how the sausage is made. Deep inside they know this, and know that no one will take them seriously. So in their insecurity, many leaders take the easy way out - they stamp their authority on the underlings and brook no opposition.

One distressing outcome of this as observes over at the Is It Working? newsletter - the end of the dissenter.

Key quote:

The silence that kills decisions

Most organisations do not suppress dissent through visible authoritarianism. They suppress it through something far subtler and more durable: social consequence. The person who consistently raises the inconvenient question, who points out that the forecasts don’t add up, who asks what happens if the core assumption is wrong, quickly learns that their reputation as a ‘team player’ is at stake. They are rarely fired for dissenting. They are simply overlooked, marginalised, and gradually removed from the rooms where decisions get made. Which is, from the organisation’s perspective, precisely the same outcome.

Is it working?

The last honest voice in the room

There is a role that most organisations desperately need and almost none have the courage to create: the professional dissenter. Not the difficult colleague who objects to everything. Not the passive-aggressive holdout in the meeting. But the person whose job (whose actual, institutionalised, protected job) is to tell the …

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Ghassan Karian

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At this point, some of you might say “yes, that is all ok on posters and PowerPoints, but in the real world, this doesn’t work”.

To which I present - Netflix (via ) and their famous principles of “farming for dissent” and “informed captain” - literally actively seeking out disagreement & different perspectives before making decisions. Often times, due to the lack of debate, the decisions that leaders make are made in a vacuum. Not only do they not have the full picture, but the people who have to execute to those decisions also do not have the visibility and rationale to why those decisions were made. Having an open conversation, also allows the team to separate the information from the person, so there’s a greater likelihood of ensuring there are enough “fail safes” designed in the process from the get go.

Key quote:

But perhaps more importantly, the informed captain model is paired with a "disagree and commit" culture where "once the decision is made, even if you were not supportive of that or you had a different opinion... your job, especially as a leader, is to get on board and to be not just supportive, but actually an advocate of it."

Work Forward

Inside Netflix's Culture Machine

Too often, conversations about culture boil down to slogans on walls. But culture isn't what you say — it's what you do. Netflix's culture famously goes deeper than values statements, actually shaping how they operate. Let’s get into how they do it, how that enabled them to scale, and what it’s like as a leader…

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a year ago · 16 likes · Brian Elliott

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So how do you, as a leader, start building this culture? I wish I had an answer that solved this conundrum. But I have a hunch - a lot of the current vacuum is built because “leaders” are no longer connected in real terms with ground realities. They grew in stature in their careers by being very good at what they did, but what they did in the early part of their careers is no longer relevant - redundant, even. Now they get their information from 1 hour presentations and Excel documents. Maybe there’s an LLM somewhere which gives them all this information within minutes instead of weeks. That should help them join the dots faster, but it doesn’t. Because the dots they see on the screen are not the dots that existed when they were starting out.

Staying in touch with the real world, as my favorite writer on Substack, , points out, requires physically doing things that matter. While a lot of the post is in the world of high performance athletes, there’s a workplace element too.

Key quote:

Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they may need at least a few minutes to explain the answer, accounting for politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of a client, the role of their teammates, and a variety of other external factors.

Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, or on their next deadlift, however, and the answer becomes much simpler.

“The satisfaction of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence has been known to make a man quiet and easy,” writes Crawford, who in 2001 quit his job in academia to become a mechanic. “It seems to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He simply points: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on.”

The whole article is a must-read:

Brad Stulberg

How Not To Become an Asshole: Do Real Things in the Real World

Over the past few years, I’ve repeatedly been frustrated by the moral failures and out-of-touch actions of politicians, major business executives, and other conventionally “successful” knowledge workers. Certainly not all, but many of these people have repeatedly let us down, among them…

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2 months ago · 69 likes · 14 comments · Brad Stulberg

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OK, so you got your hands dirty, and started working on something completely new. The first few attempts bring despair, then some joy, and eventually comes a freakish thrill for having completed something for the first time. You want to carry on. And on. And on. You are now allocating every spare minute of your time on this new activity. You were competent once, and now you’re on the path to becoming an expert. But now, the return on your time is not the same. You reach a plateau and it’s taking you a lot longer to learn something new.

Where do you stop? Do you pursue the path of expertise, or do you stay competent, or even knowledgeable?

For generations, we have been trained to be on the path to expertise. Time spent learning a topic is a marker of social privilege. But now in the age of artificial intelligence, things might be changing. You have the technology and support to help you get to a basic level of competence in a completely new topic in a relatively short period of time. That can open up possibilities for you, that maybe an expert who has spent decades in this field may not be able to see.

The key skill in the coming years, as the blog points out would be knowing when to stop knowing.

Key quote:

A person who knows almost nothing about fifty subjects may simply know almost nothing. But learning just enough about a new subject to see its shape can be surprisingly valuable. One field changes how we see another, and range increases the chance of noticing that two apparently unrelated things are connected.

The problem was that acquiring that range used to be expensive. Finding the books, learning the terminology, discovering the important thinkers and working out which arguments mattered took time. You could spend three days in the wrong intellectual lay-by before discovering it was a lay-by.

AI has made those first excursions into a new subject astonishingly cheap. It can take us down a tunnel in seconds. The problem is still knowing which tunnels exist and which are worth exploring.

The marginal hour has changed price. If the first hour in a new subject suddenly buys vastly more than it used to, while the 9,001st hour in an existing specialism remains brutally expensive, staying in the tunnel has become relatively more costly.

Polemic Paine

Knowing when to stop Knowing

I was watching the Wimbledon final and found myself wondering what the greatest sportsman in the world would look like. We had two candidates for greatest tennis player bouncing a ball at one another in front of me, but imagine winning Wimbledon, collecting the trophy and apologising because you need to get away as you’re playing for England in the Worl…

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2 months ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Polemic Paine

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Joining the Dots:

Since the theme for the day is interpretation, I thought it was only logical that I add something to that effect too.

The leaders of today, operate under a radically different paradigm than their predecessors. Even though they were generalists, the things they needed to know was a lot less than what they do now. The Operations Manager of the 1990s probably did not need to know the first thing about “coding” but the Ops Manager today would do well with having their own personal GitHub, or at least know what the Cybersecurity team means that a GitHub vulnerability will put their $2M machine down for the next 3 days. They don’t have to be an expert, but they need to know enough to be able to join the dots and understand where and how things connect, and more importantly how peripheral things could potential take them down.

To do this, the leaders of today need to create under a completely different environment than what they grew up in. An environment where experts and novices bring their own perspectives and the leader has to make intuitive calls on areas outside of their core area. An environment where dissent is taken in the spirit of progress and the team matters more than the individual. An environment that focuses more on the high performance of the team than the authority of a few individuals.

The team then gets a mission where every single individual has bought into it. Every single member has a defined role to play in such a team. A team where leadership is a role, one among many other roles, and not a calling.

A team with no mercenaries, just missionaries.

Buy me a coffee!!

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My intent of paid subscriptions is NOT to make money to pay my bills, but rather to gauge if there is a wider audience for my writing. Not to mention that the Substack algo promotes writers who activate paid users more than those who do not.

I recently found out that Substack has the ability to create lifelong discounts, and so I will be starting every post with the discount link that entitles readers to a 95% discount on a paid subscription. Effectively, that is cheaper than a Starbucks coffee.

Buy me that coffee!!

I started out this year with a blurb on this blog

Have been meaning to write more regularly on this blog. I write on my personal blog too, but with my day job, family responsibilities, and my own coaching responsibilities, the blog has taken a bit of a backseat. But I’ve always believed that writing improves my thinking, so I am trying to write more professional “stuff”. So this newsletter is an effort in that direction. The goal is to publish something at a regular cadence - maybe once every 1…

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Last week, I went somewhat overboard on Substack articles. So this week, I decided I wanted to stay away from linking to Substack as much as possible. The sad part of that, is that my next default is the Harvard Business Review and that tends to be gated behind a paywall. Still, paywall or not, these are the 5 best things I read:

i. Starting up, something that has bothered me for a while: If you ask someone to describe the qualities of an ideal leader, a lot of people will default assume to that leader being a man. Not just that, more will expect “confidence” from a leader than “competence”. And, believe it or not, there is compelling scientific evidence that women are more likely to adopt effective leadership techniques than men. Why then, do we have so many incompetent men who rise to leadership levels? This HBR article from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic raises this interesting question. TL;dr version - all those abstract n…

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The Appetizer: The 5 Best things I read since last time

Substack still remains my go-to location for reading high quality stuff. I’ve found the medium allows the writer to provide the correct context and pace as they desire. So it is very likely that more often than not, most of the links on this spot would come from Substack. As it happens, this time all the links I have come from Substack.

First up, some very easy breezy unsolicited career advice from , which also included this one sentence that possibly was the best one line I’ve read in the past two weeks.

Have a life outside of work and have hobbies. It’s amazing how many people you can meet and add to your professional network by having hobbies

The whole piece is really good, but this line really hit hard for me. Over the past 15-18 months, I have been really diligent about having that life outside of work, thanks to an increased focus on my coaching. I’ve gotten to know so many new people, many that I have helped in some way and many more that have helped me. I’ve gotten around to setting some time out for my hobbies and passions (this blog is one such example). Now that I find myself struggling at things, I think I’ve gotten a lot more forgiving of others and their struggles.

Like I said, the whole piece is really good.

OnlyCFO's Newsletter

My Unsolicited Career Advice

Today’s Sponsor: NetSuite…

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8 months ago · 48 likes · OnlyCFO

What I’ve found through this new pursuit is that I have a greater perspective and appreciation of my work life too. I have started to focus more on getting stuff done, rather than “showing off” my importance. Taking the help of people around me, building on their skills, even showcasing their efforts has reaped benefits in my own work life.

So I found this concept of “piggybacking” listed on the blog very relatable. Using something that already works - or in my case, reaching out to someone who knows what needs to be done - often gets the job done a lot faster and with a lot less friction. Not to mention, the outcome is far more effective and efficient.

Language for Leadership

'Piggyback' tasks to make the most of your time

Once you see it…

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7 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Language for Leadership

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And speaking of “language” for leadership, next up are two articles from the sporting world. As someone who has grown up as a maniacal sports fan, I find the world of sports as an excellent metaphor for life, and I often find myself dipping into sporting cliches and phrases during my coaching sessions.

First, provides a critical assessment of the language used by Ben Stokes, the captain of the England Cricket team after another deflating loss that his team faced in the recent Ashes series against Australia. Granted, he was coming from a loss, and it had just made his lifelong ambition of winning the Ashes in Australia, but saying that his “dressing room was not a place for weak men” was possibly among the worst things his team would have wanted their leader to say.

Professional sport is brutal. To excel at that level requires a level of mental fortitude that is not for normal humans. To publicly throw his team under the bus for being “weak”, Stokes crossed a line. He put himself at a higher pedestal than his team members, especially when the failings of the team were more technical than mental.

The Boundary Rider

Moral failings

In sport, there are many ways to fail…

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7 months ago · 5 likes · 3 comments · Andrew Young

I am not a huge fan of the English Premier League, but thanks to my son who is nuts about the game, I have a decent idea of what goes on. And if you are the coach of Manchester United, you probably have to have more than just an idea of what goes on. They fired their manager, and replaced him with an interim one Michael Carrick. Carrick has had some immense success in the first two games in charge, winning against the top two teams in the league.

You could say it is beginner’s luck, or you could say it is something that he has done specifically. making an impressive case of the latter, finding a specific role for a player who was not much in the scheme of things under the previous manager’s regime. What I found most relatable was the direct parallel to the corporate world. As leaders, we would love to have a team of superstars. But more often than not, a team solely made of superstars fails to function. That’s because, often a team of superstars also needs other characters who can be a wonderful glue. These “characters” help bridge the gap where the superstars are not at their strongest, and allow them to focus on maximizing their skills. Carrick seems to have done this wonderfully well, and the results seem to be working.

Bienkowski's Bletherings

Why Michael Carrick knows just how important Kobbie Mainoo is to Man Utd

Michael Carrick has done a lot in a very short space of time at Manchester United. And the club’s attacking players like Bryan Mbeumo and Bruno Fernandes clearly stood out in the wins against Manchester City and Arsenal. But what intrigues me the most about the club’s turnaround in form is how Kobbie Mainoo is at the very centre of it all…

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7 months ago · 6 likes · 7 comments · Stefan Bienkowski

Think of it this in an over-simplified way: If a superstar ranks a 10 on offense and an 7 on defense, then asking them to provide defense is asking them to close the gap on their weaknesses. Sometimes adding in someone who’s a 6 on defense actually allows them to focus on their strengths in offense, and actually helps the team more. Joan Ryan’s wonderful book “Intangibles” has more on this topic.

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Last but not least - an important question (for a newsletter focused on leadership at least).

Why do some leaders seem to do better than others? Very rarely do leaders have to “do” stuff. In most cases, they have to get others to do things. There’s only so much that they can teach. Most of the times, all they have is the power of language.

Words, as we know, can be powerful.

So, I guess the question is actually - how do these leaders use the power of language differently? As makes it clear, there are multiple ways in which to say the same thing:

Two lenses on words: logos and rhema

The Greek word logos helps provide a helpful lens for one way in which we understand the use and power of words. Logos conveys the idea of the word as a message or container. It belongs to the analytical, rational world - it’s about precision, analysis of data, and objective understanding. It gives voice to the language of the brain’s Executive Control Network - (the part of the brain which, in thought leader Nick Jankel’s parlance operates as “Control & Protect Mode”) - which gets activated as we focus upon tasks, logic and performance (Jankel, 2014).

By contrast, the rhema word is an utterance that unlocks new possibilities - a word that lands at the right moment and in the right way for the listener to encounter revelation. We believe that such utterances correlate to the language of the brain’s Default Mode Network (defined by Jankel as “Create & Connect Mode”), which is the domain of imagination, connection, divergent thought and creativity (2014).As we explored these two definitions, a new observation rose to meet us: as leaders, we most often encounter (through the many conversations, books, podcasts, speeches and blogs we consume) the logos word, but in this grey zone, what we are actually craving and need is the rhema word - the utterance that offers insight, perhaps even revelation, for our challenges and dilemmas, opening up new possibilities.

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Leadership Letters

How leaders create influence

Written by Karise Hutchinson & Christine Gilland…

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7 months ago · 21 likes · 8 comments · Leadership Letters

The Main Course:

Leaders & Managers: Why we do what we do!

When I sat down to write this newsletter, I had a problem.

I tend to bookmark the best articles from the week, and then go back on the Saturday morning to edit and write what I had in mind. I generally have a theme, but I don’t have the article all mapped out. I do that somewhat organically through the writing process. I add articles, remove them, add them again, so and so forth. The final, finished piece often takes about 3-4 hours of work. I was able to cut my original 10-15 pieces down to six, but I was having a tough time to decide which one to leave out.

So I decided to sleep over it, and let inspiration hit me overnight.

However one of my (many) faults, is that whenever I start something, I have to finish it. It bothers me all along while the job is incomplete. So I spent of my day yesterday with that mopey, bothered look on my face. So much so, that my teenager asked me finally what was bothering me. I told him what the issue was. His response was simple. Without so much as even taking his face away from the video game he was playing, he just asked “Why would you spend so much time obsessing over something that AI can do for you in minutes?”

So I asked myself that question. Why would I put myself through the wringer when there’s an easy button available?

Why do we do what we do?

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I recently found out that Substack has the ability to create lifelong discounts, and so I will be starting every post with the discount link that entitles readers to a 95% discount on a paid subscription. Effectively, that is cheaper than a Starbucks coffee

Buy me a coffee!

Before we begin, a programming note:

Have been meaning to write more regularly on this blog. I write on my personal blog too, but with my day job, family responsibilities, and my own coaching responsibilities, the blog has taken a bit of a backseat. But I’ve always believed that writing improves my thinking, so I am trying to write more professional “stuff”. So this newsletter is an effort in that direction. The goal is to publish something at a regular cadence - maybe once every 15 days - so if this newsletter is published 26 times before 2026, that would be a very successful year. The idea is to take a topic, list down the 5 or so best articles I read in the past few days, and then publish my own thoughts on the topic. Let’s see where this goes.

PS: Would love to hear your feedback through your comments, either via Substack (preferred) or via LinkedIn where I will be posting it. Your feedback will only make it better.

And as always, subscriptions never hurt!

Appetizer: The 5 Best things I read since last time*

* - since this is E01, let’s just assume it’s the 5 best things I read in the past 2 weeks, in no particular order but my best attempt to bring a coherent story line.

If you have not followed on LinkedIn or Substack, you are losing out on one of the sharpest brains on the planet. True story: he has more PhDs than humans have limbs. While technically I read this post more than 2 weeks ago, it forms the basis of today’s newsletter topic - the topic of Talent Development, something that has become more urgent in this AI era.

Bhaskar writes about his experiences working with the various C-suite executives that he meets, where everyone moans about the lack of talent, but hardly anyone puts in the effort to develop that talent which is in-house. With the ubiquity of AI, the workplace of the future is going to require a lot of long-term planning and strategic thinking, precisely the stuff which is in short supply these days. Riveting read throughout, as you always will get from Bhaskar.

Dr. Bhaskar Dasgupta

The emperor has no talent - why CEOs keep moaning about talent whilst refusing to develop it (and what to do before AI renders the question moot)

Every CEO I encounter laments the same dirge: “We simply cannot find talent.” Portfolio company boards, peer groups, industry conferences; the refrain is universal, tedious, and deeply ironic. Because the moment one shifts the conversation from talent acquisition to talent development, the cacophony dims to crickets. It is rather like complaining about …

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8 months ago · 1 like · Dr. Bhaskar Dasgupta

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Now I did read the next one in the past 2 weeks.

I stumbled upon the work of while searching for articles on talent development, and was instantly taken by this post. I’ve been managing people for about 18 years now, and I’d say the biggest mistake challenge that most organizations make face is that they take individual contributors who are stellar at their jobs, and make them people leaders, without giving them an idea of what people leadership involves. The way this has worked in the past, is you take a star IC, make them a front-line supervisor where they get in the weeds of managing other ICs, solving their technical problems, and then slowly wean them away from the tactical stuff and eventually they retire as C-suite personnel. Only one problem - the way you solve a technical problem is not the same way you solve a human problem. Humans cannot be debugged in the same way that a technical problem can be. The style and approach has to be different. Nicky shows us how.

Put differently, having spent 18 years managing people, I agree with Nicky completely on the philosophy. But I’ve got a lot of “cuts and bruises” from experience in those 18 years. This could have saved me a lot of time, as I hope it does for you.

Get Good With People (For Managers)

Why Managing People Is Harder Than Distributed Systems (But Just as Learnable)

You can design a low-latency trading system capable of handling millions of requests per second. You can optimise a database query that shaves 200ms off response time. You can debug a race condition that’s been plaguing production for weeks…

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8 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Nicky Lawrence

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Speaking of “talent” development, the best your manager can do is lead you to the water, you have to drink it yourself. And there is no better era to develop yourself than this one that we’re living in. The constraints to your own growth are mostly in your mind, because if you really want to learn something, there is enough and more information available at hand for you to grow into it. I can vouch for this from personal experience, though that’s probably for another post :).

As so effectively shows, if you invest in yourself seriously, the potential is immense. But will require equally immense amount of discipline and focus. Or as he puts it

Further, the barrier of entry has collapsed.

All you really need is a laptop and internet connection.

The whole post is interesting throughout. And if you get enough inspiration to experiment on your dreams, let me know and we can discuss how I can be of help.

future/proof

If you have multiple interests, do not waste the next 2-3 years

Society made you think that having multiple interests was a weakness…

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8 months ago · 2464 likes · 121 comments · DAN KOE

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Now that I have inspired you…

You know what you want to do, but here you are working for The Man. And here I am telling you that the next 2-3 years are critical and should not be wasted. You’ve filled up all your YouTube playlists, and you are all inspired to be that next chef / guitarist / podcaster / blogger / <fill your dream in here>.

Now what? How do you really “learn” stuff? How do you go beyond the regular, superficial jargon and go deep into rabbit holes? Some people seem to “get” stuff, regardless of what they’re trying. You could say they have a “God-given” gift, but what if you - like me - are a little skeptical of divine bias? How do these people just get better at whatever they pick up, while you think you’re too old to learn something new? Eminent psychologist, now more famous as an AI-skeptic, has an excellent book “Guitar Zero” that charts out the journey of his learning the guitar from scratch in his 40s. It did give me a lot of inspiration to try out the guitar last year. I failed miserably, but that’s a topic for a different post.

If you are not into books, has an excellent primer on the strategies of learning. I found myself nodding throughout agreeing with pretty much every line on this, so thought I’d share. I especially loved the line “A lot of schooling involves passwords”. Read the whole thing to understand the context.

Andy Masley

Strategies for learning

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come…

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2 years ago · 1711 likes · 59 comments · Andy Masley

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When you want to get somewhere, whether it is in your daily work role, or in building a new competence, there’s always more in the tank. There’s an immense potential that lies unused. Over the years, I’ve seen numerous individuals that do all the right things for their development but still something has been missing. You could do everything that we listed in the four posts above, and you could still miss the target.

In my experience, the difference between the have’s and have-not’s has always been in the mind. And it’s tough to train the mind. So I generally work with my clients to develop some mental models that they can create for themselves, which can help them reframe their problems. While I had written about it on this blog last year, I found this post about 26 Heuristics of High Performance by especially useful.

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The Main Course: When AI use reaches equilibrium, Humans will be the difference

The internet is not very clear on when this was said, or even who said this first, but suffice to say it was in an era when this could be taken as a joke. In 2026, it definitely doesn’t feel like it is in the realms of science fiction. There’s even an updated version where the future factory has three employees, adding an AI/robot, where the dog presses the switch to activate/deactivate the robot, the robot does everything, while the man is still feeding the dog.

From an organizational perspective, the temptation to cast aside human talent for automation is there for all to see. When you scale up AI to enterprise level efficiency gains, the benefits of going in for whole scale automation is so tempting. Plus you don’t need to “maintain” a human employee and have to put up with all their whims and fancies. The AI will work 24x7x52 and no one needs to worry about it at all, at next to nothing of a “salary”.

In this world, where human is needed to simply “feed the dog”, why should organizations even bother with developing people?

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The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.

This holiday break, I had the good fortune of chancing upon the “Glean AI Transformation 100” an annotated list of 100 ideas on how AI JUST MIGHT accentuate the positive and dampen the negative in workplaces that was compiled by a group of researchers, including my MS&E 280 professor . I found myself nodding through the entire list so decided to share it here on it’s entirety.

…

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When I was younger, so much younger than today, my grandmother (now alas no more) would tell me bedtime stories of the Mahabharata. One such story she told me was of when the two sides had exhausted all options of negotiations, and the epic war was the only option on the table, both parties were shoring up their allies. Both parties knew what Krishna was capable of, so they both wanted him and his mighty army to be in their camp. The Pandavas dispatched Arjuna, while the Kaurava crown prince Duryodhana went personally to Dwarka to petition Krishna and his Yadava army to join his camp. Duryodhana reached first only to find Krishna asleep. Looking for a place to sit, he saw a bench by Krishna’s feet. His ego was hurt - how can a prince sit by someone’s feet? - he asked himself. So he went and sat by the headboard (or whatever they had in mythological Dwarka). Arjuna landed there too, and he had no qualms sitting by Krishna’s feet.

When Krishna awoke, he naturally saw Arjuna first. Without noticing Duryodhana in the room, he asked Arjuna the purpose for his visit. When Arjuna mentioned the reason, Krishna was in a quandary. He had affiliations with both sides, and did not want to prefer one side over the other. So he offered Arjuna a choice - “You can take me or my army, but not both”, he said. “And if I join, it will only be as a charioteer, as I cannot fight against my own army”.

Arjuna knew exactly what he wanted. “I have no need for the army, my Lord. If you are on my side, I can defeat any army”. When Duryodhana heard Arjuna opt for one man (that too one who wouldn’t fight anyway), over a mighty army, he was relieved. By then Krishna noticed Duryodhana’s presence, but the issue was resolved amicably, since both parties got what they had come for.

I thought of this story, when I saw this news article in the Financial Times. For those of you who do not have access to the FT, here is a screenshot:

Put differently, Denholm wants to pick one man over the rest of the world.

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Effectively, that is cheaper than a coffee.

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So that said, here are the best things I have read this month.

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“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely” - Lord Acton

I was recently in a coaching session with someone that I've known for about 15 years. Smart, sharp, and articulate, this individual has all the talent in the world. But here we were in this coaching session with them telling me that they felt they hadn't quite achieved all that they were capable of.

“What do you think is holding you back?” I asked.

“Because I am not comfortable talk about my successes in public. I feel like I would not be humble if I did that” they answered.

I probed a bit further, “and that is a problem because..”

“I feel powerless”

That “powerless” feeling. Where you feel you’re doing everything but nothing is working. That is often accompanied by seeing someone half as talented as you achieve so much more than you.

What do they do, that you don’t? How do they have this thing called Power, and you don’t? Can you get it too? If so, how should one go about it?

Maybe we should first understand how the world …

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So at a minimum, I thought I should pass on the best things I’ve read I’ve read this month, so that even if you didn’t get anything from me directly, at least there’s something valuable (I hope) coming from this blog. To be clear, these articles may not have been written this month, may not even be this year. But I read them this month, and I think you should read them to. Going forward, I’d like to make this a monthly thing - and possibly weekly too.

Thus, without further ado, and in no particular order, presenting the Qacchua Newsletter for May 2025:

1. Consulting Intel on the limitations of scaling up AI from a project to the behemoth known as an enterprise. As someone who works in one such enter…

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If you have been around the internet as long as I have, surely you have seen the below quote from the author Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it

This is not an attempt to get you to understand whatever it is that gets your salary. It is more that I recently completed 25 years since I graduated college, and was wondering about how I got this far. Earlier this year I posted on my personal blog “25 Principles”, and I found it well liked enough to become my most popular post of all time1

Sandgroper’s Musings

25 Principles

A few weeks ago, this post by Nabeel S. Qureshi went viral-ish…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Chirag

So that got me wondering whether I should attempt something similar, but purely from a professional standpoint. I do not profess to be an expert. I am not a CEO, or someone who has a million followers on LinkedIn. I have done decently for myself. When I graduated college, if a soothsayer had told me that this would be the life I lived, I would have bitten their arm off for lying to me. But there might be some who might say …

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As far as pithy social media LinkedIn memes go, this is right up there. Just enter this on Google, and you will see about a million images trying to portray this in some image that you can just drag & drop into your LinkedIn post and garner a few likes.

A true leader though has to operate outside of LinkedIn. That leader is generally held accountable for the success & failures of the team.

There is always a difference between teams that “work” and teams that do not. There’s always something different. That special something. My feeling is that when we cannot define that “something”, we call it culture. You can load your team with the best talent on the planet, and still it’s not a given that they will always win. The team with the better culture beats the team with the better talent (or better plan) more often.

But what is “Culture” and how does a leader build that culture? Is it something that can be bottled? The Athle…

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Not everyone who has a job has a career... Not everyone who has a career has a job..

In a job, the money is important.. In a career, money is probably the last thing on your mind..

Folks with a job, tend to do it because everyone is doing a job.. Folks with a career pretty much do what they feel like..

You could have 30 jobs in your life and not have a career.... You could have no job in your life and have a career

Many CEOs have jobs
Many beggars have careers

There always is a job market.. There almost never is a career market..

A job is almost always based on your past experience. Nothing of that sort is required in a career

Folks with jobs are almost always looking forward to Sunday.. Folks with careers tend to bother more about the work at hand..

Monday morning blues are strictly for people with jobs. Folks with careers don't really care

Engineers primarily have jobs, however a m…

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While I have been blogging for over 20 years on various forums, blogging on a specific topic is relatively new to me. I like writing, and I like helping people and through my career, I have tried to do both but generally kept these two passions separate. That said, I am reaching that point in my career, where it is time to focus just as much on the things that I enjoy as on the things that pay my bills, and decided that the best way to do that was to become a coach.

This newsletter is therefore an extension of my coaching setup. In here, my thought is to build a community of readers, subscribers and followers who will take the time out to help each other. Whether it is to write something, or help someone with a job opening, or even just take the time out to be nice to each other. I don’t know how this community will evolve, and maybe it turns out into nothing, but the effort is worth it I think.

So with that, some ground rules for what this blog is and isn’t

1. The foc…

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