Happy 17th Birthday, Digital Tonto!
When I started this blog in 2009, everything was mired in chaos. We were in the depths of the Great Recession, and it wasn’t clear whether we’d recover. In Ukraine, where I was living at the time, the financial crisis hit even harder. GDP plunged by 15% and you could see the currency losing value at the kiosks every day on the way to work.
The world seemed to be ending and things continued to spiral. A year later, Viktor Yanukovych, whose attempt to seize power in a falsified election had triggered the Orange Revolution in 2004, won the presidency legitimately. His corrupt rule would trigger another revolution and a Russian invasion in 2014.
We don’t get to choose the times we live in. As Samwise Gamgee reminded Frodo, it’s from the difficult times that we find meaning and that’s a large part of what this blog has been about, trying to make sense of what’s changing, where we’re heading and what to do about it. Here are the articles that I found most meaningful over the past year. I hope you enjoy them!
Stop Trying to “Educate” People Into Changing, Science Proves It Doesn’t Work
We tend to assume that people resist change because they lack the right information. Give them the facts, explain the benefits and educate them properly, the thinking goes, and they will come around. Yet decades of research show that this “information deficit model” doesn’t hold up. When new evidence conflicts with our existing beliefs, we are often more likely to reject the evidence than reconsider what we think we know.
That’s because our beliefs are rooted in far more than facts. They are reinforced by mental habits, social relationships and the communities to which we belong. Changing our minds can therefore feel less like gaining knowledge than losing part of our identity.
Lasting change comes from shaping networks and cultures, not merely crafting better messages. Bring together a small, enthusiastic majority, identify a keystone project and demonstrate genuine progress. That’s how you get out of the business of selling an idea and into the business of selling a success.
Even Great Ideas Don’t Sell Themselves. You Need Three Types of Power to Make Them Win
We grow up believing that good ideas will naturally rise to the top. Yet that’s not really true. Even breakthrough ideas can languish for years, even decades or longer, before gaining traction. Ideas are necessary, but never sufficient, to make a genuinely lasting impact. To make them succeed you need to gain access to power.
Power comes in three forms. Hard power uses institutional authority and incentives to compel action. Soft power draws people in through credibility, emotion and logic. Network power connects people and resources, allowing an idea to spread and gain scale. Each has limitations on its own: authority can create resentment, persuasion may not produce action and connections are useless if they lead nowhere.
Real influence comes from combining all three. You need soft power to attract people to your cause, network power to build momentum and hard power to turn that momentum into tangible results. So don’t just ask whether your idea is good enough. Ask how you will access the power and influence needed to move it forward. That, more than the quality of the idea itself, will determine whether it succeeds or fails.
Why You Should NOT Become An AI Expert
There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence is a transformative technology, but so were smartphones, broadband mobile internet, cloud computing, and many other things over the last 20 years. The most likely scenario is that the future will look a lot like the past. Many things will be improved, some will be transformed, but adoption will be uneven and its near-term impact is likely to fall short of the hype.
Technology doesn’t implement itself. Most important work still depends on understanding customers, organizations and the nuances of real-world problems. That’s why the greatest value won’t come from knowing the most about AI, but from knowing where and how to apply it. The winners will be those who combine technological fluency with deep domain expertise.
So rather than abandoning your existing expertise to become the latest kind of AI expert, deepen the knowledge and capabilities you already possess. Learn to use AI, certainly, but don’t bet your future on a technology over which you have little control. You’re far better off betting on yourself.
Why It Pays To Believe In Luck
We like to believe that success is earned through talent, skill and hard work. Yet luck and chance play a much larger role than we care to admit. The right encounter, a fortunate mistake or simply being in the right place at the right time can alter the course of a life.
Recognizing the role of luck doesn’t diminish the importance of effort. In fact, it makes effort more meaningful because it is the part we can control. Albert Camus called this “existential rebellion”: choosing to work, strive and create meaning in a universe that offers no guarantees.
We can’t control whether fortune smiles on us, but we can prepare ourselves to take advantage of opportunities when they appear. Believing in luck helps us remain humble about our successes, resilient in the face of failure and open to unexpected possibilities. The point isn’t to wait passively for good fortune, but to find meaning in the work before us.
4 Things I Learned Managing People
The management professor Henry Mintzberg once observed that we expect management to be like a conductor leading an orchestra, with the leader on a pedestal directing each movement with expert precision. “But,” he argues, “management is more like an orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.”
Great management isn’t about authority. It’s about setting people up to do their best work. That begins with abandoning some common assumptions. Incentives can backfire, and hiring the “best people” matters far less than building the best teams. Creating psychological safety and empowering people are more important than assembling a collection of individual stars.
Most of all, every person brings something to the organization and needs something from it. The manager’s job is to understand that exchange: what people do well, what motivates them and what kind of environment allows them to thrive. Sometimes that means helping them grow within the organization, and sometimes it means recognizing that they will flourish elsewhere.
The Tony Soprano Problem: Why Even The Strongest Leaders Get Blindsided
Strong leaders are expected to make difficult decisions, ensure that they are carried out and accept responsibility for the results. Yet the qualities that make leaders decisive can also make them vulnerable. The more authority they gain, the easier it becomes to surround themselves with loyalists who reinforce their views and tell them what they want to hear.
That creates a culture of insularity. When dissenting perspectives are filtered out, leaders lose access to vital information and begin mistaking agreement within their inner circle for a broader consensus. Kevin Sharer, the former CEO of Amgen, learned this after a crisis threatened one of the company’s most important products. He realized that listening meant seeking to understand, not merely waiting for an opportunity to critique, persuade or issue instructions.
The lesson is that listening and empowerment are not simply signs of kindness or humility. They are essential survival skills. Leaders need ideas, warnings and insights to travel from the edges of an organization to the center, especially when those messages challenge prevailing assumptions. You can never know for certain whether disruption is already underway, but you can build an organization capable of recognizing it before it is too late.
Change Is Not Persuasion: These 3 Key Elements Are What Every Transformation Strategy Needs
Too often, we think that if we craft the right message people will embrace our idea. Yet even when we succeed in changing someone’s mind, their behavior is still shaped by the people and institutions around them. Genuine transformation requires more than communication. It needs a strategy designed to shift networks and overcome the forces protecting the status quo.
That strategy begins with three elements. First, clearly define the grievance and the vision, then identify a tangible keystone change that can bridge the gap between them. Second, create a resistance inventory. Third, identify targets for action. That’s how you bring real change about.
Successful change isn’t driven by any single slogan, tactic or charismatic leader. It comes from applying strength against weakness, learning from setbacks and adapting as the opposition responds. Passion and belief may inspire action, but they can’t substitute for a real strategy. To transform a system, you need to understand where power resides and how to shift it.
The Cobra Effect: Why Managing by Metrics Backfires
We like metrics because they give us something concrete to manage. Set a target, track progress and reward people for hitting the number. Yet once a measure becomes a target, people begin optimizing for the metric rather than the underlying goal. That’s the essence of the Cobra Effect: attempts to improve performance can perversely make things worse.
The problem is that metrics are only proxies for what we actually care about. Protest turnout doesn’t necessarily produce political change, GDP doesn’t capture the well-being of a society and stock price doesn’t tell you how well a company serves its customers, employees and other stakeholders. When leaders confuse metrics with the mission, incentives get distorted and people learn to game the system.
That’s why we need to manage for mission, not metrics. Numbers can provide useful signals, but they can’t substitute for a clear vision, sound strategy and an understanding of the institutions, norms and behaviors that actually drive outcomes. Anybody can create a number and call it an achievement. Making a genuine impact requires knowing what you are really trying to accomplish.
Why Change Doesn’t Really Come From the Top: The True Story of Blockbuster & Netflix
We’re told that Blockbuster failed because arrogant executives ignored Netflix. The reality is very different. Blockbuster recognized the threat, built a strong strategy to meet it and created Total Access, a hybrid model Netflix couldn’t match. Within weeks, Blockbuster went from winning 30% of new subscribers to 70%. Its strategy was working.
What brought the company down wasn’t a failure of vision or execution, but a failure to align key stakeholders. Franchisees resisted the online strategy, investors balked at the costs and activist shareholder Carl Icahn clashed with CEO John Antioco. Antioco eventually left, his successor reversed course and Blockbuster abandoned the strategy that had put Netflix on the ropes.
That’s why change doesn’t really come from the top. Leaders can have authority, a smart strategy and even strong results, but transformation still depends on whether stakeholders across the organization support the effort. Change isn’t top-down or bottom-up. It moves side-to-side through networks, and lasting success comes from aligning the people whose support you need to move forward.
How The Knowing-Doing Gap Undermines Even The Best Ideas
It’s never enough to know what to do. Organizations invest heavily in consultants, training and expertise, yet there is often a wide gap between what people know and what they actually do. The problem is that knowledge has to make its way through a messy world of habits, institutions and accumulated complexity.
Good ideas get layered onto existing rules and processes, where they interact in unexpected ways and often become bogged down. That’s why public initiatives, corporate strategies and even social movements can fail despite having clear goals and intelligent people behind them.
But the most important thing to remember is that the knowing-doing gap is, above all, a leadership challenge. It is very rare for people to come into work without wanting to achieve anything meaningful. Their ability to perform is, in large part, a result of the culture you create and you prepare and empower them to succeed.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, a lecturer at Wharton, an international keynote speaker, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, watch his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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