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Zoom in on most organizations right now and everyone is busy. Zoom out, and almost nothing has moved. CEOs tell us this constantly: they push for speed and get activity instead. It's rarely an effort problem. It's the conditions people are working within. A few questions from the latest SYPartners Dispatches From The Collective: → Ask your top team, separately, where the company is headed. Do you hear one story or eight? → What have you done lately that taught your leaders defense is the safer bet? → Where did your last big priority spend most of its time waiting, and on who was it waiting on? → Amid all this pressure for speed, what organizational weirdness is worth protecting? Where is speed getting lost in your organization? 🔗 Issue #15 is linked below. Subscribe at the bottom to get #16 in your inbox. 👇 https://lnkd.in/eEKXB_rW Jason Baer Carina Cortese Nikki Cicerani Ellie Jabbour Keith Yamashita

Every organization has a speed limit—and it’s not the speed dictated by leaders. It’s the speed current conditions actually allow. You can tell people to move faster, but unclear authority, competing commitments, concentrated expertise and cross-functional dependencies will still set the pace. AI makes that mismatch easier to see: individual tasks accelerate while the organization around them doesn’t. That tension is at the heart of this month’s SYPartners Dispatches: why does everything feel so frantic when so little seems to move? (Do you recognize these patterns? I’d love to connect. I’m shaping new offerings and ways of working designed to help unblock progress at every level of the organization.) https://lnkd.in/eFxPxxnz

As the pace of business picks up, leaders are pushing their organizations to keep up. But too often, the result is chaos and confusion. It’s an increasingly common pattern, and one we're not immune to even at SYPartners. Here’s a great overview of why this happens and what leaders can do about it. https://lnkd.in/gD3wDXFu

An eclectic collection of summer reading, if ever there was one—spanning historians, technologists, executives, and philosophers. In the latest Dispatches from SYPartners, we draw out practical lessons for navigating some of the defining leadership challenges of this moment. Thank you Nikki Cicerani, Sue Walsh and Paola Allais Acree for stacking your summer reads alongside mine—and Kendra Cooke and Anthony Quigley for your latest lessons from the field. https://lnkd.in/ga_MgVmV

A lot of AI transformation is still framed as adoption: put tools in people’s hands, teach new skills, and measure usage. But the frontier has moved. The real work now is redesigning work itself—how people and AI create, decide, and learn together. That requires more than a mandate. Leaders need to describe the future they are asking people to build: providing intention and vision while creating enough space for discovery. At SYPartners, one way we’re exploring this is through our Champions model. Consultants rotate through immersive internal AI projects, then carry those experiences and learnings into our client work. I was glad to contribute to Dispatch #14, which brings together five lessons for leading into the fall—from pairing urgency with clarity to protecting human judgment and creative agency. Read the full newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gZCcmWmQ #AITransformation #FutureOfWork #Leadership

If I had a penny for every time Maslow’s hierarchy pops into conversations about AI, I’d have many millions to donate. It's no surprise: so much of the discourse centers on human judgement complementing machine-driven capabilities. It’s as if humans are being asked to deliver enlightenment while machines fulfill basic needs. And what a privilege that is... …until we get worn out from operating only high up on the hierarchy or we forget to spark our own creativity by staying up there or—perhaps worst of all—we don’t give ourselves space and time to learn how to build judgment. Take a look at what my colleagues Mark Newhouse, Nikki Cicerani, and Sue Walsh have to say about this, and get a few great book recommendations while you’re at it. Enjoy! https://lnkd.in/eTWpCmtt