An emphatic statement tells. A question invites.

And that small mark of punctuation often determines whether teams react or reflect.

Statements drive activity. Questions drive accountability.

The Problem: Scoreboards don’t create clarity

A target tells you what outcome you want, but not what you must become or improve to achieve it.

Yes, teams can act on “grow revenue.” But those actions will fragment—each group doing what makes sense in their lane. One team discounts. Another raises prices. Marketing adds promos. Ops tightens costs.

Everyone’s rowing, but not in the same direction.

“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future…”

Some days it feels like Steve Miller was singing about my calendar.

I’ll start the morning with clarity about what really matters. Then the little things show up—emails that “just need a quick reply,” meetings that expand beyond their purpose, texts that break my focus. One after another, they eat away at my day.

Did you know the placebo effect is active in your brain every single day, not just in hospitals or clinical trials? 

Psychologists call it Expectancy Theory, and it shows that the reality we experience is driven by our expectations.

Nice is a trap. Kind is a catalyst.

At first glance, nice and kind sound like synonyms. But when coaching a team through execution, they couldn’t be further apart.

The moment a suggested solution hits the table, people pile on. Options multiply. Debates fire up. Pretty soon you’ve got a full menu of alternatives, but very little clarity on whether any of them fit the situation.

What usually gets skipped is the boring alignment on the fundamentals:

The words that sink execution aren’t the fancy bits of jargon. They’re the everyday shortcuts—the words so common that nobody notices how vague those words are.

Squishy words leave a trail of misunderstandings, false assumptions, and dropped balls.

Every time you draw an org chart, you're picking sides in battles that haven't started yet.

That's just human wiring. Social identity theory shows people quickly form in-groups and out-groups, even on trivial distinctions. Any structure you choose will naturally create "us vs. them" dynamics.

Without intentional design, you get the classic blame cycles: Sales says Marketing sends bad leads, Marketing says Sales doesn't follow up, and Engineering blames both teams for changing requirements mid-sprint.

But you can architect your organization so those tribal instincts work for you instead of against you. Here's how:

When you’re accountable for the outcome, letting go of the “how” feels risky.

If the team takes a wrong turn or misses a date, you’ll be the one explaining.

Still, trying to own every move will burn you out, disenfranchise your team, and likely leave better solutions undiscovered. Instead, define the destination; they determine the path to get there.

Scroll LinkedIn long enough and you’ll see the usual suspects:

• Posts claiming Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research.

• That Netflix beat Blockbuster because they had more vision.

• That Kodak went bankrupt because it ignored digital photography. 

They make for great click bait. Visionaries as heroes, analysts as villains. The punchline is always the same: one bold idea is all it takes. What’s missing is the part that actually determines who wins — execution.

Let’s take them one at a time.

With (American) football season right around the corner, I’ve been revisiting some of my highlights from former 49ers coach Bill Walsh’s excellent book, The Score Takes Care of Itself. It’s packed with leadership insights that reach well beyond the field.

One section in particular stands out, especially for those of us thinking about how to build and lead effective teams. It’s called Establishing Your Standard of Performance, and the rules are pretty darn good:

There’s a mismatch in many organizations that leads to frustration, inefficiency, and that nagging “why can’t we get anything done around here?” feeling.

It’s the disconnect between Authority and Accountability.

Inside organizations, we get excited about clever concepts and breakthrough plans. But even brilliant strategy—without full commitment—can fall flat. A great idea, half-executed, just looks dumb. Or worse, confusing.

Strategy isn’t self-fulfilling. It needs people to bring it to life with clarity, precision, and energy. Everyone playing their part. Everyone on tempo. Everyone believing it’s worth doing right.

Do you remember The Dress controversy?

Back in 2015 a washed-out photo of a striped dress split the web: half the planet saw blue-black, the rest swore it was white-gold.

I recently came across an article that explained why so many of us conclusively saw something so different. Scientists found two key drivers: (1) the photo was low quality, forcing our brain’s visual system to “repair” missing data, and (2) people’s repairs depended on the light they were used to. Regular daylight dwellers mentally subtracted bluish light and perceived white-gold; night owls tended to discount yellowish bulbs and landed on blue-black. The real split was experience-driven guesswork by the predictive brain, which constantly fills gaps with prior knowledge to keep perception running smoothly. 

That same shortcut shows up whenever leaders drop a half-lit strategy note.

Did you know the word priority was only ever used in the singular form for hundreds of years?

It entered the English language in the 1400s and meant the very first thing—the one item that came before all others. And for the next 500 years, that’s how it stayed. Singular. Clear. Undeniable.

Then somewhere in the 20th century, we started saying “priorities.” Plural.

As if by declaring five things “most important,” we could bend time and energy to our will. It’s like claiming there were multiple winners in a race. Everyone gets a trophy, right? But that’s not how performance works. Not in competition. Not in strategy. Real focus doesn’t allow for handing out participation ribbons. It means hard choices. It declares a winner. It says: this comes first.

Great leadership starts with trust. And trust isn’t automatic—it’s something you build through consistent actions, honest communication, and a willingness to show up authentically.

Leaders who embrace integrity, vulnerability, and transparency create an environment where teams feel safe to take risks, admit mistakes, and align around a shared vision. These qualities don’t just strengthen relationships—they elevate execution.

Clarity is the difference between strategy that moves and strategy that stalls. If your team doesn’t “get” the strategy, you have no chance of executing it. Yet, clarity doesn’t happen by accident. It requires discipline: cutting through ambiguity, prioritizing what matters most, and ensuring that every person understands not just the what, but the why behind the strategy.

Simon Sinek famously calls on us to “start with why.” But for strategy to truly stick, we also need to explain “why me?”

People commit when they see how their work matters—when the strategy doesn’t just make sense, but feels personal. That’s when execution takes off.

And behavioral science backs this up.

Every organization wrestles with the challenge of implementing new strategies while keeping the current business running. Teams are already fully engaged in their “day jobs”—what’s often referred to as business as usual (BAU) or run-the-business (RTB) work. This tension between sustaining current operations and pursuing strategic change is one of the most common pitfalls in execution.

While it’s essential to continue delivering results for the existing business, the truth is the status quo isn’t enough. If it were, we wouldn’t need a new strategy. Something isn’t working—whether it’s a current problem or an emerging challenge—and change is necessary. But change doesn’t magically happen in the margins of an already packed calendar. To succeed, we have to intentionally make room for it.

Communicating effectively is deceptively hard.

Think about it. Most of us struggle to communicate perfectly with our significant others—even after years together. If we can’t nail it at home, with people we know intimately, what hope do we have in a workplace filled with competing priorities, shifting dynamics, and far less emotional investment?

The truth is, good communication doesn’t happen by accident.

It takes intention. Structure. Practice.

When executing strategies, communication isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s the difference between success and chaos—or worse, apathy. Yet, in my experience, too many leaders treat communication as an afterthought, assuming a single email, presentation, or town hall will do the job.