Why PM and CM Need to Stop Running on Parallel Tracks There’s a moment most project managers and change practitioners know well. The system goes live. The budget closes clean. The project is declared a success. And then, six months later, someone asks: Is anyone actually using it? The silence that follows that question is expensive. This is the gap I’ve spent my career studying and closing; the space between delivery and adoption, between a project that finished and a change

A practical tool for quantifying what's really costing you and deciding where to start In my last article, I talked about sorting the problems you observe into four buckets: Process, People, Systems, and Data. If you did that exercise, even informally, you probably ended up with a list that felt both clarifying and overwhelming in equal measure. Clarifying, because you could finally see the shape of things. Overwhelming, because now you must decide where to start. This is the

A simple lens for making sense of what you're observing A few weeks ago, I wrote about curiosity; specifically, about the practice of going to where the work happens and observing with genuine openness instead of judgment. The response was something I didn't expect. Messages, mostly some version of the same thing: "Yes. But then what? I went looking, and now I'm staring at a wall of problems, and I don't know where to begin." I hear you. And I want to be honest with you: visi

On resilience, adaptability, and the kind of exhaustion that ‘actually’ fills you up. You know the feeling. Your brain is at capacity. You’ve absorbed more ideas in a single stretch than most people encounter in a month. Your eyes are heavy. And yet, you don’t want to stop. Not because you’re running on adrenaline or caffeine, but because something real is happening in the room, in the conversation, in the space between the thinking. You’re not depleted. You’re full. I call i

On beginner's mind, asking for help, and what happens when you put down the phone and pay attention. Today my husband and I took the kids to ride the city bus for the first time. Not as tourists on a metro system with color-coded maps and multilingual signage. Not abroad, where public transit is so woven into daily life that even a newcomer can follow the rhythm of it. Here. In our own city. A mostly empty bus on a Friday, and four people who had no idea what they were doing.

Women's History Month has me thinking about something we don't talk about enough: The moment when everything changes and you must decide who you are without the title. My story didn’t start in the boardroom. It started in a doorway. I grew up with privilege. My father was a doctor in Peru, a respected leader in his field. Our life was full: good schools, a tight family, a foundation many people spend their whole careers trying to build. I was thirteen years old and we left ev

A while ago, I was sitting with a leadership team that genuinely wanted to improve how their organization operated. They had management tools in place. They had projects and priorities. They had capable people leading important initiatives. And yet, despite all of that, progress felt heavy. Projects were moving but not gaining momentum. Teams were working hard, but results weren’t compounding. Leaders were frustrated that things weren’t moving faster. It reminded me of someth

The Bravest Word in Leadership: "Help" Most leaders think they must be the smartest person in the room. I’ve seen it repeatedly, leaders who insist on having a hand in every technical detail, convinced they are experts in everything. The reality? They aren’t leading; they’re bottlenecking. True leadership isn’t about "owning" every solution. It’s about Circle of Competence: knowing exactly where your genius ends and where someone else’s begins. The Birth of SPARK When I found

In my last article, I wrote about running the business mile, the discipline it takes to keep moving when results aren’t immediate. But every strong athlete (and leader) eventually learns something important: You don’t get significantly better running alone. Those who want to improve reach a point where they recognize they need a coach. Not someone to bark instructions. Not someone to step in when things get uncomfortable. But someone who makes them better. Simon Sinek says le

Why do we chase the “magic system”—EOS, Scaling Up, V/TO, OKRs—or buy the brand-name version of something, even when the off-brand works just as well? We hope it will fix our business, like we hope a designer purse will make us feel accomplished. But here’s the truth: owning the designer bag doesn’t make you successful. Likewise, implementing system tools doesn’t automatically make your business better. Doing the work does. To be clear—there’s nothing wrong with choosing thes

If you're leading anything right now; a team, a function, a transformation, you've probably felt it: that constant pull in a dozen directions at once. There's no shortage of problems to solve. In fact, the list usually grows faster than your capacity to address it. And over time, that gap can start to feel overwhelming. Here's the trap many leaders fall into - trying to solve everything from a distance. We sit in meetings, review dashboards, react to escalations, and make dec