How To Slay Dragons

Leadership lesson: Gravity always wins.

We love to think we’re in control of meetings, outcomes, even our coffee cups. But physics (and reality) doesn’t care about your confidence.

A fancy conference room. A “designer” mug. A split-second of inattention. That’s all it takes. Not a crisis. Not a failure of strategy. Just a predictable, preventable mess you didn’t prepare for.

Stop overthinking leadership and start managing the obvious risks. I now travel with a keyboard cover everywhere. Why? Because I got tired of relearning the same dumb lesson.

The full blog breaks this down (with a few painful stories). Link in comments.

Your strategy isn’t failing because it’s wrong. It’s failing because your competitors don’t believe it.

Most leaders obsess over what they think, vision decks, SWOTs, KPIs while ignoring the only thing that actually drives competitive behavior: what the OTHER SIDE believes about you.

That blind spot is expensive. You launch initiatives assuming logic wins. Meanwhile, your competitors are reacting to assumptions, reputation, and half-baked perceptions about you. You’re playing chess. They’re hallucinating and still beating you.

META-Strategy fixes this: shape their beliefs, then exploit them. Cambyses didn’t defeat Egypt, he weaponized their beliefs about cats. Zhuge Liang didn’t fight, he let reputation do the killing. Stop managing reality. Start managing perception.

Want the uncomfortable truth about how belief, not brilliance wins? Read the full memo and subscribe on Substack. Stay dangerous. Link in bio.