Highlights of the Week in Creative Leadership: April 18, 2025

In today’s VUCA environment, the ‘silent killers’ framework still proves that the real enemy of strategic execution isn’t incompetence – it is often silence. Organizational transformation and strategy researchers Pregmark and Beer confirm that the six ‘silent killers’ of strategic change identified in the late 1990s still plague organizations today: top-down leadership style, unclear strategies, ineffective senior teams, poor vertical communication, weak cross-functional collaboration, and inadequate leadership development. Their study reveals a seventh barrier particularly relevant in today’s VUCA world: inadequate ‘delegation of authority and decision rights’. This prevents organizations from rapidly responding to change through experimentation and learning. The takeaway? Smart leaders must create structure – as in the form of a Strategic Fitness Process they describe – which enables task forces to gather unfiltered feedback from multiple employees, creating a powerful wake-up call for leadership teams. Leaders seeking greater organizational agility should institutionalize such processes for honest feedback from lower levels, clearly articulate organizational purpose (not just strategy), actively involve external stakeholders in strategic conversations, replace quick-fix programs with systemic leadership development, and create systems that enable decision-making at lower levels while maintaining accountability for resource management.

Johanna E. Pregmark and Michael Beer (2025) “The Silent Killers of Strategic Change in a VUCA World,” Academy of Management Perspectives, Vol. 00, No. 00, 1-17, posted online.

Beer and Eisenstat’s classic article:

Michael Beer and Russell A. Eisenstat (2000) “The Silent Killers of Strategy Implementation and Learning,” Sloan Management Review, 41: 29-40.

Palantir’s journey from controversial government contractor to $100 billion enterprise platform reveals valuable insights about solving meaningful problems. Nabeel Qureshi’s reflection on his eight years at the company reveals how it fostered a culture of intellectual intensity and mission focus that attracted top talent despite below-market salaries. Eliminating traditional titles, creating a rich internal vocabulary, and encouraging productive dissent contributed to the creation of what Qureshi describes as ‘a cult of skeptical people who cared deeply and wanted to argue about where the world was going.’ The company’s ‘Forward Deployed Engineer’ model embedded teams directly with customers, gaining critical tacit and contextual knowledge while coding onsite, integrating everyday chaos, and solving manufacturing pain points. By developing specialized tools that overcame both technical and political obstacles to data access, Palantir built foundations for what would become Foundry, achieving a rare services-to-product company transition. For leaders, the lessons are powerful: Get close enough to the problem to feel it in your bones. Enforce rigor but leave space for weird. Design from lived context, not abstract briefs. Cultivate intellectual debate and encourage belief without dogma. 

Nabeel S. Qureshi (2024) “Reflections on Palantir: A Retrospective on an Eight-Year Stint,” Nabeel S. Qureshi Substack, Oct 15, 2024.

In a breakthrough experiment, Harvard Kennedy School and NBER researchers Ben Weidmann, Yixian Xu, and David Deming demonstrate that leading AI agents in collaborative problem-solving is a powerful proxy for leading human teams. Leaders who perform well with GPT-4o-powered ‘silicon teammates’ also excel with people. Effective leaders ask more questions, encourage conversational turn-taking, use collective language (‘we,’ ‘us’), and score higher on fluid intelligence and social perception Interestingly, gender and ethnicity showed no correlation with leadership success, while social intelligence, emotional perceptiveness, and fluid reasoning remained a differentiator with human teams, suggesting emotion still matters in human-led contexts. For creative leaders, this research shows that AI can be embraced not just as a tool, but as a testbed – an efficient, scalable, cost-effective way to help identify leadership potential beyond traditional demographics. More practically, the study suggests that creative leaders should foster information-sharing through questions rather than monologues, practice conversational turn-taking, develop self-awareness about your leadership impact, and focus less on demographics and more on communication skills when identifying leadership potential.

Ben Weidmann, Yixian Xu, and David J. Deming (2025) “Measuring Human Leadership Skills with AI Agents,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 33662, April 2025, http://www.nber.org/papers/w33662. 

IMD professor Jennifer Jordan’s research identifies seven critical tensions that leaders must balance in today’s rapidly changing environment: power holder vs. power sharer, tactician vs. visionary, constant vs. adapter, perfectionist vs. accelerator, intuitionist vs. analyst, teller vs. listener, and expert vs. learner. Whether you’re navigating intuition vs. analytics like IKEA’s Barbara Coppola, or embracing adaptability like Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst, the key lies in contextual awareness and humility – and developing the capacity to toggle between approaches as situations demand. The key isn’t perfecting balance across all tensions, but creating a ‘tension map’ that identifies which 3-4 tensions are most relevant to specific contexts you encounter and developing the emotional intelligence to recognize when to shift gears. When facing your next leadership challenge, ask yourself three questions: What leadership does the situation demand? What contextual factors are present? What emotional cues am I sensing from my team? This situational awareness and agility helps determine whether to accelerate or perfect, hold power or share it, tell or listen – fostering the psychological safety and direction teams need in uncertain times. By diagnosing your defaults and aiming for agility, you let context – not comfort – determine how and when to adapt your leadership style.

“How – and When – to Adapt Your Leadership Style,” HBR On Leadership Podcast

See also:

Jennifer Jordan (2024) “7 Key Tensions Every Leader Must Balance,” Harvard Business Review, YouTube Video (10:21), June 13, 2024.

Jennifer Jordan, Michael Wade and Elizabeth Teracino (2020) “Every Leader Must Navigate These 7 Tensions,” Harvard Business Review, February 20, 2020.

If tariffs once functioned as policy punctuation, today they’re the ambient noise of global business – persistent, politicized, and profoundly disruptive. Both Proto Experience Designer Peter Pawlick and tech and business analyst Ben Thompson offer compelling, complementary views: Pawlick, from the inside-out of enterprise strategy; Thompson, from the outside-in of political economy. Together, they map the erosion of a decades-old consensus around scale, predictability, and global optimization – and the rise of a new imperative: adaptability. On his ‘Stratechery’ Substack, Thompson traces manufacturing’s evolution through Clayton Christensen’s disruption framework, showing how emerging economies progressed from simple assembly to sophisticated component production, while Pawlick, in an extended LinkedIn post, demonstrates how this creates cascading effects across cost structures, supply networks, operating models, capital deployment, and customer relationships. Both identify Apple as an instructive case study – simultaneously vulnerable to tariffs while demonstrating resilience through strategic adaptability, particularly in diversifying its supply base from 14 to 64 Indian suppliers while maintaining coherent product architecture.

Creative leaders must now design organizations – and re-engineer leadership itself – not for achieving scale but for fluidity. Thompson reminds us that disruption begins downstream but must be solved upstream – through smart policy, investment in modular capacity, and demand-side leverage. Pawlick echoes this operationally, proposing a five-domain model (from cost economics to customer fit) that reframes volatility as a design challenge, not a crisis. Both argue that narrative coherence and transparent storytelling – what you say to your board, your customers, your markets – matters as much as your balance sheet. The real leadership opportunity? Redefine what resilience looks like. Practical steps include: segmenting product lines based on tariff exposure and margin variability; developing modular, region-specific architectures where components can be sourced flexibly; redefining headquarters as ‘coordination nodes, not command centers’; and leveraging this volatile moment to reset customer value narratives. As Thompson observes, ‘You move past disruption by not only exerting control on alternatives, but exerting control on disruptors themselves’ – again, not through force but by leveraging demand power to shape supply networks in ways that build resilience without sacrificing innovation or growth potential.

Peter Pawlick (2025) “How Tariffs Are Reshaping Supply, Strategy, and Scale,” LinkedIn, April 14, 2025.

Ben Thompson (2025) “American Disruption” Stratechery Substack, April 9, 2025.