In my presentation trainings, the third step is the one that divides the room: some dread it, some love it. The content is right, the slides are clean, and now someone stands up and presents to the others, on camera. When all of that is in place, about one in ten gets the energy right. The rest, at least in Germany, give too little: too little power towards the audience, too little conviction in the voice. Rarely, someone gives too much. A few months ago I wrote in my own Digital Leader Canvas that I wanted "to put more energy into my tonality when presenting or selling". After years of reflection it can still be hard to find the right energy, and the motivation to use it.

If you run a company, this is your problem first. The tools that promise to fix it now listen to voices and read faces, and some of them score "confidence" or "energy" and report to managers. Since February 2025, the EU AI Act prohibits AI that infers emotions from the faces or voices of people at work, except for m...

Someone is presenting in an online meeting. Half the cameras are off. One person is writing emails, another is reading something else. Afterwards, the presenter says what I hear more and more often: I would like some meeting rules. Cameras on, no email, full attention for whoever is speaking. I understand the wish. I also think the rules would not have saved that meeting. Many employees landed in a hybrid world of communication during Covid and never really learned how to communicate in it. There is more to do than fits into a day, and, I suspect, many of us have trained ourselves on thirty-second videos. But a good part of it sits with the sender: how you win a room's attention, and how you keep it.

If you run a company, this is your problem first. Decisions get made where someone presents: the board meeting, the sales call, the project review. In a Microsoft Research analysis of 34,524 meeting records, someone sent or answered email in roughly three out of ten meetings, and the odds...

A child wants to paint on the wall. The wall is not for painting. A child paints a black flower, and an adult explains that flowers are not black. Nobody there means harm. That is where, I believe, many children learn what they may make and imagine, and what not.

A friend of mine says he is not creative at all. He can repair almost anything: the car, the boiler, a chair nobody else would touch. He does not call that creative, because in most heads creativity lives next to art. A software engineer who finds an unexpected way through a problem does what a painter does. The word is narrower than the thing.

If you run a company that wants to stand out in competition, this is your problem too. Where teams feel safe enough to show unfinished thinking, creativity goes up, and it can be measured. Since AI tools like ChatGPT arrived, there is a new reason to care: ideas from the same tool grow more alike, so the unfinished, odd, human idea is the one you cannot buy. Who may show it is decided...

In a leadership series that started this autumn, I asked the participants what would make it a success for them. One of them wrote that it would be a success if his heart was touched.

I have been coaching and training leaders since 2014. As far as I remember, nobody had put that so plainly on paper before. It fits what I see more often: feelings at work get more attention than they used to. And of all the things AI cannot do for us, this may be the biggest one.

(This is the third of Microsoft's 5Cs covered here, after courage and curiosity.)

8 min read. If you take one thing from this: compassion is empathy plus the wish to help. Feeling with someone wears you out; feeling for someone gives you something to do. Ahead: why empathy alone leads to burnout; why 'responsibility' is not a feeling; which cultures allow feeling at work, and what it does to results; whether a machine can feel for you.

Two things, not one

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's feelings a...

Somewhere around 1992 I got a Nintendo, and for the rest of the decade most of my free hours went into a screen: Super Mario on the NES and the Game Boy, later Half-Life, Counter-Strike and StarCraft on a PC. My mother and stepfather had a simple word for it: waste. A waste of time, and of a good brain.

Whether they were right is not the point. What matters is what the word "waste" did: it stayed with me long after the games. It taught me that being curious has a price, and that the people around you set it. Nobody banned the games; I just learned to keep quiet about them.

(This is the second of two editions on curiosity, the second of Microsoft's 5Cs covered here.)

8 min read. If you take one thing from this: interest is only half of curiosity. The other half is what it costs to be seen not knowing, and that price is set by the people around you. Ahead: the two halves, and why one without the other goes nowhere; who sets the price at work; what AI does to the wall, in both directio...

A child in front of a television is doing something clever. In twenty minutes it gets a jungle, a submarine, a city at night and a family that isn't its own, without leaving the sofa. More new things per minute than the house could ever offer. The brain, built to hunt for novelty, has found a shortcut.

For plenty of adults the shortcut survived childhood; only the screen changed. And somewhere between the sofa and the office, for many, the pleasure in the new goes missing. This edition is about whether that's true, what the shortcut leaves out, and why mid-career may be where it costs most.

(Second of Microsoft's 5Cs in this mini-series, after courage. Curiosity gets two editions as well, and this one is about the first of two dials: wanting the new at all.)

7 min read. If you take one thing from this: curiosity is a learning state, not a mood. It tends to dip in mid-career. And the grey feeling at the start of something new is real, not a weakness. Ahead: what novelty does in the b...

Last week I made the case that most good ideas in established companies aren't rejected. They're slowed until the energy drains out of them, because an attempt costs too much to make casually.

The obvious conclusion is to make everything small. Run pilots. Keep it reversible. Start on Monday.

That's half right, and the wrong half causes real damage. So let me start this edition by arguing against the advice I'm about to give.

(New here? This stands on its own, but the diagnosis behind it was last week's edition on why nothing starts. And the Digital Leader Canvas, the free companion to this series, is here.)

Reading time: 7 minutes. If you take one thing from this: "make everything small" is only half an answer, because some AI changes only work whole, and a hundred pilots can be a way of avoiding one decision. Ahead: four rules that lower the cost of trying, the Disney move for keeping critics in the right seat, and which instrument really builds courage in a team, which is rare...

"We should be careful about starting something like this."

Some version of that sentence reaches me several times a year, and it's almost never about something large. The most recent case was 360-degree feedback: one department, a few weeks, software optional, entirely reversible.

Careful about a feedback pilot.

Nobody involved was blocking anything, and I want to be clear about that before I use it as an example. The caution was reasonable by the standards of the place. In organisations like that, nothing stays small: every initiative becomes a proper undertaking, a boulder to be set in motion. Capacity is thin to begin with, so anything new has to queue. By the time it reaches the front, the energy that started it has drained away. That's how most initiatives die in established companies. Not refused. Slowed until nobody quite remembers why they mattered.

Most conversations about AI in organisations are about capability: which tools, which use cases, which skills, what it costs, ...

A while ago a business partner replied to one of my emails, and I knew within two lines that he hadn't written it. The phrasing was too smooth, too balanced, too eager to acknowledge my points before answering them. Even the formatting was too perfect: tidy paragraphs of near-identical length, a neat bulleted list, not one of the small irregularities a person leaves behind when they type in a hurry. Nothing about it sounded like him.

What surprised me a bit was my own reaction. The technology didn't bother me; I use it every day. I felt something smaller and more personal: that I hadn't been worth the minutes. Somewhere in his inbox my message had come up, he'd clicked "generate reply", skimmed it, and sent. The content was fine. The signal was: you're a queue item.

That reaction is the subject of this edition, because it puts a price tag on something we're all now doing. And the price isn't paid in the text.

Let me implicate myself

Before I go further, the disclosure this editio...

Walk through any European airport bookshop — Frankfurt, Lisbon, Amsterdam; my travel schedule gives me too many chances to test this — and look at the business shelf. Shelf after shelf, mostly American: the titles, the case studies, the advice. We fly between European cities reading playbooks largely written for a different continent, and then wonder why they don't quite fit when we land.

I promised this edition last time: the gap this newsletter has circled since the beginning without facing head-on. Europe watches America — its leadership trends, its development trends, its tools — and asks, almost reflexively, what do we need to do like they do? If that sounds overstated, run through the methods your own organisation has adopted: OKRs came from Intel and Google, the Agile Manifesto was written in Utah, Radical Candor and Lean Startup in Silicon Valley. Even the Culture Map — the standard work on European cultural difference, quoted throughout this series — was written by an America...