We believe in better.

Greenleaf’s test is uncomfortable and it is the right one: do those served grow as people — do they become healthier, wiser, freer, more likely themselves to serve? Authority is something lent by the people being led, and it is withdrawn the moment it stops being earned.

In practice that means the chief executive’s job is to remove what is in the way of the people doing the work, not to be the one deciding everything.

Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader, 1970

Say where we are. Say what has changed or what is in the way. Say what we are going to do about it. In that order, every time — in a board paper, in a meeting, in an email.

It is a discipline of thought before it is a format. Most arguments that cannot be put in that shape have not yet been thought through, and the structure exposes it before the audience does.

After Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle

A fact is not an insight. Every observation has to survive the question asked of it — and then asked again of the answer, until what is left is something a reader can actually act on.

It is the fastest way to find the difference between a report and a recommendation.

Carnegie’s first principle, and the hardest of the four to keep. Criticism puts a person on the defensive and sets them to justifying themselves; it almost never changes what they do next.

It is not an argument for avoiding hard conversations. It is an argument for having them about the problem rather than about the person.

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, 1936