Let me do some math with you. Your weekly cross-team sync: 8 people, 60 minutes. It has been running for 11 months. Attendance is variable. Decisions are inconsistent. The agenda is usually sent the morning of, sometimes not at all. The meeting usually runs 10 to 15 minutes over. Here is what that meeting has actually cost your organization: 8 people × 1.25 hours (with overrun) × 48 weeks = 480 hours of collective human time. That is 12 full working weeks. Three months of one person’s life. At a blended fully-loaded salary of $120,000 for a senior IC or manager, you’re looking at roughly $70,000 in labor cost for a single recurring meeting over a year. Now ask yourself: what has that meeting produced? If it has produced $70,000 in value - in decisions made, alignment created, problems solved, projects unblocked - then it is worth every minute. Many good meetings are. But if it produces vague summaries, unclear follow-up, and decisions that get relitigated in Slack the next day? Y...
Maxwell's Law of the Lid explained honestly - and what raising it actually requires. John Maxwell has a principle he calls the Law of the Lid . It goes like this: your leadership ability determines your level of effectiveness . The lower your ability to lead - yourself, your relationships, your environment - the lower the lid on your potential. No matter how hard you work or how talented you are, you cannot produce at a level higher than your leadership lid. When I first heard this, I thought it was about managing teams. About being a good boss. About having direct reports who perform. It took me a while to understand that the most important lid is not the one over your team. It is the one over yourself. What does self-leadership actually mean? Self-leadership is not motivation. It is not discipline, in the way most people use that word. It is not waking up at 5am or having a morning routine or meditating before your emails. (I know you thought I was about to go...