#427 – July 13, 2026

Discerning the Best from the Rest

 

Hello, fellow strategists!

Judgment is the resource we need most these days — not the capacity to produce, but the capacity of taste, discerning the essential from the excess, the best from the merely adequate, the important from the merely uncomfortable. This edition circles that theme from several angles: which words earn their place and which don’t, which work is genuinely excellent versus merely competent, and which discomfort is worth heeding versus setting aside. Enjoy!  

 

Quick Takes

Be Brief, Be Brilliant, Be Gone

We’ve all sat through a meeting where someone with something important to say buried it under everything else they wanted to mention. Yue Zhao, writing in her newsletter The Uncommon Manager, opens with a phrase familiar from executive communications training: Be Brief, Be Brilliant, and Be Gone. Rather than treating it as a slogan, she unpacks what it actually takes to live up to it.

Succinctness isn’t the same as being short, she’s careful to note — some ideas need more words, and each one should earn its place. Nor is it licence to skip the hard parts of a topic, or to hand over raw data without interpretation; either one just trades brevity for clarity you still owed your audience.

“Being succinct does not mean being short,” as she puts it. What it actually demands, in her framing, is preparation on three fronts:

• Context. Understand how your point connects to what your audience already cares about — their priorities, their pressures, the meeting they’re walking into next.
• Clarity. Know the one thing you’re trying to say before you open your mouth. Meandering isn’t a sign you’re saying too much; it’s a sign you haven’t decided what matters most.
• Restraint. Once you’ve made your point, stop. The instinct to linger — for reassurance, for small talk, for one more caveat — often dilutes what you just accomplished.

She closes with a nod to Pascal, who once apologized for a long letter by explaining he hadn’t had time to write a short one — brevity, done well, is the harder craft, not the easier one.

None of this is limited to the executive suite. Board members, funders, customers, overwhelmed teams and colleagues in mid-crisis — everyone we work with is, in some sense, short on time and attention. The gift isn’t fewer words. It’s knowing which ones matter, and stopping once you’ve said them.

 

Taste Decides What’s Worth Making

In an AI-saturated world, the skill that’s scarce is no longer the capacity to make — it’s the capacity to judge. Almost anyone can now produce almost anything: a logo, a strategy memo, a hundred taglines, in seconds. But somebody still has to decide what’s extraordinary and what’s merely competent or serviceable at best.

To prove the point, best-selling author Daniel Pink notes that since the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022, new book releases have roughly tripled — and average published quality has fallen. More output, less worth reading.

The capacity we’re now lacking he calls “taste”: aesthetic judgment, a point of view, the sense that some things are good and others aren’t. Speaking at the Columbus College of Art & Design’s spring commencement, Pink offered the graduates three ways to build that sensibility, and they hold up well beyond the design studio.

• You don’t develop taste by watching, listening, or reading; you develop it by making things. AI models train on other people’s work; you train on your own. Every project that didn’t come together, every piece of feedback that stung, is what builds real judgment — no amount of passive consumption substitutes for it.
• Taste depends on the courage to say no. Some will tell you taste is just opinion, too subjective to defend. Pink disagrees: taste is subjective, but not arbitrary. It’s a form of moral courage — it takes a stand, and part of taking a stand is being willing to reject what isn’t good enough, even when the room has already nodded along.
• If your tastes aren’t changing, you have no taste. If it never updates, it’s just a habit. The people who stay relevant over a career aren’t the ones who found a groove early and defended it forever. They’re the ones who stay restless enough to be surprised.

Pink’s point applies beyond the design world. When the generation of material is free and instantaneous, judgment is the whole game — and you can’t delegate that to the tool doing the generating. It might be worth asking your own team this week: are we just producing ever more work at a mediocre standard, or getting better at judging the best of what is produced?

 

Points to Ponder

• People tend to approve of answers that tell them what they want to hear. And that, the AI Collective newsletter says, is the direction generative AI models tend to drift. They shared a Science study in March that found leading models endorse what users want to hear about 49% more often than a person would (even on harmful requests), and that people trust the agreeable version more. The same publication also noted a finding by Anthropic that people accept AI answers without checking them 91% of the time.
• When assessing remote-work requests as a disability accommodation, employers often look for a clear rule. There isn’t one — but the law firm Fasken notes legal decisions are sending a consistent signal: remote work is “no longer unusual” and is now an option employers are expected to seriously weigh. That doesn’t make it automatic, though — the outcome still depends on the medical evidence, the nature of the role, and how carefully the process was handled.
• Where is your energy better spent right now: pushing harder or planting yourself in better ground? In posing this question, James Clear says: “If you want a plant to grow, you can fuss over it every day — watering, weeding, moving it toward the sun. Or you can place it in the right soil and let nature do most of the work. A seed planted in the right spot often thrives on its own. Life is much the same. Progress is not only about how hard you work, but also about where you decide to work.”
• Here are five questions you should ask before making a big decision, featured recently in HBR’s Management Tip of the Day. Matter Consulting CEO Steven Morris recommends asking:  ● What would happen if we did nothing?  ● What could make us regret this decision?  ● What alternatives did we overlook?  ● How will we know if this was the right choice?  ● Is this decision reversible?

 

8020Info Drill-Down:

Comfortable Isn’t the Goal

“If your goals are comfortable, they’re not big enough.” Sally Hogshead’s line has earned a permanent spot taped to more than one strategist’s monitor — including ours.

It’s a useful check, because ambitious plans are supposed to feel unsettling. The trouble starts when leaders read that discomfort as a warning sign and quietly shrink the goal instead of examining it.

We’ve watched this play out repeatedly with leadership teams stepping into genuinely new territory — a merger, a bold funding bet, a governance overhaul. The plan feels thrilling and terrifying in equal measure, and the instinct is to treat the terror as a verdict. It isn’t. It’s feedback. It’s data. The real work is figuring out what, specifically, is generating the discomfort — and whether it points to a real gap or just an unfamiliar feeling.

Amanda Buchanan of Selah Consulting once shared a helpful starting point: notice how you handle uncertainty in your own life. Are you a detailed planner, or do you build the bridge as you walk it? Knowing your default helps you separate temperament from genuine risk.

From there, run these seven questions to locate the source:

• Are you clear on the goal — what’s to be achieved, and why?
• Do you believe it’s actually achievable?
• Do you know how to start, and can you see the path forward?
• Are you missing critical information about the problem or your options?
• Are you worried about disrupting a crucial relationship?
• Is there an unresolved conflict between your head and your heart?
• Is the dream too big for your current budget, experience, or expertise?

The stress you feel in responding to each question points to a specific gap to be addressed — lack of clarity, information, resources, relationship — and it’s better to address those gaps, not avoid them. For example, if the goal genuinely outstrips your resources, pare it back deliberately and make that your plan. Either way, the aim isn’t to feel perfectly comfortable with your plan. But it is to have one in which you feel confidence.

 

For Your Reading List:  Sustainable Excellence vs. Hustle Culture

The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg presents an antidote to hustle culture’s hacks and burnout. He argues that true excellence blends skill mastery with “mattering” — work that feels significant — and ties sustainable performance to three practices: aligning with your values, cultivating focus, and favouring consistency over intensity. It also has a chapter applying these ideas to organizations. Reviewers have noted it leans philosophical rather than tactical. Readers navigating constant organizational disruption, on the other hand, may prefer Stulberg’s earlier Master of Change (2023), which focuses more directly on resilience and adapting through change.

 

Closing Thought:  Use More Than Your Little Finger

“Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.“

— from a letter written by psychologist William James to the Polish philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski in 1906.

 

AI Disclosure: This newsletter was hand-crafted and personally curated. In addition to using Gemini Pro and other online tools for research and fact-checking, the author made some use of Claude for polishing the prose and headings.