A behavioral scientist I have been reading lately made a point that stuck with me. Culture does not shift because a company rewrites its stated values on a slide or a wall. It shifts based on how employees watch those values get enacted, day after day, in the decisions nobody bothers to narrate out loud.…
Walk into enough boardrooms right now and you will hear the same conversation on repeat. How much of the workforce can we replace with AI. Finance teams are running the numbers, circling headcount like a line item to be trimmed rather than the people who actually built the company. It feels decisive. It feels modern.…
I have worked with enough unemployed IT project managers over the past year to notice a pattern. The job market right now is unforgiving, layoffs keep coming in waves, and AI skepticism has made hiring managers harder to read. In that environment, imposter syndrome shows up almost universally. What I have found, again and again…
A client came to me recently rattled after a first-round interview. She had prepared thoughtful, well-structured answers, and the hiring manager still seemed to be testing her, listening for something that sounded rehearsed or generated rather than lived. She is an IT project manager with real scars from real projects, and she left the conversation…
The email went out on a Tuesday morning in late October 2025. Fourteen thousand Amazon employees opened their inbox and found out their corporate jobs were gone, part of a round that had been rumored at up to 30,000 in the days before. I have spent thirty years leading complex, cross-division projects and coaching leaders…