Mark MacLeod

I help startup CEOs go from $5M in revenue to a massive exit

Since 1999, I have sat at the right-hand side of the leaders of high growth technology companies as either a CFO, VC or deal maker. I served as CFO for software companies including Shopify (NYSE: SHOP) and Freshbooks. 

I was a General Partner in Real Ventures, one of Canada's largest and most active seed stage funds. My investments there include the fund's largest cash on cash and highest IRR returns to date. 

Most recently, I founded SurePath Capital Partners the leading investment bank for SMB SaaS companies where we did hundreds of millions in financing and exit transactions.

The thing I loved most about these roles was the one on one coaching and advisory conversations I had with CEOs. 

Since 2020 I have been coaching, investing in and advising CEOs + helping them execute game-changing deals.

I am a semi-active angel investor with a portfolio of 22 investments, 2 highly positive exits and counting.

In my spare time, I am a passionate CrossFit athlete and electronic music producer/ DJ. I also run Deep Down Music, a record label.

Founder

I coach, advise and invest in the CEOs of high growth technology companies & help them execute game-changing deals.

The best CEOs I've worked with all have one thing in common: They're blunt.

Not rude. Not cruel. Not careless with their words.

Blunt.

They say what needs to be said in the room where it needs to be said.

They don't soften feedback until it loses its meaning.

They don't wait three months to have the conversation everyone knows is overdue.

They don't hide behind politeness when clarity is what the team actually needs.

Most founders confuse being nice with being kind.

Nice avoids the truth to protect feelings.

Kind delivers the truth because the stakes are too high not to.

Your team doesn't need you to be comfortable.

They need you to be clear.

Bluntness with respect is one of the highest-leverage leadership skills you can develop.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

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I don't think I will ever fully retire.

Retirement is a concept built for a world that no longer exists.

It assumed you'd grind for 40 years, then stop.

Trade your health for money, then try to buy it back.

But what if you could work forever?

Not because you have to. Because you want to.

Because building still lights you up at 60, 70, 80.

That changes the entire equation.

You can't run this game like a sprint.

The founders who burned out at 45 didn't fail because they lacked talent. They failed because they built a pace they couldn't sustain.

We're going to live longer than any generation before us. The question isn't when you stop.

It's how you build a life and a body and a mind that lets you keep going as long as you choose.

That means sleep isn't optional. Recovery isn't weakness. Energy isn't something you sacrifice for the next milestone.

It's the asset that makes every future milestone possible.

Retirement is what happens when you run out of energy.

Sustainability is what happens when you never do.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

I am leaning into my weirdness, and it feels good.

I have never been a stereotypical CPA. When I was in undergrad, I designed my life around raves. Classes were Tuesday - Thursday. This enabled me to go dancing all night Saturday and recover. 

While I love to serve, I hate having a boss. So, while my peers went the “Big 4” route, I joined a small firm serving founders. I have only ever been or worked with founders. 

I have always leaned into what I love. I love to write. When I look back, all of my most important relationships came from my writing. Tobi from Shopify. Mike from FreshBooks. The guys starting Real Ventures. All came in part because they read my thoughts.

Then there’s yoga. Starting casually in my late 20s, yoga has evolved to become the foundation of my life.

The stretches offered in most North American yoga studios are a tiny fraction of what yoga is. In fact, the word “asana” (that’s what these postures are called) is barely mentioned in the Yoga Sutras.

Yoga is a complete system for living your life. My goal is to live every minute in accordance with yogic practices and values.

I discovered kundalini yoga in 2012. I got serious about it in 2019. And I teach it now.

Kundalini focuses on building and directing energy. We all have dormant energy at the base of our spine. Through these practices (called “kriyas”), we activate and direct that energy. 

Studies have shown that this practice turns on dormant parts of your brain. It unlocks our potential.

All of this mix of yoga, breathwork, meditation, and human optimization has co-mingled with my startup experience to create Limitless. 

My mission is simple: to redefine how founders build companies by putting their energy, health, and inner alignment first. So they can scale without limits and lead from a higher state.

Change your life so you can change the world!

Hard to think of something more motivating to work on!

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

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Certified Personal & Business Performance Coach

Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA)

An exclusive community of VC and PE-backed CEOs who want
to scale themselves and their companies without limits.

Limitless is an exclusive community of VC and PE-backed CEOs who want
to scale themselves and their companies without limits.

I coach startup CEOs to grow themselves and their business all the way to a massive exit

SurePath Capital Partners is the premier strategic financial advisor to the global SMB Software market. With offices in Toronto and San Francisco, we aim to be the #1 advisor in this space globally and the one call CEOs and board make when they need to make a deal happen.

I led finance and corporate development at FreshBooks - the #1 cloud accounting specialist for small business owners. Since 2004, over 5 million people have used FreshBooks to track time, organize expenses and invoice clients online and in the cloud.

Accomplishments:
- Closed $30M institutional funding round + other unpublished transactions
- Led the process to find a partner to backstop a new product line
- Sourced and closed other key revenue-generating partnerships

CFO + Chief Corporate Development Officer

Venture Partner

Parter at Real Ventures where I focus on SaaS, freemium, e-commerce and digital media seed investments

Director, Fabric Technologies
Director, Context.io (sold to Return Path)
Director, Frank and Oak
Observer, Rewardli Inc.
Investor, Thinknear.com (sold to Telenav)
Investor, Localmind.com (sold to Airbnb)
Investor, Massive Damage Inc.
Director, Sweet IQ (sold to Reachlocal)
Observer, Unbounce.com
Investor, Engagio (sold to Influitive)
Investor, Origin.al Internet Company General Partner

General Partner

CFO for Tungle - a great solution for meeting coordination.

Raised a $5M "A" round. Served as CFO through the successful sale of the company to RIM.

Interim CFO, Shopify
Advisor, Well.ca
Advisor, Cakemail 
Advisor, Dok Dok Inc 
Advisor, Raymark
Advisor, Sitezoogle 
Interim CFO, Status.net Inc.

Advisor & CFO

Led finance, operations, legal, HR, strategic planning functions for this mobile communications startup. Raised an $10M B round led by Flybridge. Raised an additional $1M in China. Made major improvements to execution, ops, key metrics, etc.

Led finance, operations, customer support, IT and manufacturing for this venture-backed networked storage vendor. Negotiated the sale of Terrascale to Rackable Systems (NASDAQ: RACK) in a deal returning 10x on invested capital.

VP, Finance

Prepared this 15 person IP networking startup for commercialization & ‘B’ round funding. Responsibilities included financing, all back office operations, investor + board relations and negotiation of all  agreements. Towards the end of my term, I was given increasing responsibility for OEM sales and strategic relationships.

Strategic consulting assignments: 
•	Advised on the sale of two software companies and the purchase of an education services company
•	Led the successful restructuring of an insolvent retailer. The company is now thriving and expanding
•	Enabled the restructuring & strategic refocus of a new media company that resulted in a 3x growth in revenues and 5x growth in profit & cash flow

President

Was responsible for Finance, Alliances and Corporate Development functions. Raised $19M in equity over 2 rounds + oversaw growth to over 100 people. Established many key partner relationships

Director, Finance + Corporate Development

Helping VC-backed CEOs scale themselves and their companies without limits. 
| Host of The Startup CEO Show podcast

Marie Chevrier Schwartz spent 10 years building Sampler. Raised venture capital. Grew it to real scale. Then the business went bankrupt.

Most founders go dark when that happens. Marie did the opposite. She went on social media and told everyone.

The thing she said that stuck with me most: The day she accepted it was over, she felt relief. Not defeat. Relief.

Because she finally separated who she was from what she built.

That's the hardest thing in entrepreneurship. Not the fundraising. Not the product. Not the market timing.

It's realizing you are not your company.

Marie was late in her pregnancy when she learned the business wouldn't survive. She had a newborn when it officially ended. And instead of shutting down, she used that moment to rebuild her identity entirely.

She's went on to runTechTO, Canada's largest tech community, serving 60,000 founders. Different chapter. Same energy. More clarity.

If you missed the podcast, the full conversation is on my blog → link in the comments.

Most founder interviews are about fundraising, growth hacks, and exits.
This one was different.

I sat down with Tonya Papanikolov, founder of Rainbo, one of the leading functional mushroom brands. She's a holistic nutritionist, a Kundalini yoga teacher, and someone who built her company from a meditation download, not a pitch deck.

What struck me most was how she thinks about success.

Not revenue targets. Not market share.
Alignment. 

Is what she's building aligned with her deeper purpose? And when the answer is yes, everything else follows.

She also said something that stopped me: when she feels the urge to escape and retreat from the work, that's usually a sign she's avoiding the next level of growth, not that she needs rest.

That's a distinction most founders never make.

We talked about building a CPG brand from scratch, getting into Whole Foods, running a company with her husband, and why her morning practice is the most important thing she does for the business.

If you missed the podcast, the full conversation is on my blog

Botkeeper raised $90M+ and just shut down after 11 years. It's a cautionary tale we all can learn from.

Raising capital is not a sign of success. It just means someone gave you a shot.

We celebrate fundraising like it's the finish line. It's not. It's the starting gun.

And sometimes it's the thing that kills you.

More capital means more pressure, higher burn, bigger expectations, and less room to figure things out.

Botkeeper never nailed product-market fit with accountants. But they kept raising anyway. I don't blame them. But this happens a lot with VCs overfunding.

$90M later, the outcome was the same as if they'd run out of money at $5M.
Except that more people got hurt.

The founders I work with who build lasting companies treat capital as fuel for what's already working. Not a substitute for what isn't working.

The true test of your values isn't when you fire a low performer.
Everyone can do that.

It's when you exit a high performer who violates them.

The person who is hitting their numbers. The one the board loves. The one your team depends on.

But they're toxic. They undermine trust. They treat people like collateral damage.

And you know it.

Most CEOs tolerate it because the results are too good to lose.

That's not pragmatism. That's a signal to your entire company that values are negotiable when the numbers are right.

The moment you exit that person, two things happen.

First, it hurts. Revenue might dip. There's a gap.

Second, your culture becomes real. Every person on your team now knows the values aren't a poster on the wall. They're the operating system.

And that's worth more than any one performer.

Harry Stebbings says fundraising has changed.

According to Harry, SaaS founders growing 2-3x have two choices:

Use AI to accelerate to 8-10x growth. Or cut burn and never raise again.

The reality is more nuanced.

The real question isn't "which path." It's "how do I build OPTIONALITY so I can choose either, on my terms?"

Optionality has never been more important than it is now.

Optionality means:

✅ Your can get to cashflow break-even in runway if you are not there already.

✅ Your growth rate & unit economics let you raise if and when you want to.

✅You are known to your most natural buyers and can enter into a warm, qualified exit process at any time.

And a personal consideration here: 

✅ As founder, your energy and clarity let you make that strategic call from strength, not panic.

The founders who win in this market aren't picking door 1 or door 2.

They're building a company, and a version of themselves, that can walk through whichever door makes sense, whenever it makes sense.

That's not simple. But it's the real game.

Founder @ 20VC

The biggest risk of AI isn't losing your job. It's never being able to stop working.

The people burning out fastest right now aren't the ones resisting AI.
They're the ones who embrace it most.

A new Harvard Business Review study followed a tech company for eight months and found that when people genuinely adopted AI, they didn't work less. They just did more. 

To-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, then kept going. 

Work bled into lunches and late evenings. Not because anyone was pressured. Because the tools made it more doable.

This is the trap nobody's talking about.

AI doesn't create boundaries. It removes them.

And without boundaries, more capacity just becomes more work.

This is why health, energy, and inner clarity aren't nice-to-haves in the AI era.
They're survival tools.

The founders who thrive through this won't be the ones who squeezed the most out of every AI tool.

They'll be the ones who knew when to stop. Who protected their sleep. Who built recovery into their operating system. Who had the self-awareness to say 
"I can do more," and the discipline to say "but I won't."

Being able to call it a day and feel good about what you accomplished will become a superpower (it always was..).

AI is the most powerful accelerant founders have ever had.

Without boundaries, it accelerates burnout just as fast as growth.

Your job as CEO isn't to do more. It's to remove friction.

Friction is everywhere. It's the slow approval process. The unclear ownership. The meeting that should be an email. The hire you haven't made. The conversation you've been avoiding.

It's not one big thing. It's a hundred small things quietly dragging your company down.

Most founders tolerate them. They work around them. They get used to the drag.

Limitless CEOs have a different habit.

They remove one piece of friction every single day.

It sounds small. But compounded over a quarter, that's 90 obstacles gone.
Over a year, you've fundamentally changed how your company operates.

Not through a big reorg. Not through a new strategy deck.

Through the daily discipline of making things a little easier for your team to win.

That's the real job.

Find and remove one piece of friction every day.

AI made you faster. It didn't make you better at stopping.

Every CEO I speak with has the same problem right now: the tools keep getting better, but the days keep getting fuller.

So I teach them a simple boundary protocol: Block one hour a day that is completely analog.

No screens. No Slack. No AI. No input at all.

Walk. Breathe. Sit. Think. Or do nothing.

This isn't a wellness hack. It's an operating decision.

Because the quality of your leadership is determined in the space between inputs. Not during them.

The founders who protect that space make sharper calls, see further ahead, and last longer than the ones running at full capacity every waking hour.

Your brain needs time offline to process what it's taken in. Without that, you're not thinking. You're just reacting faster.

AI gives you speed. Analog time gives you clarity.

You need both. Most founders only have one.

I asked a CEO client to rate his happiness. He said 6 out of 10.
I asked what would make it a 10.

His answer wasn't more revenue. Wasn't a bigger team. Wasn't closing a round.
It was spending more time on things that create energy.

He already knew the answer. Most founders do.

The gap between a 6 and a 10 isn't more success.

It's less of what drains you and more of what fills you up.

The hard part isn't knowing this. It's giving yourself permission to act on it.

Energy isn't a reward for building something great. It's the requirement.

Design your role, company and life around energy and you become limitless!

Every startup's 2026 budget is already wrong.

Not because someone made a mistake.

Because AI is changing the cost structure faster than anyone can model.

Roles you planned to hire for in Q3 might not be needed by then.

Tools that cost six figures are being replaced by agents that cost hundreds.

Runway is quietly extending at companies that are paying attention.

And the ones that aren't are still hiring against a plan that was outdated the week it was approved.

This is the new reality for founders:

You can't forecast spend the way you used to.

The old was was full of certainty. Full of proven formulas. 

The founders who adapt fastest aren't the ones with the best financial models.

They're the ones willing to revisit assumptions every month, rather than every quarter or every year.

Rigid budgets were already dangerous. In the AI era, they're fiction.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

Most founders optimize their GTM funnel. Almost none optimize the machine that runs it all.

I recently sat down with Greg Newlands, a fitness coach who works with founders.

Full disclosure: Greg is my coach and also works with several of our Limitless founders.

One thing he said stuck with me:

"If I'm not sleeping well, not exercising, not rested, I just don't perform the same in life or in business."

That's not a wellness quote. That's an operating reality.

Greg trains entrepreneurs the way athletes get trained: 
Strategic breaks throughout the day. 
Resistance training as a non-negotiable. 
Tracking four daily KPIs for energy and performance.

The part that hit hardest: he burned out multiple times before he stopped treating rest as the enemy of progress.

Sound familiar?

This is one of the most tactical conversations I've had on health as a founder strategy.

Full episode on my blog → link in comments.

From your biggest → the best shape of your life | Helping ambitious, driven men rebuild their body & confidence after letting things slip

Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Block, just gave us a lesson in making hard decisions.

Often, when faced with decisions like layoffs, the temptation is to do the minimum necessary. To avoid as much pain as possible. 

Jack did the opposite. He leaned into the pain. He cut 40% of Block's workforce. Over 4,000 people. In one move.

Not because the business is struggling. Gross profit grew 24% last year.

He did it because he saw where AI is heading and decided to get there first. He leaned in.

Dorsey said it clearly: “Repeated rounds of cuts destroy morale, focus, and trust.” He'd rather take one hard, clear action than manage a slow bleed toward the same outcome.

You can disagree with the decision. But the leadership principle is worth studying.

The hardest decisions aren't hard because you don't know what to do. They're hard because you don't want to feel the pain of doing it. They're hard because you resist.

So you delay. You half-measure. You spread the pain out over months, hoping it hurts less.

It doesn't. It just hurts longer.

Whether it's a layoff, a co-founder conversation, or a pivot you've been avoiding, the cost of the slow path is almost always higher than the cost of the decisive one.

Suffering = pain * resistance. If you don’t resist what you need to do, you will not suffer. 

It’s no surprise that Jack took this approach, given his spiritual practice. Jack does long Vipassana retreats. Anyone who has done these will know that they are painful but always worth it.

The way out (of whatever issue you are struggling with) is through. Lean into the discomfort. Make the bold call.

A founder built an AI system that scans everything. It was making him worse at his job.

AI lets you measure everything now. Every Gong call. Every Slack thread. Every data query. Every customer conversation.

One founder I spoke with built an AI system that scans a thousand times more data than his team could manually. Every day, he is briefed on literally everything in his company.

Impressive. Also dangerous.

Because the ability to do everything is not a reason to do everything.

When I dug in, his real bottleneck was one thing. So we cut one of three product initiatives entirely. Narrowed focus to the one thing blocking growth.

More data didn't solve it. Less did.

Here's what I see happening everywhere right now:

AI gives founders superhuman capacity to monitor, measure, and manage.

But capacity without focus is just sophisticated distraction.

The founders who win won't be the ones who do the most with AI.

They'll be the ones disciplined enough to do less.

The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master.

For most founders, the mind is running the show.

It wakes you up at 3 am with worst-case scenarios.

It replays the board meeting you can't change.

It tells you that every competitor is ahead of you.

It convinces you that rest is laziness.

The founders I work with at Limitless are learning to think with more intention.

They choose what to focus on rather than letting their minds choose for them.

That's what meditation is. That's what journaling is. That's what a morning practice is.

Not escaping the mind. Training it to work for you, not against you.

You are a mental athlete. You need to train your mind the way athletes train their bodies.

Your mind built your company. Don't let it destroy you in the process.

Every founder has a financial dashboard. Almost none have a biological one.

At Limitless, we think about CEO performance across three dimensions:

Physical → sleep quality, HRV, recovery.

Mental → deep work hours, focus time.

Financial → MRR, pipeline velocity, growth.

(We also go deep on spiritual, but let's park that for now...).

Here's what most founders miss:
These aren't three separate dashboards. They're one system.

✅ Your HRV predicts your decision quality.

✅ Your sleep predicts your deep work capacity.

✅ Your deep work predicts your revenue.

The financial metrics are the output. The biological ones are the input.

Fix the inputs. The outputs follow.

Every playbook you relied on is being rewritten right now.

AI is disrupting how we build, hire, sell, and lead.

The best practices that got you here? Most of them no longer apply.

This is terrifying if you need external certainty to make decisions.
It's freeing if you don't.

When the map is gone, the founder who wins is the one who can navigate without it.

That means first principles over borrowed frameworks. Grounded decisions over reactive ones. Intuition over consensus.

Your own race over someone else's example.

The answers aren't in the latest AI playbook or the hottest thread on X.

They're inside the founder who is clear enough, calm enough, and honest enough to hear them.

This is the era where inner work becomes a competitive advantage.

I meditate every morning before I open my laptop.

Not just because I'm spiritual. Because it makes me a better decision-maker.

When your mind is full of noise, every decision feels urgent. Everything looks like a fire. You react instead of respond.

When your mind is clear, you see what actually matters. You hear the signal through the noise. You trust yourself enough to act without needing five people to validate the call.

The best CEOs I work with are the clearest.

That clarity comes from creating space between the input and the response.

That's all meditation is. Not woo-woo. Not escape.

A daily practice of training your mind to be still so it can be sharp when it matters.

You are a mental athlete. You need to train your mind the way athletes train their bodies.

Ten minutes a day. No app required. Just you and silence. Pay attention to your breath. As distractions arise, keep coming back to the breath. That's it.

It's the highest-ROI habit no one puts on their calendar.

Subscribe to my newsletter and get a 22 page presentation on the secrets of Limitless CEOs https://lnkd.in/gWqQBd-n

Cofounder of Lead In 30 • Upgrade your leaders • Human resources and leadership development

It was one of the most memorable moments of my career. I was standing in the front of the room finishing a meeting with the top 200 leaders of a large hospital system in the DC area. I handed the microphone to the CEO to close us out. What he said shocked me and has stuck with me for years. After hours of discussion about the culture of his organization of 18,000 people that day he ended the meeting looking into the eyes of his top 200 and saying into the microphone, "I have come to an inconvenient and disgusting conclusion that I am the problem."

That's a direct quote.

He was gone less than two months later. 

He left.

For almost a decade I've traveled the world meeting with leaders of some of the world's biggest companies. Amazon, Walmart, Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Johnson & Johnson, Cigna, Hormel, BD, Darden Restaurants, Fox, and HCA to name a few. I've averaged 165 flights a year. New York, London, Singapore, Sydney, New Zealand, and a lot of less notable locales have been stops along the way.

Here's what I've learned...

Leaders make or break an organization.

They are the competitive advantage.

Or the anchor sinking the ship.

One leader can change everything. Positively or negatively.

After years of consulting senior executives on their company-wide culture transformation projects I'm now spending all of my time with a smaller group of leaders. Call them executive coaching clients or whatever you want. They are leaders of teams, divisions, business areas, or enterprises that aren't yet who they want to become.

We help successful executives grow their careers through strengthening their leadership effectiveness.

That's the phrase we wrote as we founded our firm.

Perhaps you're that leader who could benefit from our questions, perspective, and proprietary models. Or maybe you know that leader.  

DM me. 

I'd love to chat. 🎯

Russ Hill

Marvin Ellison started as a part-time security guard at Target making $4.35 an hour. He unloaded trucks and drove forklifts to pay his way through college. He cleaned buildings at a department store.

His father picked cotton as a sharecropper. The family didn't have indoor plumbing until he was six years old.

Today he's the Chairman and CEO of Lowe's. $84 billion company. 300,000 employees. The only Black executive in history to lead two Fortune 500 companies.

His first day as CEO, he skipped headquarters entirely.

Went straight to a store floor. He later said the store is always the best place to learn in retail.

What he learned changed everything about how Lowe's operates.

Previous management had stripped empowerment from frontline leaders. Every decision escalated upward. Store managers followed rigid corporate mandates regardless of local market conditions. One store in Austin set up a fire pit display in 112-degree heat because the planogram demanded it.

Ellison brought all 2,200 store managers through week-long leadership training over 18 months. He mixed managers with 3 months of experience alongside those with 27 years.

He gave them back the authority to make decisions that serve the customer.

The results:
- Stock went from roughly $96 to over $250
- Operating margins improved by more than 440 basis points
- The company added tens of billions in market cap

Here's what most leaders miss:

Centralized systems offer control. But they create bottlenecks that slow response times. In a volatile world, latency is fatal.

Ellison understood this. He spread decision-making horizontally rather than elevating it vertically. He processed information in parallel instead of waiting for it to climb the chain of command.

His father had a rule at the dinner table. Seven children were served first. He always ate last.

Because the leader serves everyone else before themselves.

That philosophy built an $84 billion company.

What would change if your leadership team stopped hoarding decisions and started distributing them?

Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results And Most Don't has the frameworks for building this kind of leadership: https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

Cofounder of Lone Rock Leadership • Upgrade your managers • Human resources and leadership development

Every Sunday, Jon Moeller sat down and asked himself one question. He ran Procter and Gamble. $390 billion company. 108,000 employees.

The question:
How is the business going to be stronger next week because of what I do?

His next line: "Everything else is just noise."

That discipline shaped one of the most ruthless acts of focus in corporate history.

P&G had over 170 brands. Most were still profitable. Most still had teams. Cutting them felt wasteful.

The company cut anyway. Down to 65.

They exited entire categories described internally as "flavors, fragrances, and fashion."

The 65 brands they kept? They produced 95% of the company's profits.

Organic sales accelerated significantly after the restructuring. P&G went on to deliver 40 consecutive quarters of organic sales growth.

Here's what most leaders miss:

Focused execution is a leader's ability to protect priorities, eliminate noise, and ensure that effort converts to outcomes. Most leaders struggle with this because the noise feels urgent.

The number of meetings has tripled since 2020. Organizations that reduced meetings by 40 percent saw a 71 percent increase in productivity.

But meetings are the symptom.

The disease is too many priorities competing for finite capacity. When everything is urgent, nothing gets the focus it needs to succeed. Initiatives launch with fanfare and die quietly from neglect.

Moeller understood this.

He once described the problem this way: often our objective in meetings is to look smart, or at least not look dumb, or to carry an agenda. If instead we went into each meeting with the objective of learning something from each person in the room, that changes everything.

He didn't just practice focus himself. He built systems that filtered noise before it reached his teams. He killed projects that weren't working rather than letting them consume capacity.

One question every Sunday.

What would change on your team if every leader started the week that way?

Want the complete framework for delivering results through disciplined focus? Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results And Most Don't: 

https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

Andy Grove asked one question that saved Intel from extinction. The answer cost 8,000 jobs. Here's why it was the best decision in tech history:

In 1985, Intel was dying.

Profits collapsed from $198 million to less than $2 million in a single year.

Japanese competitors were crushing them in memory chips.

The company that helped build Silicon Valley was bleeding out.

Grove sat in his office with co-founder Gordon Moore.

He looked out the window and asked:

"If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?"

Moore didn't hesitate.

"He would get us out of memories."

Grove's response: "Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?"

That question changed everything.

Intel laid off 8,000 people. Spent over $180 million rebuilding. Abandoned the product the company was founded on.

Most of the organization fought the change. The board was skeptical.

Grove committed anyway. No hedging. No half-measures. No "let's try both for a while."

Within a decade, Intel owned over 80% of the microprocessor market.

Revenue grew from $1.9 billion to $25.1 billion.

Time Magazine named Grove Man of the Year in 1997.

But here's what makes this story worth studying:

Grove already knew the answer before he asked the question.

So did Moore.

The data was clear. Memory chips were a losing game. Everyone in the building could see it.

Nobody wanted to be the person who killed Intel's founding product.

This is where most leaders stall.

They don't lack information. They lack the willingness to act on information they already have.

So they commission more reports. Form committees. Run pilots. Delay until the market makes the decision for them.

Grove called this a "strategic inflection point" in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.

The moment where the old strategy is dying but leadership hasn't yet committed to the new one.

Most companies die there. Not from ignorance. From indecision.

Here's what most leaders miss:

The hardest decisions aren't the ones where you don't have enough data.

They're the ones where you have plenty of data and still can't pull the trigger.

Grove's trick was simple. He removed himself from the equation.

"What would our replacement do?"

That one reframe cut through the politics, the emotion, and the sunk cost.

Try it this week:

Look at the one decision your team has been circling for months.

Ask: "If a new leader walked in tomorrow, what would they do?"

You already know the answer.

The question is whether you'll act on it.

Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results And Most Don't has the frameworks for making these decisions before the market makes them for you: 

https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

Bernard Arnault runs the world's largest luxury group. Worth $400 billion in brands. 200,000 employees. Yet he still walks stores unannounced and checks for dust:

You'd expect someone at that level to be completely removed from day-to-day operations.

But this isn't micromanagement. It's how you protect an empire where standards can't slip even 1%.

Here's what most leaders miss about how quality actually dies:

A display case has a small scuff. Nobody fixes it because "customers probably won't notice." Next week, there are two scuffs. Then the lighting is slightly off. Then product arrangement gets sloppy.

Each moment feels insignificant.

But teams are watching what you walk past without comment.

At LVMH, Arnault knows that luxury exists in the details customers feel but can't articulate. The moment you accept "good enough," you've lost what made you special.

This is why he still checks himself.

When the CEO of a $400 billion company inspects store windows personally, it sends an unmistakable message: we protect what matters, even when nobody's watching.

The principle works everywhere:
- In manufacturing, run your hand along welds and joints. Feel what quality means.
- In customer service, read actual support tickets, not summary metrics.
- In sales, listen to full client calls, not highlight reels.

People perform to the standard you inspect, not the standard you expect.

Standards slip quietly. Great leaders don't.

This principle of visible reinforcement is central to creating environments where results compound instead of drift.

Ray Dalio records every meeting at Bridgewater and shares the tapes with all 1,500 employees. Most CEOs would call this insane. He calls it essential. Here's what most leaders didn't get: 

Most organizations treat transparency like a trust exercise. Dalio treated it like debugging code.

Every meeting recorded. Every decision tracked. Every outcome analyzed against the original logic.

When an investment thesis failed, they could replay exactly where the thinking broke down - not to blame, but to upgrade the decision-making system itself.

This is why Bridgewater's transparency worked when others' failed: it was designed for learning speed, not team bonding.

Here's the difference: At Bridgewater, people could challenge Dalio's investment thesis in front of 50 colleagues without fear of retaliation. But they couldn't avoid the data showing their last 3 predictions were wrong.

Real safety means you can surface hard truths. False safety means hard truths stay buried until quarterly results force them into the open.

Ask yourself: When was the last time someone 3 levels below you told you a project was failing before you discovered it yourself?

If the answer is "never" or "I can't remember," truth is moving too slowly through your organization.

And when truth moves slowly, so do results.

The question isn't whether truth will surface. It's whether it surfaces fast enough to matter.

Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results, And Most Don't shows you how to build systems where clarity drives performance without sacrificing trust: https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

Your highest-performing team just put in three brutal months. The effort was there. The results weren't.

Before you question their commitment, Angela Duckworth's research on grit suggests you might be asking the wrong question.

Most leaders know Duckworth's work shows that perseverance matters. What they miss is the critical qualifier: grit only drives breakthrough results when it's anchored to clear goals and consistent feedback loops.

Without that foundation, what looks like admirable persistence is actually just expensive stubbornness.

Watch what happens when teams grind without clear direction. Effort multiplies while frustration compounds exponentially, and nobody can explain why all that hard work isn't moving the needle.

I saw a product team work 60-hour weeks for three months rebuilding a feature. Incredible effort, total commitment. The problem? Leadership kept saying "make it better" without defining what better actually meant.

They built five different versions before someone finally articulated clear success metrics. All that grit, pointed at a moving target.

The outcome wasn't breakthrough performance. It was exhausted people who couldn't understand why their grinding effort produced so little progress.

Here's what clarity actually requires: specific outcomes everyone can visualize, defined metrics that show real-time progress, and tight feedback loops that course-correct before effort becomes waste.

Without all three, you're not building grit. You're building frustration.

Before demanding more perseverance from your team, ask: Can every person clearly articulate the goal, their role in achieving it, and how they'll know they're making progress?

If you're getting vague answers, you don't have a grit problem. You have a clarity problem.

And no amount of perseverance fixes unclear direction.

Subscribe to my newsletter for leadership insights that cut through conventional wisdom and give you frameworks that actually work: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF

In 2006, Indra Nooyi took over PepsiCo amid declining soda sales. Obesity criticism was rising. Analysts wanted quick fixes. She chose patience over panic and unlocked ~$57B in market value:

Instead of squeezing margins, Nooyi rebalanced the portfolio.

She introduced “Performance with Purpose.”

Not as branding. As strategy.

PepsiCo reorganized its products into 3 clear categories:

• Fun for You
• Better for You
• Good for You

Capital shifted toward healthier snacks, nutrition science, and product reformulation.

R&D spending nearly tripled.

Sodium was reduced.
Sugar was adjusted.
Packaging and water usage were cut across global operations.

She expanded into emerging markets.
She strengthened snacks, which began outperforming beverages.
New billion-dollar brands were added almost every other year.

During her 12-year tenure:

Revenue grew by more than 80%.
Market value rose dramatically.
PepsiCo reinforced its position as the world’s second-largest food and beverage company.

Nooyi proved purpose pays. PepsiCo’s stock returned 109% while competitors flatlined, and market value rose $57B.

But here’s what most leaders missed:

Nooyi didn’t chase trends. She used purpose as a capital allocation filter.

If it didn’t align with long-term positioning, it didn’t get funded.

Most executives react to quarterly pressure. She redirected resources before the consumer shift fully matured.

Purpose wasn’t soft. It shaped where money flowed. And that discipline compounded.

High-performing organizations don’t react.

They align capital, talent, and strategy around a clear direction.

If your “purpose” doesn’t influence investment decisions, it’s marketing.

Clarity → Alignment → Movement.

Join 12,000+ leaders who get weekly insights on building it:
https://lnkd.in/en9vxeNk

Ed Catmull built a room at Pixar where nobody has authority. Not even him. It produced 12 consecutive hit films. Here's how radical candor actually works:

Every few months, Pixar's most senior creative leaders gather to watch an unfinished film.

The animation is rough. The story has holes. Some scenes barely work.

Then they tear it apart.

They call it the Braintrust.

And it has one rule that makes it unlike any feedback system in corporate America:

Nobody in the room has authority over the director.

Every comment is a suggestion. The director can ignore every single one.

Catmull designed it this way on purpose.

He noticed that when people with power give feedback, it stops being feedback.

It becomes an order.

And when feedback becomes an order, directors stop bringing real problems to the table.

So he stripped all authority from the room.

The results?

Pixar's first 12 films were all critically acclaimed. Six won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Every single Pixar film has been profitable.

But here's the part most people don't know:

Every one of those films started out broken.

Catmull himself said it: "All our movies suck at first."

Toy Story 2 was so bad it had to be completely reimagined in 1999. The story was hollow and the humor fell flat.

Ratatouille went through a full director change after Braintrust feedback.

Toy Story 3's climax had to be rewritten when Andrew Stanton pushed back: "These toys aren't stupid. They know Lotso isn't a good guy."

The Braintrust didn't prevent those problems.

It surfaced them before they became permanent.

Here's what most leaders miss:

Most teams don't have a candor problem. They have a safety problem.

Your people know what's wrong. They just don't feel safe saying it.

Catmull understood that candor requires the absence of consequences.

The moment someone gets punished for raising a concern, truth goes underground.

And once truth goes underground, problems compound in silence.

As Catmull put it: "Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunction."

The fix isn't telling people to "be more honest."

It's redesigning the environment so honesty has no cost.

Here's how to start:

Pick your next team meeting. Before it starts, say this:

"I want to hear what's broken. No one in this room has the authority to punish you for what you say in the next 30 minutes."

Then shut up and listen.

What you hear will be more valuable than any consultant report.

Want to build this kind of candor in your team? 

Lead In 30 transforms how managers and senior executives create trust and deliver results in 30 days. 

Message me or book a conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF

You don't wait until you feel brave enough to lead. Katharine Graham proved this when she took over The Washington Post in 1963. She wasn't ready. She knew it. Everyone around her knew it too...

Her husband had run the paper. She'd never led anything. When he died, she inherited chaos and doubt in equal measure. Board members questioned whether she could handle it. One executive reportedly dismissed her as "just a housewife" playing publisher.

But she accepted the responsibility anyway.

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers decision landed on her desk. Her lawyers warned that publishing classified documents could mean prison time and the end of The Washington Post. The company was about to go public, one wrong move could kill the deal and everything they'd built.

She could barely sleep. But she knew staying silent would betray what journalism existed for.

She published.

About a year later, Watergate. Two reporters she barely knew were chasing a sitting president. The pressure was different this time—not just legal threats, but direct White House intimidation. Her business advisors begged her to back down.

But something had shifted in her. The Pentagon Papers decision had shown her she could survive choosing right over safe.

She backed her reporters.

Those decisions didn't come from some innate courage gene. They came from a pattern she'd built. The Pentagon Papers taught her she could survive choosing principle over safety. That experience gave her the foundation for Watergate. Each hard choice built the muscle for the next one.

This is how leadership courage actually develops. Not through waiting until you feel confident. Through taking responsibility when you don't.

Your courage builds the same way Graham's did. The budget conversation you're avoiding. The underperformer you need to address. The strategic pivot everyone resists. Each one builds capacity for the next.

One difficult decision at a time. One moment of choosing discipline over fear. The results compound.

My new book, Deliver: Why Some Leaders Get Results And Most Don't, shows you the framework for building this discipline into lasting results.: https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

2014: Microsoft is drifting. Innovation slows. Internal rivalries dominate. Wall Street questions relevance. Satya Nadella takes over and does something unexpected:

The stack-ranking system forces managers to rank employees against each other.

No mass layoffs. No public culture purge. No flashy rebrand.

Instead, he removes one system: Stack ranking.

For years, employees were graded against each other.

Top bucket. Middle bucket. Bottom bucket.

Collaboration was risky. Helping a peer could hurt your ranking.

First leadership cycle without it? Confusion.

Managers ask: “How do we differentiate performance?”

Nadella reframes the standard:

From “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all.”

Curiosity becomes measurable.
Collaboration becomes expected.
Leaders are evaluated on collective outcomes, not individual dominance.

Then comes the strategic shift:

“Mobile first. Cloud first.”

Microsoft stops protecting Windows at all costs.
Products ship on iOS and Android.
Azure becomes the priority.

Teams that once competed now have to build together.

Azure scales into a global cloud platform.
LinkedIn and GitHub expand the ecosystem.
Microsoft regains relevance in cloud and AI.

Eventually, the company crosses a $3 trillion market cap.

But here’s what most leaders miss: Nadella didn’t motivate alignment.

He removed the system that made misalignment rational.

If incentives reward rivalry, you’ll get silos.
If performance systems punish collaboration, you’ll get ego.
If culture and strategy aren’t aligned, execution stalls.

Most leaders swing between two extremes:

• The Nice Leader: strong culture, weak accountability
• The Hard Driver: strong targets, fractured teams

Both fail.

Because they think alignment is soft.

Nadella proved it’s structural.

He made collaboration measurable.
He made learning a standard.
He made strategy dependent on alignment.

Clarity → Alignment → Movement.

Want more research-backed insights on leadership?

Join 11,000+ leaders who get our weekly newsletter:

👉 https://lnkd.in/en9vxeNk

Jess Elmquist has spent 30 years leading talent. He's interviewed and placed over 250,000 people. He now oversees 32,000 employees at more than 1,100 Dutch Bros locations.

His assessment of this moment:
"This is the most disruption and change I've ever seen."

Jamie Dimon said the same thing differently. In his annual shareholder letter, he warned of "considerable turbulence." Geopolitical instability. Tariffs. Trade wars. Sticky inflation.

This isn't cyclical. It's structural.

The CEO who built a five-year strategy in January may find its assumptions invalid by March.

Nearly half of CEOs say their company will not be economically viable in ten years if it continues on its current path.

Volatility is the new normal. And the most dangerous response is the one that feels most natural: waiting for clarity.

On the same day we were collecting data from leaders across more than 180 organizations, a senior executive at a Fortune 50 manufacturer told us:
"We are in absolute crisis mode right now. We're a total mess."

Hours later, a business unit president was celebrating a record-breaking 2025 while pushing her team to adapt even faster.

Same economy. Same disruption.
Wildly different outcomes.

Here's what most leaders miss:

The gap between those two organizations has nothing to do with market conditions. It has everything to do with whether leaders can act decisively with incomplete information.

That ability is the new core competency.

Clarity isn't coming. The leaders who will define 2026 are the ones who've stopped waiting for it.

This connects to a principle I teach in Deliver: the best leaders don't wait for perfect information. They build the judgment to move without it.

Want to develop that kind of leadership in your team? Message me or book a conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF

2018: Tesla was deep in “production hell.” Targets were slipping. Engineers were layering fixes on top of fixes. Elon Musk sent a blunt directive: Delete the part.

“If you’re not adding back at least 10% of what you delete, you didn’t delete enough.”

He laid out a 5-step engineering order:

1. Make requirements less dumb.
2. Delete the part or process.
3. Simplify or optimize.
4. Accelerate cycle time.
5. Automate.

Most organizations reverse it.

They automate broken systems.
They optimize complexity.
They add dashboards to manage friction instead of removing it.

Musk forced teams to justify every requirement.

Every component had to earn its existence.

That mindset showed up in Tesla’s push to simplify manufacturing, reduce part counts, and vertically integrate critical systems.

The principle wasn’t about speed. It was about subtraction before scale.

Complexity compounds silently. So does simplification.

Most leaders respond to problems by adding layers.

The disciplined ones remove them.

Before you improve performance, ask:

What shouldn’t exist?

That’s where execution really accelerates.

If you want a deeper look at the disciplines that separate fast organizations from slow ones, I break them down in Deliver:

https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

Most leaders run from storms. Reed Timmer drives a reinforced vehicle straight into EF5 tornadoes while other meteorologists watch from 50 miles away. 

He's collected data that revolutionized how we predict severe weather. His edge? Getting close to what everyone else avoids.

That's the difference between managing and leading.

When you avoid hard conversations, they don't disappear. The senior developer who misses deadlines and dismisses feedback in every 1-on-1. You've rescheduled the performance conversation three times because confrontation feels uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, two junior developers are now copying his approach because that's what they see rewarded.

The storm you avoided? It just got three times bigger.

Avoidance feels like protection. It's actually compounding debt with interest you can't afford.

Smart leaders do the opposite. They run what I call the Tornado Test: If you're hoping the problem resolves itself, that's your signal to drive straight toward it.

Your VP of Sales missed quota three quarters in a row. Everyone on the leadership team knows it. Nobody wants to start succession planning. While you wait, your best account executives are interviewing elsewhere because they see the writing on the wall.

Small storms are manageable with direct action. Ignored storms destroy entire teams.

The question isn't whether you'll face turbulence. It's whether you'll confront it now with a plan or later when it's 10 times more expensive.

Ask yourself: What's the one conversation I've been postponing? The one initiative everyone knows is failing, but nobody addresses?

That's your tornado.

Subscribe to our newsletter where I break down the exact frameworks leaders use to identify and confront their biggest storms before they become crises: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF

Mellody Hobson asks leaders one diagnostic question: "If I gave you our P&L with the labels removed, could you identify which lines drive profitability and which are cost centers?"

Most can't answer it.

That's the gap between strategic theater and strategic leadership.

I watched a director greenlight a product expansion without understanding customer acquisition cost. Six months in, they'd spent $2M acquiring customers worth $800K lifetime value.

The vision was clear. The economics weren't.

Leaders who avoid the numbers avoid accountability. 

They create ambiguity for their teams. They can't answer the hard questions because they don't understand the mechanics behind their own decisions.

Here's the test: Can you explain your business model to a smart 12-year-old without looking at a spreadsheet?

If you can't explain how you make money, what it costs to acquire a customer, and which metrics actually matter, you don't understand the mechanics of what you're leading.

Financial literacy is execution literacy. And execution is what separates leaders who deliver from leaders who just talk.

I dig into the mechanics behind effective execution on the Lead In 30 podcast. If you're ready to move past leadership theory and into what actually works, listen here: https://lnkd.in/d_-Knwhy

Under Travis Kalanick, Uber became Silicon Valley’s fastest growth machine. Cities were conquered. Regulators challenged. Growth was the culture. Then an internal memo went public.

By 2017, Uber was operating in more than 70 countries.

Revenue had scaled from near zero in 2010 to roughly $6.5 billion in 2016.

Its private valuation approached $68–70 billion, making it one of the most valuable startups in the world.

Expansion was relentless.

New markets launched aggressively.
Competitors were outspent.
Regulatory battles were embraced, not avoided.

Speed wasn’t a tactic. It was the identity.

Then, in early 2017, engineer Susan Fowler published a blog post detailing harassment, retaliation, and systemic cultural failures inside Uber.

What followed:

• Internal investigations
• Executive departures
• Public backlash (#DeleteUber trended globally)
• Board pressure from major investors

In June 2017, Kalanick resigned as CEO.

Here’s the uncomfortable lesson:

Uber didn’t struggle because it moved fast. It struggled because discipline didn’t scale with ambition.

Incentives rewarded growth above all else.

Governance lagged.
Cultural standards were inconsistent.
High performers were protected if they delivered results.

Results masked fragility.

Hero leadership can drive early momentum. But personality is not a governance system. When growth outpaces structure, misalignment compounds quietly. Until it surfaces publicly.

High-performing organizations don’t just scale revenue. They scale accountability.

The question for leaders isn’t: “Are we winning?”

It’s: “Would our system survive scrutiny at this scale?”

Ambition builds momentum. Discipline builds durability.

If you want a deeper look at how disciplined execution separates resilient organizations from fragile ones, I explore it in Deliver:

https://lnkd.in/eaiPFZhw

Ray Dalio went on Wall Street Week, the most-watched financial program in America, and told millions of viewers a depression was coming. He testified before Congress with the same prediction.

He was spectacularly wrong.

The market bottomed the month Mexico defaulted and launched a 17-year bull run. Dalio had to let go of all his employees until he was the only person left at Bridgewater Associates.

He had to borrow $4,000 from his dad just to pay his family's bills.

Today Bridgewater has produced 11.4% annualized returns over 34 years with only four or five losing years.

Here's what changed everything:

He stopped saying "I'm right" and started asking "How do I know I'm right?"

In his own words:
"Whatever success I've had in life has more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know."

That shift became the foundation of one of the most extreme management cultures ever created.

Every meeting at Bridgewater is recorded.
Every employee rates every other person in real time.
A tool called the Dot Collector scores people across dozens of attributes.
A typical employee receives more than 2,000 ratings per year.

When a junior employee rated Dalio a 3 out of 10 on open-mindedness during a meeting, he didn't get defensive.

He shared the score and discussed what he could improve.

Most companies say "we value feedback."
Dalio operationalized it.

Here's what most leaders miss:

The ability to read people, build trust quickly, and create conditions where people give their best work. No machine can replicate it.

Sixty-one percent of employees working under empathetic leaders report being more innovative. Seventy-six percent report greater engagement. Google found psychological safety was the most important factor in team effectiveness.

Culture isn't what's on the poster. It's a system of behaviors you measure.

About 30% of new hires leave Bridgewater within 18 months. Dalio sees this as a feature. The system self-selects for people who want radical honesty, not just the idea of it.

What system do you have for making sure the best idea wins, regardless of who says it?

Lead In 30 transforms how managers and senior executives build trust and deliver results in 30 days. Message me or book a conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gsb3qeCF

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