Join Something New and Exciting
Nobody is writing about Timeless Leadership - until now. Despite being the true essence of effective and meaningful leadership, Timeless Leadership is missed by researchers and practitioners alike.
If you’re like most leaders, you rely too much on learning leadership by experience. How come? Perhaps it’s because the writing and resources look like this:
Leadership platitudes: you get vague and fluffy frameworks and mantras that deflate as soon as they encounter the rough realities of the real world..
Management disguised as leadership: you’re offered tactical practices of managing people - but nothing about solving the big problems facing the world…
Leadership mythology: you consume inspirational stories of transformational leaders that you can never emulate, because they are overly simplified, contingent on rare & abundant power, and/or sanitized to the point of fiction….
Leadership critiqued: you get cynical analyses that suggest that leaders are either utterly corrupt or doomed to fail (so why try)…
Leadership over-engineered: you get a theory that is well balanced and complete, but is too complicated to implement without working with textbook in hand.
You don’t have time for any of that… but do you have time to completely re-invent the wheel?
It’s time to create a method of leadership that combines effectiveness, boldness, and simplicity.
Something at once practical and aspirational, flexible but consistent, focused but broadly applicable….
Timeless Leadership is the effort to invent this method, and this newsletter is the chronicles of both this invention and the mechanism for its proliferation.
Be an Early Adopter
By subscribing this newsletter, you join a revolution of 21st century leadership at the ground floor. You will pick up the most important and actionable advice for leading yourself and others and building an enduring legacy - all packaged in a way that’s designed to propel change in your practice each time you read.
This newsletter is designed especially for:
The thoughtful operator who likes to learn but finds existing resources ill-fitting for their schedule or priorities
The tech executive who is striving to change the world but is weighed down running the business and needs to let go of the dials to let others lead
The working parent who worries about the state of the world, but feels the levers they have access to inside and outside the business are insufficient
If any of the above describe you, I hope my writing is helpful. If ALL of the above describe you - then you are my ideal reader, you and I share a lot in common, and having you along for the ride is going to mean you’ve got me as your coach, advisor, and cheerleader as you strive to change the world every day.
What Questions Will We Answer?
I’ve developed the concept of Timeless Leadership over two decades of studying and practicing leadership in schools, communities, startups, scale-ups, and politics. What I found again and again is that leaders are in a battle with time, struggling and sometimes succeeding in answering these three questions:
Leading myself: How do I prioritize my own time?
Leading within organizations: How do I build and use systems that help teams make the best use of their time?
Leading outside of organizations: How can I influence movements of people to do work that lasts beyond our time?
Answers to all these questions are accessible by reading widely and deeply, but practicing leaders have nowhere to go to succinctly find answers to all three.
This Substack will routinely address all three questions for a complete view of leadership for our time.
But What Does a Timeless Leader Do?
There’s one driving hypothesis I’ll be testing in each piece of writing.
Timeless Leaders do less, But they TEACH more.
I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the common approach to overcoming the three core time challenges is by taking a teaching approach.
This Substack explores what exactly that means, where it’s true, where it might not be, and the specific practices you can take into your leadership to win with time.
How Is This Substack Written?
The first season of the Substack will run from Nov 28th-Feb 27th, with one piece coming out each Tuesday. Each week will feature a specific topic or theme and evaluate how my hypothesis of do less, teach more works or doesn’t work for leading self, leading in organizations, and leading movements.
My primary aim is to generate consistent value. To achieve that I’ll always aim to give some indication on why I’ve chosen a topic, analyze it thoughtfully (but not exhaustively), and give some suggested next steps.
For at least this first season every issue will be completely free and comments will be open - I encourage readers to respond and engage!
Let’s Get Reading
What are you waiting for? Subscribe now and you won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
