How to be direct and strategic

How to be direct and strategic
4 minutes by Yue Zhao

Yue says that strategic communication is not manipulation. It means understanding your audience's mindset, anticipating emotional reactions, and framing your message in a way that people can actually hear it. Raising a real problem the wrong way can shut down the conversation before it starts. The truth stays the same, but how you deliver it determines whether anything changes.

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Why we never get to what matters
9 minutes by Yew Jin Lim

Work is designed to expand forever, and getting faster only raises the bar. The cost is real: guilt, distraction, lost relationships, and an attention span that quietly disappears. The system works perfectly for companies, just not for the people inside it. According to Yew small things that help include accepting the list never ends, doing what matters first, and protecting time that has no purpose at all.

Gap between how your team sees you and how you see yourself
6 minutes by Roman Nikolaev

Most leaders have a gap between how they see themselves and how others see them. Roman points out that asking for specific feedback and using tools like personality assessments can reveal that gap. The hard part is accepting what you hear, since our self-image pushes back against anything that contradicts it. Leaning into that discomfort is where real growth starts.

Understanding systems
7 minutes by Christoffer Stjernlöf

Good tutors spend most of their energy managing student motivation, adjusting difficulty up or down based on how engaged the student seems. They watch for subtle mistakes that reveal flawed thinking, then design exercises to expose those gaps. A key skill they build in students is verifying their own answers rather than checking solutions. Christoffer argues this same process of forming and testing hypotheses applies to learning almost anything.

Adding a team was the wrong strategic decision
13 minutes by Aleix Morgadas

Aleix describes how a new CX team was created without alignment, causing confusion and duplication of work. Instead of following the planned approach, the teams built simple internal dashboards to quickly reduce customer support ticket resolution time. Despite imperfect decisions and some wasted effort, this pragmatic solution improved outcomes fast, empowered teams, and highlighted the importance of alignment, autonomy, and adapting to real constraints.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• How to hire people who are better than you