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About 35% of current jobs in the UK are at high risk of computerisation over the following 20 years, according to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941 and type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the …
Leaked Google Pixel 11 marketing materials suggest a new HiLight notification feature, while a five-minute charging claim raises questions ahead of Google’s launch.
The post Google Pixel 11 Leak Reveals ‘HiLight’ Notification Feature, Raises Questions …
‘AI is now baked into every decision, every experiment and every merchant interaction,’ e-commerce giant’s president says
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The CEO and cofounder of Bogg sits in the Fast Company hot seat to share her candid take on leadership—and why ‘follow the rules’ is the most overrated advice in business.
We are all on a quest. The job role we fulfill or the products we sell are just the costumes and exterior wrapping. It turns out that the real destination of leadership journeys isn’t the product we are selling—it’s the finely tuned inner wisdom we achieve. And it’s usually pretty humbling. As T.S. Eliot wisely wrote in his poem Little Gidding, “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
In the end, it’s less about the product, service, or experience that we developed and much more about what we learned in the process. And that’s whether you’re launching a project as a manager, completing a raise as an entrepreneur, standing up a division in a corporation, or selling your startup.
In 2017, Beri Meric watched the company he’d built double in size four years running—and then nearly collapse. He told me it felt like a near-death experience for the organization he’d poured himself into. In the middle of that unraveling, his Young Presidents’ Organization forum said something that he has never forgotten: He wasn’t the small thing straining to carry a big, fragile company. He was the big thing. The company was something he’d made and, therefore, could make again.
That reframe is an example of what I call “Inside Out” leadership. We tend to treat leadership as a performance staged for an external audience: Hit all your numbers, consistently grow sales, and all the while make it look effortless. But composure built on top of an unexamined interior will crack eventually, usually at the worst possible moment. Inside Out leadership starts from the premise that how a leader relates to their interior self is the alchemy for how they will relate to everyone else. Get that wrong, and no amount of strategic polish fixes it.
How to do it
Here are three takeaways that Meric shared with me about his Inside Out leadership crossroads.
1. Self-inquiry isn’t indulgent—it’s structural. Meric, founder of the leadership community IVY, has spent 16 years building cohorts, peer groups, and rituals designed to force leaders into continuous self-reflection, rather than assuming that they magically start out with heightened self-awareness. His own inflection point came from a shattering eureka moment that changed how he led. The lesson for the rest of us is that self-knowledge needs scaffolding. That scaffolding can be in the form of a recurring practice or community that interrupts the autopilot of external performance long enough for something honest to surface.
2. Lead with outcomes, then arrive at the inner work. Meric told me that when he’s talking to business leaders, starting with “get yourself right first” rarely lands. What works is starting with the result you want for your clients or your team and then tracing your steps back until you arrive at the question of who you need to be internally to deliver it. Inside Out leadership doesn’t require leaders to denounce their ambition but it does ask them to trace their ambition back to its source.
3. Treat the confusing middle as data, not shame. Meric’s most consistent finding, after asking hundreds of leaders what experience made them who they are, is that the answer is almost never a win. I can certainly relate to that. Instead, the pivotal moment that crystallizes most of our identity is the interaction or failure that could have broken us but instead became the material for constructing who we are as a person. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who championed the concept of psychological safety, calls these intelligent failures “an undesired result in new territory.” It’s not carelessness, but the essential residue that comes from taking real risks. When organizations punish the mess, they risk missing the growth hiding deep inside.
As AI absorbs more of the analytical and execution work leaders used to own, Meric expects the premium on this kind of interior, human-to-human work to rise, not fall—in the way live concerts have only grown more valuable in an age of infinite streaming. The instruments may be getting cheaper but people will pay for presence.
The next time your company or team hits its own version of Meric’s 2017, remember what Meric’s forum told him: You are not the small thing carrying the big thing. You are the big thing, so lead from there.
