Latest news with #businessculture
Forbes
7 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Why Caution, Anxiety, And Self-Doubt Are Leadership Assets In 2025
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash The Wolf of Wall Street is a highly entertaining movie. Yes, the acting is great, but more than that, it captures a specific era in one of the world's most powerful industries: the stock market. At the top were leaders like the character played by Matthew McConaughey—fast-talking, endlessly confident, seemingly fearless. Today, that kind of leadership isn't just outdated—it's increasingly problematic. In a climate defined by economic volatility, rapid technological shifts, and growing awareness of mental health, blind boldness can do more harm than good. Fear, long seen as a weakness, might actually be one of the defining traits of the most successful and forward-thinking leaders of our time. As CEO of my company for nearly two decades, I understand the appeal of the mythical fearless leader. But that's never been me. And it's taken me a while to realize that might actually be a good thing. Here's why. The End Of The Confidence Cult The startup world (and broader business culture) has long worshipped at the altar of confidence and decisiveness. Headlines have celebrated leaders who charged ahead with their ideas, reshaping the world through conviction, never second-guessing their intuition. Unwavering belief in one's ideas seemed like a requisite for scalable success. But the narrative is shifting. Increasingly, we're seeing examples of bold confidence that burns hot and then fizzles. WeWork, for example, was largely built on bravado, but the original business model simply couldn't sustain itself. The archetype of the fearless visionary is fading. Today's most admired leaders are introspective and skeptical. They second-guess. They pause to reflect. They embrace a growth mindset. Take Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who famously encouraged his team to be "learn-it-alls" rather than "know-it-alls." As he put it: In a world where overconfidence can sink a company, humility is less a liability and more a survival skill. Anxiety Drives Innovation The story of is the kind of cautionary tale that keeps leaders up at night. In the early 2000s, Larry Halff launched a bookmarking site praised for its thoughtful design and community features. Though it gained a loyal following, the platform ran on minimal infrastructure, managed almost entirely by Halff. In 2009, suffered a catastrophic data loss that wiped out both user data and backups—a single failure that ultimately ended the service. Fear of this kind of occurrence can be debilitating. It can also inspire innovation and automation. Leaders can search for solutions that don't fully extinguish, but help them to manage their fears. For example, let's say a founder worried about their startup's compliance risks. That fear can drive them to build an AI agent to monitor and enforce regulatory standards, using a persistent fear as motivation to automate a tedious, manual, error-prone task. The anxious leader anticipates worst-case scenarios before they happen, building scalable systems in the process. Resilience Through Slow Growth Venture capital often gets all the headlines—and with good reason. It's bold, it's fast, and it promises big returns. The fearless founder who bets it all can reap massive rewards. But the risk is just as considerable. For more cautious leaders, bootstrapping offers a different kind of appeal. It may not be as flashy, but it's often more sustainable. Yes, the climb tends to be slower, but it's also steadier. As the founder of a bootstrapped company, I've learned that moving thoughtfully builds resilience. When resources are limited, you get creative. You ask questions first. You only grow when your business model is ready to support it. And here's what often gets overlooked: bootstrapping can be less stressful. You're not constantly putting it all on the line. It's better for your well-being and for your team's. What's more, a growing body of research shows that founder mental health isn't just a personal matter; it's a critical factor in long-term business success. Slow growth and cautious leadership don't always make headlines. But it tends to create healthier and more human companies. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make. Final Thoughts If you're an aspiring entrepreneur struggling with self-doubt or fear, take heart: you don't need unshakable confidence to succeed. With the right strategies, you can turn fear into a strength. Adopt a growth mindset. Acknowledge your worries, but also look for tech tools that help manage them. And finally, let go of the myth of overnight success. It may not be Hollywood Blockbuster material, but slow, steady progress is far more sustainable.
Forbes
15-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Truth Gap: How Little White Lies Can Undermine A Company's Culture
Dmitry Malin, COO of Novakid . getty In business, transparency and open communication are often celebrated as core values. According to the Transparency Index 2024, transparency creates trust and trust then catalyzes business growth. The report also highlights how, in a world defined by disinformation and crises, there is a growing need for trust and transparency. Gallup research highlights the importance of trust in leadership, as trust in leaders can improve employee engagement. And yet there is one small decision that most people make which directly affects the culture of the business—the little white lie. These comforting falsehoods, often considered harmless, can undermine the very culture people want to build because they create a dangerous gap between perception and reality. The illusion of harmony created by these little white lies can create a seductive narrative that suggests everything is fine but instead leaves critical issues unaddressed. Sure, most people reading this will think that the idea of the little white lie undermining the entire business culture is a bit dramatic. After all, isn't it just a nice way of not hurting someone's feelings? Isn't a white lie better than telling your boss the truth about their new haircut? Or perhaps letting your colleague know that their email writing skills are subpar? The short answer is no. A lie is a lie no matter how big, and it can have a direct impact on your relationships and the health of the business. It is also so unnervingly common that the truth has become something of a commodity. According to a study undertaken by a University of Massachusetts psychologist (via Science News), 60% of adults lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation. That's a staggering percentage of people in a very short amount of time. It is also a massive sign: Honesty is both rare and important. It is also uncomfortable. The Comfort Trap: The Simplicity Of The Little White Lie Little white lies in the workplace make life easier because they can help you avoid stepping outside of your comfort zone. However, in my experience, they are also a trap that can: • Prevent leaders from seeing problems until they become crises. • Run the risk of creating a false consensus that leads to poor strategic decisions. • Build artificial harmony in the office rather than authentic relationships. • Reinforce a culture where people prioritize pleasantness over honesty and progress. When a business consistently chooses comfort over candor, it is systematically undermining its capacity for innovation and adaptation. Think about it: If you invest in an employee net promoter score (NPS) and get negative feedback that you didn't expect, your team leads are going to be affected. If they've never had honest employee feedback around how the company operates or what should improve, then a negative NPS is going to be both surprising and unpleasant, which then impacts trust, well-being and the business. Finding The Right Balance The cost of workplace deception is more than just a nasty surprise come employee feedback day. It can also affect trust and overall workplace culture. When companies let small deceptions go, they are creating an environment where it could become easier to justify increasingly larger ethical compromises. The problem worsens in hierarchical environments where power dynamics can discourage honesty. When employees don't feel comfortable voicing their concerns to superiors, then leadership is left at a disadvantage: How can you improve your business if employees aren't comfortable telling you what's going wrong? This doesn't mean you should abandon tact and diplomacy in favor of brutal honesty. Creating a culture where people feel free to be unnecessarily hurtful isn't the solution either. I believe success involves maintaining a delicate balance that combines respect with radical candor. This approach focuses on these core principles: 1. Separating observations from judgements when delivering feedback. 2. Creating a psychologically safe environment before requesting honesty. 3. Framing feedback around impact rather than personal criticism. 4. Demonstrating equal commitment to hearing tough truths across all levels of the business. 5. Building feedback processes that normalize constructive insights. When you can build a culture of constructive honesty, you are walking away from the false narrative of little white lies to be nice and toward a culture that values truthfulness. This requires leaders to model vulnerability by actively seeking uncomfortable feedback and responding to it with genuine appreciation rather than defensiveness. There is no doubt that creating this kind of culture is challenging. It takes time and practice to get it right and to walk away from old behaviors, but I've found that it is rewarding. When you approach it with intentionality and consistent practice, you are building an environment where people feel safe enough to be honest, and you are equally building a foundation of trust that will grow stronger with each honest conversation. Forbes Business Council is the foremost growth and networking organization for business owners and leaders. Do I qualify?
Bloomberg
13-07-2025
- Automotive
- Bloomberg
Xi Wants to End China's Price Wars. But How?
Inside China, price wars are far more dangerous than US tariffs. As President Xi Jinping starts to address the country's ultra-competitive business culture, the trillion-dollar question is how — and whether he can succeed. Race-to-the-bottom mentality is everywhere. The world's biggest EV maker BYD Co. slashed prices by as much as 34% in May, exacerbating a decline in auto prices that began in late 2022. A turf war in the food-delivery market has e-commerce giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Inc. offering splashy discounts to take on sector leader Meituan. Hong Kong's stock market, where these blue chips are listed, has lost momentum as a result.
Fast Company
20-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
The case against ‘conscious leadership'
'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.' – Ralph Waldo Emerson There's a new orthodoxy quietly sweeping through executive leadership circles. It goes by many names—embodied awareness, whole-self management, conscious leadership—but the core message is the same: intuition and spiritual presence are the foundations of strategic leadership. At first glance, this seems like progress. Who wouldn't prefer a leader who's self-aware and emotionally attuned. In a business world riddled with brittle egos and performative hustle, a little more reflection is a breath of fresh air. But beneath its soothing language, the practice of Conscious Leadership has more insidious effects on business culture. Pioneered by groups like The Conscious Leadership Group, it has evolved into a sprawling, self-affirming ideology—one that displaces competence with charisma, rigor with resonance, and accountability with affirmation. The result? A growing class of business leaders who mistake internal coherence for external effectiveness—who believe that if they feel right, they must be right. It's not just anti-rational; it's anti-leadership. From Competence to Vibes At the heart of the formal Conscious Leadership framework is the '15 Commitments'—a framework designed to promote self-awareness, integrity, and responsibility. The commitments are trite and self-evident to anyone with a modicum of social or emotional intelligence. But it's not the principles that are the problem, it's their embodiment – conscious leadership heuristics have become popular shorthand in corporate and entrepreneurial leadership circles where Conscious Leadership has taken on its own ideological life. Take the idea of the 'whole-body yes.' It sounds poetic, even profound. But in functional terms, it's an epistemic disaster. The whole-body yes tells you that if something doesn't feel right—in your gut—it's probably wrong. Not just wrong for you, but wrong period. And therefore, you shouldn't do it. Or worse, you shouldn't have to do it. On its face, this confuses intuition with truth. But more dangerously, it provides a prospective license to avoid the hard work of intellectual and moral analysis. Every hesitance becomes an omen to be heeded. Every discomfort becomes a signal to say 'no.' Every debate becomes an attack on your 'authentic self.' In other words: if you don't want to do something, your subconscious probably knows it's ethically compromised or strategically unsound. Therefore, resistance becomes virtue. An undergraduate ethics major could tell you why this notion is so intoxicatingly fallacious: it is the embodiment of confirmation bias. It tells us that whatever feels right is, in fact, right. It's confusing righteousness with rightness, and it's a cloaking device for all of our basest instincts. Sociopaths exhibit this same kind of circular self-assurance. Like Luigi Mangione and the Unabomber, they are able to dress-up their prejudices in a pseudo-ethical manifesto to rationalize the overt violation of ethical norms. Modern neuropsychology has taught us that our brain is quite good at confabulating—retroactively fabricating a reason for unreasonable behavior. That's the essence of the whole-body yes; license for confabulation. Business Leadership Without Skin in the Game You can tell a lot about a framework by who evangelizes it. Conscious leadership tends to take root squarely among venture capitalists, consultants, HR departments, and coaching circles—those stakeholders that are structurally insulated from the consequences of strategic execution. These are not, generally speaking, people with direct exposure to existential business risks. They don't carry payroll. They don't answer to shareholders. They don't navigate hostile markets. They're not in the line of fire. And because of that, they can afford to substitute internal validation for external results. They can afford to confuse feeling good with doing good. In that vacuum of real-world feedback, Conscious Leadership thrives. It spreads through offsites and retreats. It drips into executive workshops and middle-management Slack channels. It cloaks itself in the language of growth while quietly eroding the foundation of competency-based leadership. The Reactionary Core: Anti-Rationality in a Pseudo-Spiritual Shell Despite proselytization among progressive business leaders, Conscious Leadership is a deeply reactionary movement. It doesn't evolve leadership—it regresses to a kind of anti-rational romanticism. It seeks not to integrate intuition with reason, but to replace rational deliberation entirely with internal 'knowing.' In ancient traditions—from Buddhist mindfulness to Greek Stoicism—true wisdom arises from tension: between emotion and restraint, instinct and inquiry, desire and discipline. The project of modernity was about striking this balance. In philosophy, the Enlightenment forced the end of insular thinking and the birth of objective bases for decision-making. In healthcare, we have evidence-based medicine rather than bedside impressions. In law, we have procedural justice instead of the will of the monarch. In finance, we have quantitative models instead of gut instinct. Intuitions may point to the source of what's most fundamentally valuable in human life. But one also needs to recognize that we only get to play the game of modern society if we are able to temper our emotional, gut instincts. Conscious Leadership indulgently short-circuits that developmental arc. You no longer need to sit in discomfort, wrestle with ambiguity, or act in spite of your fear. You simply check in with your 'truth,' and act accordingly. This kind of psychospiritual narcissism used to be the birth right of false gurus and religious fundamentalists, but executives are now importing it into the boardroom. 'Conscious Leadership Isn't for Everyone': The Narcissism of Framing Dissent as Deficiency Perhaps the most telling artifact of this movement's epistemic regression is represented in an article from the formal Conscious Leadership group entitled ' Conscious Leadership Isn't for Everyone.' I felt a wave of relief when I stumbled upon this piece—finally, some humility to balance their ideological self-assurance. Surely, I thought, they'll acknowledge the limits of their framework. Something like: 'Maybe Conscious Leadership doesn't apply so well in a military context, where you can't pause to check in with your body before rushing to save a wounded soldier.' Or: 'Maybe your 'whole-body yes' should be informed by real analysis and empirical evidence.' But no. Instead of setting boundaries (the sign of a real discipline), the article castigates the un-initiated for their small-mindedness. For those not quite ready to 'do the work.' Here's the tone: If you don't resonate with the Conscious Leadership framework, it's not because the framework might be flawed. It's because you aren't ready. You haven't evolved enough. You're still trapped in your fear, your ego, your unconscious patterns. This is the hallmark of every narrow-minded epistemology, from religious cults to multilevel marketing: disagreement is pathologized. Non-belief is recast as immaturity. Critique is rebranded as resistance. What could have been a useful framework becomes a totalizing worldview and a litmus test for identity. It's a circular self-help theology wrapped in the garb of a professional services business model. Perhaps the most dangerous part of Conscious Leadership isn't its spread in coaching circles—but its growing adoption in boardrooms. As performance management becomes politicized and teams crave psychological safety, frameworks like these offer a tempting escape hatch: a way to appear ethical and evolved without committing to the hard metrics of performance or the messy realities of leadership. This trend is more than aesthetic. It's structural. We are watching as companies quietly substitute felt authenticity for functional accountability. Leaders are now praised for their vulnerability, but rarely challenged on the outcomes of their teams. Difficult conversations are avoided in the name of 'staying above the line.' Strategy becomes an exercise in inner alignment. Disagreement becomes a trauma response. But in this context, consciousness is the unique privilege of people who have, in some sense, already 'made it'. Being at the top, they have the material wealth and security to dedicate themselves to introspection and exploration. They exhort this new way of thinking, and discourage the exact model – ambition, competency-building, and hard-work – that allowed them to rise to such a position in the first place. In this way, Conscious Leadership is more rehabilitative than it is strategic; it is a framework that allows the executive caste to recapture some sense of humanity after years of grinding away in corporate gears. For the underlings, aware of the path it took leaders to become leaders, these platitudes ring false. Those being consciously 'led' are happy to pay lip-service to their leader's fluffy worldview as long as it protects their position in the organization. All the while, they feel the necessity to continue delivering tangible results – The only realistic, quantifiable source of security within the organization. The disconnect—between leadership speech and the results-oriented nature of business—simply breeds cognitive dissonance among employees. They need to confabulate a consciousness-based story to explain their strategic decisions, or worse, they actually use the Conscious Leadership Commitments to make those decisions. What Leadership Actually Requires Real leadership doesn't require denial of intuition, but it does require tempering it. It requires navigating the productive tension between feeling and thinking. It means honoring discomfort, not avoiding it. It means acting ethically even when your nervous system is screaming ' run'. And above all, it means holding power not as self-expression—but as responsibility. Leadership isn't about being your most authentic self in the boardroom. It's about making decisions under uncertainty, absorbing pressure so others can thrive, and balancing the needs of the self with the needs of the system. That kind of leadership may not feel as righteous. But it works, particularly in a business context where employees actually care about whether their organization succeeds. Here's another unsexy fact of life and business—the best way to grow spiritually is to find a base of stability. And in many cases, this means having enough material wealth to pay medical bills, repair your car, and care for your family members—and that means that the business must thrive in real financial terms. That's why Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is still a useful framework: we need material security and basic social cohesion before we can work towards self-transcendence. But so-called 'conscious leaders' don't realize that transcendence is path-dependent; they haven't reflected enough to see that rightful leadership is earned through competency, merit, and sacrifice, rather than verbal appeals to higher ideals. Most employees are happy to find enlightenment on their own time and in their own way. They don't want group therapy funded through the HR budget and proselytized by their boss. They'd prefer their leader to lead the way by making sound strategic decisions, and if that is at odds with being an empathetic and ethical human, then yes, you're in a crappy business situation. This isn't a revelation worthy of a book. Conscious Leadership isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. And after all that critique, frankly, the 15 formal Conscious Leadership Commitments are pretty much right. They are general enough to be unchallengeable, but they are represented (and treated) as a comprehensive leadership model. Principles, rules, and commitments are a protection against chaos. They give us something to latch onto in complex situations, like executive leadership. But the truth is, a leader who truly embodies morality, humanism, and empathy has no need for a formal principle. The people who are most ensnared by moral principles and ideologies are those people who most need them—the type of people for whom integrity is unnatural and hard-won. After all, the deeper essence of the 15 Commitments—individual responsibility, curiosity, integrity—ought to be ingrained early in life. These qualities should be nurtured through sound parenting, quality education, and lived experience. When foundational virtues like individual responsibility and empathy haven't been deeply internalized, frameworks like these can feel revelatory—not because they unlock new wisdom, but because they compensate for what should have already been there. Those who most loudly profess their principles often do so to paper over their fragility. Moral status, when secure, doesn't need to be declared—it's lived. So, live consciously and lead consciously, but if you ever hear someone start a sentence with 'in the spirit of conscious leadership', then I suggest you turn tail and run.
Bloomberg
17-06-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Corporate Italy Lacks Female CEOs: Parzani
Claudia Parzani, Chair of Borsa Italiana, says the lack of female CEOs and chairs in Italy is a cultural issue that the business community needs to fix. She also discusses the need for tariff and regulatory clarity, simplifying the process for IPOs and a capital markets union with Bloomberg's Francine Lacqua at a Bloomberg New Voices event in Milan. (Source: Bloomberg)
