We spend a lot of time figuring out who has the skills to lead. But do we ever stop to ask if they actually want to? Turns out, that question matters more than most organizations realize — and skipping it can quietly hollow out your entire leadership pipeline

We’ve spent 70 years trading one set of performance management “warts” for another. If every redesign leaves employees and managers frustrated, maybe we’re solving the wrong problem. In this piece, I suggest we stop treating PM as a process to fix and start recognizing it as The Performance Problem—a complex, deeply embedded challenge requiring a different kind of thinking.

CEO to employee pay ratios have exploded—sometimes topping 900:1—while companies defend widening pay inequality as the natural outcome of meritocracy. But what if much of this pay dispersion isn’t driven by superior performance or market forces at all? Research suggests that a significant portion of the CEO–worker pay gap may reflect more “monkey business”-- flawed variable pay systems and other non-legitimate factors.