Any time someone declares something dead, the reports of its demise are usually wildly exaggerated. We heard it about email, then the office, then the phone. Usually, the thing has not disappeared. It just stopped working the way people were used to.

Cold calling is different.

I started my career as an SDR, making those calls myself. Now I am the CEO receiving them. For the past few months, I have answered every unknown number that hits my phone.

Businesses today have access to a wealth of technology, data, and automation. AI can draft content, streamline workflows, analyze information, and help teams move quickly. I could not have imagined this level of digitization even a few years ago.

As a business owner, I love those advantages. We use technology every day to work more efficiently and better serve our clients.

The campaign goes live after weeks of work. It’s signed off, aligned, and there’s a buzz in the air about the business about to come your way.

You feel a quiet confidence as leads start to flow in. The funnel seems to be working, and the spend is justified. But cut to 48 hours later, and not one lead has converted into a sale. Was the creative not working? Was the call to action not strong enough?

We live in a world that rewards speed, productivity, and performance. Leadership has followed suit, driven by the need to control outcomes and stay ahead of crises. Too often, we reward decisiveness over reflection, performance over presence, and certainty over curiosity. We implicitly ask people to leave their humanity at the door in order to succeed.

Research continues to point to the costs of relentless acceleration. The 2026 edition of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace shows employee wellbeing and engagement remaining stubbornly low, while other research shows how chronic time pressure doesn’t just increase burnout, but also erodes empathy.

AI has rapidly transformed how work gets done across industries, but for many people, it’s causing more anxiety than productivity gains. More than half of surveyed workers are worried that AI will put them or someone in their household out of work, according to research from Reuters.

If you’re feeling the anxiety and the pressure of AI in the workplace, there are steps you can take to develop your skillset and feel more secure in your abilities at work. The key is to develop the uniquely human skills that AI cannot easily replicate.

Training has never been more accessible, more engaging or more widely adopted. Yet one question continues to challenge learning and development (L&D) leaders: Why doesn’t better training consistently lead to better workplace performance?

Organizations invest heavily in learning initiatives, participants leave sessions with positive feedback and facilitators deliver high-quality experiences. But weeks later, many employees return to familiar routines and the expected improvements in performance fail to materialize.

We’re nearing the end of the “hurry up and wait” era when customers politely settled for service and timeliness that suited the providers but sucked for the recipients. In many cases, there were few alternatives, and they were grateful to have access at all to certain of these providers. However, in today’s competitive environment, “right now” is barely enough to satisfy the demands of an educated, aggressive and increasingly connected public. No one wants to wait for anything, and if you’re not willing to meet their requirements, they’ll happily find someone else who will. The whole world is a few clicks away.

Most founders struggling with growth think they have a lead generation problem. They focus on lead volume or other top-of-funnel gaps, such as the cost of acquiring those leads. In my experience, the real issue shows up later. You expect a deal to move forward, but it doesn’t. It stalls, drags, quietly dies.

When you dig into why, the answer is rarely “you didn’t have enough features” or “you were too expensive.” It’s much simpler. The buyer didn’t feel confident enough to move forward. I’ve seen this hold true for all types of business, from B2B companies with large sales teams or software and other goods that are sold directly online.

When I started selling, most sales jobs were straight commission. You ate what you killed. You were paid what you were worth. Sales attracted the kind of people who were hungry, money motivated, and focused on results.

Compare that to the state of commissions in 2026. More and more companies have moved towards either a very generous base salary with a small commission percentage and/or bonus, or straight salary. Today, sales attracts a different kind of individual, one who would rather babysit accounts, accept orders, and simply be part of a big, well-known company, not because they can make a lot of money, but for bragging rights about the logo they work for.

If you’re a CEO or a VP of HR, you can usually spot an executive coaching candidate before they realize it for themselves. From your vantage point, you get to see things that may be invisible to the executive living inside their own day-to-day world, like attrition patterns, succession bench depth, who’s getting promoted on other teams and who's carrying more workload than they should be.

The hard part isn’t seeing the signs. Rather, it’s knowing when the signs add up to a candidate for executive leadership coaching compared with a training problem, a performance problem or just a leader having a rough quarter.

Last month, a CEO announced that his institution would replace "low-value human capital" with artificial intelligence. The backlash was swift—public outrage, union condemnation, regulatory scrutiny, and an apology that landed as badly as the original comment. He joins a growing list of CEOs who simply cannot get their AI messaging right.

But this isn't really a messaging problem. It's an emotional-intelligence problem. As any brilliant influencer or speech writer will tell you, the key to successful or influential communication is heart—being able to speak in a way that resonates with your audience.

A few years ago, a group of researchers and I were tasked with answering that question. In addition to identifying what makes a great team, we worked to isolate the skills needed to build and maintain such a team, and outline ways to develop those skills.

I recently shared these discoveries with members of the Lighthouse, my community for emotionally intelligent leaders, and the conversation revealed practical lessons for anyone who’s trying to get more out of their team.

Now that Q1 results are in, it's a good time to step back and ask a fundamental question: is your sales force the right size?

Last Month we conducted a webinar on territory management. Let’s say you have allocated your territories in such that you expect each salesperson has a reasonable opportunity to bring in $2 million in revenue for the year. After Q1, you notice that some reps are tracking well above their $2M targets. This would cause you to wonder if there are unrealized opportunities in some of your territories.

Don’t you just love being stuck on hold while a recording insists, “Your call is important to us?” Or getting a “just for you” product recommendation that totally misses the mark? These moments highlight how impersonal the digital customer experience has become. What if artificial intelligence (AI) could move past robotic platitudes to read a customer’s tone, frustration, or satisfaction in real time? Can it go beyond solving problems to truly understanding how someone feels?

We’re not there yet, but the technology is advancing fast, and the stakes are high.

If you’re like most learning and development (L&D) leaders, your sales onboarding goal is to create knowledgeable and trusted advisors who can start closing as quickly as possible. You want sellers who use a consultative approach to build long-lasting and profitable customer relationships.

But many sales onboarding programs make a common mistake: They spend weeks on product training before introducing sales skills. This produces very knowledgeable sellers who can’t run a good discovery call.

It used to be that you had to wait for the morning newspaper or an evening TV broadcast to get the news. An event had to be especially noteworthy to be pushed out as a “breaking” piece that would get communicated shortly after it occurred.

Now more than ever, the world runs on instant information — and not just for headline-grabbing events. AI is rapidly reshaping how businesses obtain and react to the breaking news that can directly impact their bottom lines, even when that information wouldn’t be considered newsworthy to others.

For decades, organizations have treated learning and skills development as something that supports work but stays separate from it. Whether it’s a course to complete, a session to attend or a program to roll out, it traditionally happens in isolated moments, disconnected from the work itself.

This model is fundamentally broken, built for a world where skills had long shelf lives and change moved slowly enough to train for in advance. But it no longer reflects how people build skills today.

Strong leadership includes the courage to address what needs attention. Many leaders want their teams to grow, but delay the conversations that would bring greater clarity and strengthen accountability. Over time, that silence can leave people unsure of what is expected and unsure of how to improve.

Learning how to give feedback to employees helps leaders create clarity, strengthen trust, and reinforce healthy standards across the team. When feedback is handled well, it supports individual growth and gives accountability a clearer, steadier place in the team’s culture.

The art of storytelling can catapult your visibility, confidence and authenticity. It can build the transparency that generates trust and bridge the gap to build real connection.

I worked for a decade as a negotiator in the media industry, and even in the most complex deals, it was the ability to tell the right story in the right way that made all the difference.

Often, when negotiations go awry, it’s because emotions are flared, egos are bruised and preconceived ideas take center stage.

When asked about brand loyalty by eMarketer in 2025, almost two-thirds of survey participants said customer loyalty was on the decline. However, there’s an antidote to this phenomenon: building emotional connections with your buyers.

A shopper who has multiple positive experiences with your people, products, or services is more likely to come back. Plus, there’s a higher chance they’ll gush about your brand online, which can influence future purchases.