The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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On October 18 I wrote that questioning the frame you’re in is hard and so you keep making choice after choice without ever choosing the very game you’re playing.

On October 25 I wrote of the costs you pay when you decide to question the frame, and urged you to do it anyway and make your story truly yours.

At this point I should follow the usual narrative, which says that you are not your job and that you should keep your identity disentangled from it. And you will achieve a quiet, tranquil spirit because you’re no longer shackled.

IT MAKES ME WANT TO VOMIT.

How can you do something for eight hours a day and avoid being defined by it?

How absurd, how sad! Are you then faking it for eight hours so you can buy things to make the few hours left bearable? Is your existence a mere exchange, life for money? If so, eight hours of pretending is who you become. Life for money would be a fair trade for a coal miner digging his way to the his meal, but, if you are reading this, your problems sit much higher up Maslow’s pyramid.

Live with it: you are what you repeatedly do.

You are a social animal living in a social group built around social norms, that define you by what you do and what you bring to the table. If you don’t like it, go find yourself an island - but don’t be surprised when you start talking to seagulls.

Mind you: this doesn’t mean you are ONLY your job, or that you become worthless if you lose it. It means you are ALSO your job, in the same way you are ALSO the many other things you do.

And that’s okay.

The mainstream narrative was born in response to an age when work was all-encompassing and people found themselves ground to dust. We are no longer there. We now live in an age of work-life balance and hobbies and side hustles and sports and parenthood, and our problem lies no longer in disentangling ourselves from work, but rather in integrating all the pieces.

SO WHAT?

So choose your craft well, because you are choosing your identity.

If what you do during your day makes you angry, frustrated and arrogant, that is the identity you’re building. If it makes you caring, kind and empathetic, that is the identity you’re building too.

Do not let that dysfunctional narrative rob you of the choice, because it is yours to make.

You act your way to yourself.

Michelangelo had a pristine block of marble and he chiseled his way to his vision.

Be your own Michelangelo.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

Next up: how do you manage the cognitive load of emails?

Warning - exciting news below.

From November I’ll be co-authoring You’re a manager. Now What? with Andrea Chiarelli and we plan for it to become the best management publication on Substack.

If you want to say “I was there at the beginning” when it’ll blow through the roof, come join us.

There are at least two questions to ask in any given situation: why are things the way they are and what to do about them?

If you’ve been reading The Intentional Manager, you know that that’s where I put my deep thinking and answer the first question.

But what about the second one?

From November 4, you’ll find it in You Are a Manager. Now What?, a new newsletter written with and dedicated to navigating the messy reality.

Check out the link below and join us!

You're a manager. Now what?

You're a manager. Now what?

Writing about management is often too abstract to be useful when you actually need it…

Read more

15 days ago · 27 likes · 28 comments · Andrea Chiarelli and Luca Foppoli

It’ll be fun.

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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Last week I wrote about how Elena found herself ground to a pulp by a life that had happened to her.

And about how you keep choosing your next job and promotion while failing to question the very fact that you are building a career in marketing or, broader, a career in corporate or, broader still, a career instead of a job.

Finally, I urged you to choose: but what does challenging the frame cost?

Cost 1: your identity

Compare this:

With:

Neither version explains what you actually do, but the first sounds more serious and grounded in reality.

You look in the mirror, say the first and it feels like you own a specific place in the world.

You say the second and you sound… lost.

Challenging the frame means challenging the identity you have been using for years. Good luck.

Cost 2: your past

Questioning your current frame inevitably leads to questioning the choices that brought you there.

Ouch.

If you are not sure about the very structure of your current life, does it mean that you made an unending chain of mistakes up until now? That your father was right? Your ex? That you should have followed your dream instead and who knows what amazing experiences you would have had?

Does this make you… a failure?

Challenging the frame means asking these questions and going through the pain of seeking an acceptable answer. Not a joyride.

Given that life is hard enough already, why the hell should you bother in the first place?

Imagine you avoid the question and picture yourself at 85: would you be happy?

I wouldn’t.

There is nothing I fear more than reaching the end, looking back and realizing I never chose my identity, but rather I borrowed it from a structure I accepted as true.

But:

What if you fail the “So, what do you do” question for a bit? Uncomfortable, but survivable.

What if you do the questioning and then choose to keep your job and your life as they are? Fantastic, I’m happy for you. It means that what happened to you was in line with what you wanted all along. Yay!

What if the past dissatisfies you? You take a better next step. And the next. And the next. Always the next one, gazing proudly at the horizon.

It is only by accepting your past that you can turn it into the road that led you to where you are, rather than something that happened to you. Stealing from Nietzsche: you turn every “it was” into a “thus I willed it”.

What if you decide you want a quieter life? Simpler things. More time with your family. More quiet afternoons reading. Fewer adrenaline-inducing meetings. That’s fine too. In fact, that serenity is the most mature form of happiness, as Tolstoy describes it in Family Happiness.

After many sleepless nights, I have chosen to stay, for now, and I know why.

As for you, choose.

And, whatever the answer, it will truly be yours.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

Next week: What’s wrong with tying your identity to your job?

Warning - exciting news below.

From November I’ll be co-authoring You’re a manager. Now What? with Andrea Chiarelli and we plan for it to become the best management publication on Substack.

If you want to say “I was there at the beginning” when it’ll blow through the roof, come join us.

You're a manager. Now what?

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

This piece belongs to the Worth Arguing With series, where I write back to other people’s thinking - because the best compliment you can pay an idea is to take it seriously.

was the archetypical high performer. Self-driven and chasing excellence, she made VP in her late twenties. She quit at 33: her body running with the vitality of a 80-year-old-woman, her mind eaten by the guilt of not being the mother and partner she longed to be.

Bob, a friend with fifteen years of increasingly senior roles behind him, still feels nowhere near his potential.

Both reached a destination chosen for them.

And then there’s you: your parents put you in kindergarten, in elementary school, in middle school, in high school - and the first 18 years of your life breezed by, without you having made a single meaningful choice.

Then a half-random college (”how can you know what to do with your life at 18 years old?”) and a half-random job (”just get started and eventually you’ll find your way”).

When you were 23, it began: the annual performance review cycle with the same recycled goals and evaluations, the same business review with new numbers, the same summer vacation spent checking Outlook because “I don’t want to come back to hundreds of unread emails”, the paternity leave that made you feel dirty.

Fifteen years of corporate, some 3,300 working days. Last month the new hire didn’t get your cultural reference, last week your right knee hurt for no reason and on Monday you went to bed early rather than staying out drinking with the team.

You are 38.

Did you choose any of it?

We fail to question the frame

Eventually Elena chose, forced by her body and guilt.

Eventually we all choose, even if it is mostly because we are forced to - think of a bad boss or a better offer.

Yet, even when we do choose, we keep choosing within the same frame.

Look at me:

• I started off as a biomedical engineer and then discovered a passion for biostatistics, which I pursued via two executive master’s degrees, 4.5 years of work and two companies.

• Then I stumbled upon management and realized that people, not numbers, were my calling, which I have built on across four roles, two companies and more than 5 years.

• Meanwhile, I decided to move from biometrics and clinical to business, through a change of company and an executive MBA.

Deliberate at every step - and blind to the frame itself.

You drifted while I chose, yet we both ended up in the same place: inside a frame neither of us ever questioned.

Why is it so hard to even notice the existence of a frame?

In 1941 the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm described the condition of modern man as freed from the old authorities, from the Church to traditional morality, but not freed to chart a path on his own. This is me non-choosing the frame and, however hard I work within it, taking the path of least resistance and accepting the desires the path proposes as my own - the promotion, the “exceeds expectations”, the bigger title.

Do you perceive being in motion when standing on a train? No, unless the train rocks a little. Same here: oblivion, until something hits you.

And yet I believe that, deep down, you know. I have known for months, maybe years.

If you listen closely, you will hear a feeble, stubborn voice telling you that this doesn’t need to be the whole thing, that there could be more, that you could be more.

This is where choosing can begin.

Whether it begins is in your hands.

Whether it continues is a choice you have to remake every day.

So we accept the frame and ignore the voice, because it is easier.

So we age, passively.

I don’t care whether you stay or go, but look at yourself: have you chosen?

Thanks for reading,

Luca

Next up: what does listening to that voice cost you?

Warning - exciting news below.

From November I’ll be co-authoring You’re a manager. Now What? with and we plan for it to become the best management publication on Substack.

If you want to say “I was there at the beginning” when it’ll blow through the roof, come join us.

You’re a manager. Now what?

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

Coaching is the single most powerful lever to drive performance and feedback is a crucial piece of it.

In the past I wrote about how to provide feedback well, how to fail at it and when to stop.

Today, I’m addressing another question: should you give positive feedback at all? If yes, how do you do it?

Yes, you should give positive feedback

Managerial talk neglects it, focusing on negative feedback - the harder conversation - but you need the positive version for two reasons:

1. It reinforces the desired behaviors

If people ignore whether they have done something right, you risk them performing well on project 1 and floundering on project 2.

And yes, it means that you need to pay more attention to your people, because now you are no longer simply watching for mistakes, but also for good examples: tiring, ain’t it?

Yet, that’s why they pay you the big bucks.

2. It drives performance by increasing motivation

Look, I get it: you want to pretend you are a big boy who doesn’t need any positive reinforcement.

The problem is that I don’t believe you, because I know we are playing the same status game, showing up strong and self-sufficient because “this is what strong leaders do.”

Bullshit.

You are human and humans appreciate being appreciated: do this to your team and see their motivation go up, and with it their enthusiasm, sense of ownership and desire to make things happen.

And then see it reflected in their performance.

The pushback

“Good work is what I expect and what I pay for, so why should I bother complimenting them as well?”

The salary pays for the what, found in a job description that was outdated on day 2, but the real differentiator is how that what gets done.

If you want the right-how (defined by you, as a manager) and not one of the one hundred possible wrong-hows (defined by others who are not in charge right now), you need to tell people.

If you don’t, how are they supposed to know whether they delivered it well?

How to give positive feedback?

Spoiler alert: “Great job!”, “Congratulations”, “Keep it up!” are not examples of positive feedback.

You give positive feedback well the same way you give the negative one well:

1. Observation.

2. Feelings.

3. Need.

4. Request.

And you prepare for it, even if it will be easier than its negative counterpart. You prepare because it will transpire in the words you use and the precision of your speaking - and the care you put into it will itself be rewarding.

Avoiding preparation has two outcomes:

• Best case - you ramble through the conversation and somehow pass the message along; the person is happy, but you damage that leadership image of control and calmness that you have cultivated so far.

• Worst case - you send a confused message and the only thing that comes across is your happiness: ok, but so what? What should the person keep doing? In short: you failed.

In practice

Negative feedback is what you use when the how is wrong.

Positive feedback is what you use when the how is right.

Using only half is like flossing with one hand: technically doable, but why make it so hard?

Thanks for reading,

Luca

Next week: did you choose your corporate job or did it just happen to you?

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

Coaching by providing feedback is the single most powerful lever to multiply your team’s output (here’s how to provide and how not to provide feedback) and modern fluffy management theory holds coaching as leadership Holy Grail.

But this fluffiness never quite deigns to answer a tough question: what do you do when the other person doesn’t respond?

You stop.

You stop whether the problem is the coach or the coachee and whether the coachee can’t change or won’t change.

Why you stop

Coaching is expensive, as conversations take time to prepare and follow up.

In addition, the math simply doesn’t add up:

1. you spend most of your time on the unresponsive person, who is likely your lowest performer

2. After hours of effort, he will finally improve a little, but still be below standards

3. In the meanwhile, the opportunity cost compounds against you, because the time you spent on your low performer is time you did NOT spend on the rest of the team, whose performance has stalled, if not drifted altogether

Point 2 also hides a paradox: from his point of view he has doubled the quality of his work and he expects you to be happy; from your point of view, he is still below standards and not adequate.

And so now the half-coached employees becomes a resentful low performer.

Lovely.

The pushback

“If your coaching didn’t work, it’s because you didn’t find the right way to speak to the person”

If you have created an environment where people can be successful and your coaching doesn’t work, the problem might very well be with your coaching style not being right for him.

And it still doesn’t matter.

As a manager, you work to multiply your team’s output in a context of competition (with the other managers gunning for you), scarcity (with expectations constantly rising and resources shrinking) and timeliness (achieving a result today or in a month might be very different): you simply do not have the luxury to look for the perfect key to each of your people’s hearts.

When you stop

When you have created the possibility of success - single-point accountability, clear expectations, a safe environment, given feedback repeatedly and nothing changed.

Repeatedly to the same person, not “on the same topic” or “in the same month”.

If you try coaching a person on three different things, he has had the opportunity to show a different behavior and failed to do so, it is a patter and it is reason enough to stop.

As the wise man says: you can lead a horse to the water, but you can’t make him drink.

And this is true whether he won’t or can’t drink.

The pushback

“Only three opportunities before writing him off? That’s too harsh!”

Look, I get it. For years I have seen myself as the sheperd who brought all sheeps home. The savior. The one that makes everyone see the light and improve, finally being the version of themselves they could have been all along.

How arrogant of me!

Some people simply cannot change and so a fourth attempt would fail just the same.

And the others CHOOSE whether to change. Not you. Them.

If you gave someone multiple chances to improve and he didn’t, he chose to ignore you.

He ignored you thrice, what makes you think a fourth attempt would yield a different result?

Accept it and move on.

How you stop coaching

Withdrawing coaching is a necessity, but doing it well is hard.

You need to keep providing feedback to keep the standard visible, lest it drops for the whole team while the low performer believes he’s doing ok. Limit yourself to 15min sessions or, better yet, just put everything in your weekly 1-1.

You need to create a paper trail to document the standard-vs-performance gap, because you’ll need it to justify the negative performance review and the performance improvement plan. Keep it factual and professional: it will need to be bulletproof.

You need to keep him engaged to keep getting something out of him, but ... I do not know how to do this. From his point of view, yesterday you were nice and today you stopped coaching him and started writing nasty emails instead. If you know how to turn this into a non-negative experience, write it in the comments!

Doing the above will be tiring and painful, but the moment you chose to withdraw coaching is when you wrote the verdict, and now you need to walk him all the way to the door.

Coaching is the most powerful lever you have to multiply your team’s output, but multiple failed attempts are proof enough that your coaching is not - and won’t - work for him.

Make the tough decision and hold the line.

Next week: should you give positive feedback and how to do so?

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

Giving feedback is how you raise your team’s level, but it is HARD.

Last week I shared three ways to fail spectacularly at it, each tried and tested by me in the past few years.

Today I will share how I approach difficult conversations since reading Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg: it transformed how I give feedback and I hope it will transform you.

Before starting

Remember: you control the delivery, not the reception.

Your job is to deliver the message respectfully and clearly, but he chooses whether to change his behavior.

A future article will be dedicated to what to do when he ignores you.

The four steps below build upon each other and must be followed in order:

• In step 1 and 2 you earn the right to be heard;

• In step 3 and 4 you spend the currency you just earned.

Step 1: observation

The first step establishes a shared reality.

Its purpose is to ground the conversation in the same facts, lest it becomes two people debating how the movie ended after having watched two different movies.

Rules:

• Facts only, as observed by you. No judgments, no interpretations. Facts.

• Use the pronoun “I” followed by “observed/noticed/saw”. Reality has many facets and you only saw some, which is what you are bringing to the table without any pretense at “universal objectivity”.

What will happen:

• He might push back against some of your statements and provide his own interpretations. Listen politely, then peel back the interpretation layer and stick to the facts.

• He might bring new facts to the table. Ask questions until you understand them fully, then mirror them back alongside your own.

Done when: you both agree on what happened.

Step 2: feelings

The second step clarifies how you felt about the situation.

Its purpose is to underscore the consequences of his behavior and to justify what comes next.

Rules:

• Your feelings only, without any attempt at reading his.

• Keep it professional: you are not talking to a therapist, just sharing briefly how you felt.

• Use the pronoun “I”: these are the feelings you chose to experience and the other person, while responsible for his behavior, is not responsible for them. The situation did not “make you angry”: the situation was the situation and you chose to respond with anger. Grow up and take responsibility for your own choices.

What will happen:

• Either he will listen and then contribute with his own feelings (best case).

• Or he will defend himself (still good, at least he’s engaging).

• Or he will stay silent (bad, but it might happen).

Done: you have stated your position and he has responded.

Step 3: need

The third step surfaces your deeper need.

Its purpose is to clarify why you want what you want, creating a shared understanding of where you are going and why.

Rules:

• Stay at a high level. You want him to walk away knowing the big why behind your ask, so focus on the bigger picture.

• Engage in the discussion, but only up to a certain point. You are the manager and you are communicating the needs of the role, not negotiating your standards. If he pushes back, explain more, but, when the disagreement is clear, cut the discussion and push through.

What will happen:

• Either he will listen and ask questions to understand more (good).

• Or he will refuse to agree with your rationale (bad, but it happens).

Done when: he either understands the big why or it is clear that he won’t yield.

Step 4: request

The fourth step makes the specific ask.

Its purpose is to align on what will happen differently next time.

Rules:

• Be specific. Now you’re making your request and afterwards you’ll need to verify whether it was fulfilled.

• Engage in the discussion, but only up to a certain point. You are requesting him to do something different, not asking his opinion about it.

• Ask for a written recap of the conversation. This surfaces any unclear point and creates a trace, in his own words, that the conversation has taken place.

What will happen:

• Either he will ask questions and contribute to shaping the request (good).

• Or he will grudgingly commit to comply (bad, but it ends the conversation nonetheless).

Done when: he agrees he will do as asked.

Two unexpected side benefits

Do not wing it: if you want to succeed, you will need to prepare before having the conversation.

And you will notice:

1. What initially resembles a jumbled mess of judgments and feelings will start looking simple and linear. You might even decide to avoid the feedback conversation altogether because the case does not stand.

2. You will achieve clarity on yourself and your motives, understanding why some situations trigger your emotions and why you need things to be a certain way.

As a result, you will become a more competent communicator and a better leader.

Next week we’ll answer the toughest question yet: when to give feedback and when to give up?

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

If you have ever given anyone feedback, you know it is bloody hard.

Below are three ways NOT to do it: I tested all three, sometimes going through the whole damage ramp-up and other times catching myself early.

I promised this one a while ago, when I wrote that a manager who gives feedback only during the review cycle is doing a poor job.

Hopefully reading this will spare you some pain.

You’re welcome.

1. Brutal honesty

I started managing people at 27 and believed that saying things straight was the honest thing to do.

My creed was “like me or not, here’s how I am for real - I don’t play politics” - you know the gist. In practice, I was calling myself virtuous while being an asshole.

(and I am ready to bet money that you just thought of at least one other person fitting the description).

Effect:

• short-term: you both get angry, nothing changes.

• mid-term: you believe he is unresponsive and hunting for excuses, he thinks you don’t know what you are talking about. The relationship sours.

• long-term: communication breaks down completely and he stops bringing you problems; if you find out about them, you are forced to react urgently and have limited options.

Luckily for me, I caught myself early and never went beyond the short-term negative effect.

2. The sandwich method (a.k.a. “the shit sandwich”)

I already knew it was not going to work, but HR ran a whole training session on it and I felt compelled to try it. They are the experts after all, right?

You take a fluffy piece of white bread (i.e. a compliment), put some shit on top of it (i.e. the actual feedback) and then close it with another piece of white bread (i.e. another compliment) - hence its street name.

Effect:

• short-term: you are happy he took it well, but he hears two compliments and a suggestion and changes nothing

• mid-term: believing you delivered the feedback, you expect changes and grow increasingly frustrated when you see none; he keeps living his happy life, oblivious.

• long-term: frustration leaks in your tone and decisions; he becomes resentful as he perceives you as unfair; his performance drops. Any further attempt at feedback fails the same way, reinforcing the cycle.

I never got to experience any of this firsthand as, after the first failure, I just went back to brutal honesty and eventually to the therapy session.

3. The therapy session

The HR-driven failure prompted me back to carving my own path, all the more convinced that you need to actually do before trying to teach.

After realizing that brutal honesty was counterproductive, I found myself at the opposite end of the spectrum: listening.

Listening for feelings and deeper reasons, digging and digging to the point that I found myself almost defending my own managerial requests.

Effect:

• short-term: endless conversations, but no concrete action defined.

• mid-term: you grow frustrated because nothing changes, he feels heard and internalizes that low performance is accepted.

• long-term: the low standard is no longer acceptable, you try to raise it where it once was and he feels personally betrayed, eventually leaving. Do this for a few years and the standard lowers for the whole team, without any hope of recovery.

Here I reached the mid-term effect with one person and the long-term one with another; the former is still there and never got wind of any of it, the latter left, badly. It was painful.

None of these methods work:

• brutal honesty fails to create the safe environment and shared reality that are foundational to receiving a tough message. Even worse, it forces your own reality onto him and, after that, it’s just two people arguing about how the movie ended - after having seen two different movies.

• the shit sandwich fails at delivering the message altogether, by including it between two instructions to disregard it.

• the therapy session ends up unpacking the past and disregarding the future, while you justify to your report why you are delivering the feedback in the first place.

Next week I’ll share something that actually works - stay tuned.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

The other day I asked a person in my team for feedback on how to improve my communication style.

No particular reason, other than my belief in the need to constantly improve as a communicator.

Here’s what she told me:

The first lesson is the classic one: when you hold a leadership position, what you say and how you say it gets blown out of proportion - so beware.

The second lesson I had never encountered: watch the delta, especially in writing.

If your people are used to a certain writing style, any new message will be pitted against that standard and any deviation will cause an overreaction.

If you are normally friendly and relaxed in your writing, they will interpret sudden coldness as anger or as negative feedback. If it’s a deliberate choice, all is good; but if, like in my case, you go cold because you have slept poorly and have many things to do, it becomes carelessness - not acceptable when impacting others.

The bottom line: prevent your own emotional and physical conditions from spilling over into your written communications, lest people overreact to the delta.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

Last week I argued that we should all think of ourselves as a part of the sales team who happens to deal with some specific technicalities around selling. I then proceeded to detail how to make it happen as a manager.

And yet behaviors are hard to track and harder to measure, with goal systems failing to account for them: how do you know when your team has completed the mindset shift then?

You look for the comma.

A support function acting as a blocker answers “It cannot be done,” while a support function acting as an enabler answers “It cannot be done, but here is how to get closer to what you’re asking.”

Some examples

Regulatory versus sales. The sales team receives its target and is asked to sell in five new Countries, with the regulatory affairs team as support. The RA director knows he will never make it through all the submissions and translations in time.

Here is how he acts:

• As a blocker: “We cannot sell until all the submissions have been done. We expect them to be done by the end of Q2”. The RA director optimizes for his submissions regardless of the incompatibility with the sales targets.

• As an enabler: “You cannot sell until we have the formal regulatory approvals, expected at the end of Q2; however, we can work around this by having the customer sign a waiver to accept the full responsibility of proceeding without the software translated”. Here the director realizes the impact his stance has on the sales target and acts accordingly.

The comma: “We cannot sell without a translation, but we can sign a waiver and proceed somehow”.

Quality versus operations. Operations needs to produce faster because of the increasing market demands and the Quality director is pulled in to seek solutions.

Here is how he answers:

• As a blocker: “It cannot be done because all tests must be completed before we can release the production batches”, ensuring no auditor will ever complain, but blocking any production increase.

• As an enabler: “Our Quality requirements demand full testing before releasing production batches; however, we can now start working to eliminate some of these tests as we have enough historical data to justify it”. He understands that Quality is a service to production and acts to remove friction.

The comma: “We cannot avoid testing, but we can work to minimize it in the future”.

Medical affairs versus sales. The sales team wants to engage a new customer through a clinical study, knowing he is very focused on research and academic publications. It comes up with a clinical protocol proposal for the medical affairs director.

Here is how he reacts:

• As a blocker: “This cannot be done because we have multiple similar clinical initiatives already active and I won’t have the budget for that”. The director thinks only of the medical bits and of how this study would add no scientific evidence.

• As an enabler: “We cannot launch this clinical activity as it would increase budget without an appropriate and proportional return on the investment; however, we can engage this customer in other ways, granting us customer engagement for a fraction of the cost”. The director understands that medical affairs exists solely to serve sales and acts accordingly, providing a solution for the sales problem.

The comma: “We can’t launch a new project, but we can engage the customer through other means”.

Are you being an enabler or a blocker?

Look for the comma and find out.

And, if you don’t like what you discover, remember: “The truth will set you free, but first it’ll piss you off” ~ Ted Lasso.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

Subscribe now

Companies centralize their supporting functions to achieve standardization and cost efficiency, designing teams of comparatively few people who support the business across its geographies and product lines.

While they achieve these, efficacy is abysmal.

Yes, the company saves money by hiring fewer people within the centralized function, and yes, the supporting function follows the same script everywhere, but most frontline teams regard the supporting functions as a hindrance rather than a facilitator.

And so the big question: how to make the supporting team support?

I will answer through the example of Regulatory supporting Sales, but the same applies to every other supporting function.

Shifting the mindset

I believe the answer lies in a long-overdue mindset shift.

Today, the Regulatory people see themselves as part of the Regulatory team; instead, they should see themselves as the part of the Sales team dealing with regulations.

The shift in perspective would be massive, effectively reframing Regulatory as a service to the Sales team - which, in fact, it is.

Three things must be true for this to happen:

• The incentives must be aligned.

• The Regulatory people must be included in the Sales leadership team.

• Management must embrace the costs of these decisions.

Aligning the incentive systems

Systems produce the output they are designed for and the current incentive systems are designed to reward each function for optimizing its own thing.

Sales optimizes for revenues and Regulatory for no questions after submissions, so Sales works to sell more regardless of compliance and Regulatory puts guardrails in place to avoid any issue. It is nobody’s fault, each team doing the rational thing within the given constraints, and the result is a constant fight for compliance or flexibility, draining energy that could be put to better use.

Aligning the incentive systems means rewarding both teams for reaching the same target.

The Regulatory team will receive its bonus if its submissions go well AND if the revenues come in as per target. The Sales team will receive its bonus if it reaches the sales target AND if there are no compliance problems.

The pushback

“Companies already include the overall performance as a coefficient of the bonus calculation”.

In theory, yes; in practice, the “company-level performance” is so far away from an employee that the motivating factor is zero.

What I propose is a much more granular thing, where, if you work to support only Italy, Spain and Portugal, your bonus is linked to the business performance of only those three

Including the supporting function in the leadership team

Today, supporting functions have their own reporting lines and weekly reviews and project trackers and team building events, effectively living in their own world and isolated from the team they are designed to support.

I advocate keeping the reporting lines as they are, but giving the supporting function a seat in the leadership team of the function it supports.

The Regulatory person keeps reporting to the Regulatory Director, but, day to day, he belongs to the Sales team he serves, participating in the Sales team activities and business reviews and being expected to justify delays to the commercial VPs.

The pushback

“This is already done”.

No, it’s not.

The closest thing we have is Finance as a business partner and, in most cases, they are just controllers. The term is not even applied to any other function.

Embracing the costs

There are two costs associated with this approach: the retention risk and the managerial coordination cost.

People being judged on things they don’t fully control carries a retention risk. The Regulatory team could argue that it should not be judged upon whether the Sales team reaches its target and the Sales team could argue that the fact that the company receives regulatory pushbacks should be irrelevant in determining its targets.

This line of reasoning is understandable, but wrong: you all belong to the same company, why should one receive a bonus if the other one fails?

Revenues that create compliance problems are a hindrance and regulatory activities that don’t generate revenues are a waste. Value is generated for the company only if both targets are achieved and bonuses should be awarded accordingly.

Creating granular goals that span teams carries a managerial cost. Today, goals are a piece of corporate theater, performed twice a year at the minimal viable cost for all parties involved. In my proposal, managers of different teams would need to discuss goals together and track them throughout the year.

In addition, Regulatory decisions would no longer sit only with the Regulatory Director, who would need to involve his Sales counterpart; the same would be true in reverse.

Most teams within companies are built to support others, yet they act as if their existence were valuable per se.

If you are managing one of these teams, you have the opportunity to drive a mindset shift that is long overdue - from self- to them-centered.

Don’t waste it.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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The other day I had lunch with one of the sharpest individuals I have come across as of late.

We talked about how powerful the Apple ecosystem is and why big medical device companies cannot replicate it.

Portfolios vs ecosystems

A portfolio is a mix of products sold to the same customer, where value does not multiply when you add pieces. The best thing a customer gets out of a portfolio is a bundle discount.

A system is a set of elements coherent with each other and oriented toward a common objective, where value multiplies as you add pieces. An “ecosystem” is a system, just with a sexier name.

PS: if the definition of “system” sounds suspiciously similar to the definition of “strategy”, it is because strategy is but a system made of choices:

Apple’s products are a system: they work well alone, but shine brighter with any addition.

iPhone + iPad + AirPods > iPhone + Samsung tablet + Beats earphones. And, if your spouse is an Apple user, you also get the benefit of a shared iCloud plan and Passwords and Apple TV; and, if you have kids, of shared Parental Control; and on it goes.

The result? Apple reaps 80% of the smartphone market’s profit, while selling only 20% of the phones.

Meanwhile, its competitors battle for the remaining crumbs, effectively playing to survive rather than win. Talk about a competitive advantage.

Which begs the question: why does nobody in medical devices do this?

Regulations vs ecosystems

The medical device industry is highly regulated and regulations make creating systems of products excruciating.

Two options are available:

• You can buy your way into a system, acquiring an approved device and integrating it. The problem is that any meaningful modification triggers a painful regulatory submission, defeating the purpose of acquiring an approved device in the first place.

• You can build your own system in-house, designing it upfront and then developing the pieces sequentially, to keep the regulatory cost to a minimum. The problem is committing to an architecture before the market confirms it: doable, but only if you have big money and the balls to hold the steering wheel straight for years, following a precise vision despite Wall Street. Very few choose this path.

This is why medical device companies build portfolios instead: acquisition, aggregation, discount.

And the pleasure of such conversations is why going to lunch with interesting people is so important.

The next time someone presents you with an ecosystem, ask them what value unlocks by buying more pieces.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

But what is value in the first place?

If you’re ready to do go down the entire value rabbit hole instead, here’s the link to the whole repository.

This piece belongs to the Worth Arguing With series, where I write back to other people’s thinking - because the best compliment you can pay an idea is to take it seriously.

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The Intentional Manager — strategy, leadership and execution for the professional who wants to lead with intention, not just effort.

The other day I read an excellent piece by Leon, where he argued that leadership is an evergreen topic because it is a complex problem without a defined solution.

He then explained the difference between complicated and complex adaptive systems.

In a complicated system the total is the sum of the parts and knowing each part gives you a full understanding of the whole system, its behavior and output. Complicated problems have a “right” solution. Think of a catapult shooting a projectile: if you know the initial conditions of both, you can predict where the projectile will land; this would be true even if you were shooting 200 projectiles at the same time, albeit with more math.

In a complex system the total is more than the sum of its parts and knowing the single pieces is not enough to reliably predict how the system will behave. Complex adaptive systems also have the capacity of learning from the past, introducing an extra layer of complexity. Complex problems have no defined solution. Take the same catapult as before, but this time imagine launching a pigeon (alive and unconstrained): no math will ever predict the landing spot.

Leadership is a complex problem with no clear solution because it concerns complex adaptive systems (i.e. teams), themselves made of complex adaptive systems (i.e. people).

Below I will explore how treating leadership as a complicated problem has failed in the past and how facing it as a complex problem is the only viable approach.

Why complicated solutions fail

Leadership fascinates us because it stands on two fundamental human truths: the ability and desire to think independently and the urge to command others.

The two are structural elements of what it means to be human: they were there before, they are here now and they will be here tomorrow.

Taylorism addressed the problem by removing its complex aspects: it transformed people into cogs of the factory process, forcing them to adhere to strict instructions, measuring their output with scientific precision and treating them as replaceable parts. Applied to white-collar work, think of tools that measure keystrokes, time sheets to spot idle capacity and forced vacation time.

Different tools, but the same underlying idea: thinking is a waste of time.

While it partially worked on the factory floor, this approach failed miserably when applied to knowledge work, as removing judgment from a system that runs on judgment produced disengagement, output below expectations and a machine that grinds. This is what you see in corporate every day.

The good news is that it seems we are slowly coming to accept that complicated solutions don’t work in leadership — see the shift from command-and-control to servant leadership.

The bad news is that we still have a long way to go — see the recent wave of mandated return to office (an attempt to summon collaboration by scheduling it, which will only obtain bodies at desks on Tuesdays) and the number of prescriptive dickheads still successfully climbing the corporate ladder.

I am a manager, what do I do then?

You accept that a team is a complex adaptive system, where you can only nudge the parts while building the structure.

• Nudging the parts means coaching the people, to keep them aligned with the overall direction by positively reinforcing the desired behaviors and punishing the negative ones (research shows that the former is far more effective than the latter, but that’s the topic for another article).

• Building the structure means being the architect of the team, designing its governance, how communication flows and how it interacts with other teams.

They are both never-ending endeavors, as the people and the team will keep on evolving and adapting to the environment (remember that “adaptive”? This is it).

And yes, this is a full-time job.

The pushback

”This sounds very fancy, but when do I get things done?”

As a manager, “getting things done” happens through people, but it will not happen if you treat them as a complicated problem.

People are complex. Embrace it. Own it. Treat them as such and you will be amazed at what they will achieve.

The distinction between complicated and complex adaptive systems is a powerful mental model for dealing with reality, but treating one system as the other breeds pain and suffering.

In leadership, stop looking for the solution.

Build the structure, coach the people and let the results emerge.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

Part of The Intentional Leadership Arc, a series on leadership published every Sunday in The Intentional Manager.

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The Intentional Manager — strategy, leadership and execution for the professional who wants to lead with intention, not just effort.

“Working at 100% capacity” is among the most baffling corporate fixations.

Managers chase it to justify asking for more resources. Employees crave it because doing more is how they get promoted and (maybe) not executed during the next mass-firing. Everybody is busy and efficient.

Then something unexpected happens, no one can deal with it, it becomes urgent and eventually an heroic firefighter solves it.

The irony? Most of that work is, by definition, unnecessary.

As is the firefighting for which you missed dinner with your spouse last night.

Below I will demonstrate why this is so and what, as a manager, to do differently to increase your team’s output.

What is a bottleneck?

If you imagine a pipe with water flowing in, there will be places where water slows down.

The bottleneck is where it slows down the MOST.

For each pipe, the number of bottlenecks is, by definition, ONE.

Implications for the whole process

A pipe can only carry as much water as its bottleneck.

If the maximum outflow of your faucet is 1l, pushing 100l or 1,000l or 10,000l down the pipe is an exercise in futility: your faucet will still spout 1l.

Conversely, if your 1l faucet functions at half-capacity, at 0.5l, the whole pipe will carry 0.5l.

While the faucet runs at full speed, at 1l, the rest of the pipe will always have spare capacity.

How does this apply to corporate?

A process is a pipe for work to flow through, with a bottleneck that limits how fast work can flow.

The bottleneck is a specific person or function and the process moves, at most, at its speed; if it slows down, so does everything else. Within that process, most people (in fact, all the non-bottleneck people) have free time, while they wait for the bottleneck to process its piece.

Corporate culture, however, condemns idle employees and incentivizes well-meaning managers to make one of three decisions.

Launching efficiency initiatives, where the team works to speed up its piece of the process. Sensible, but useless: you can improve things to your heart’s content, but, if not in direct service to the bottleneck, the overall process will move just as slow.

Launching quality initiatives, where the team raises the quality of its piece of the process. Again - sensible, but improvements should be driven by customers, not spare capacity; else, they only raise costs and shrink margins.

Launching side projects, where the team does things unrelated to the process it was hired to support. While these can be fun and interesting, there’s a reason they are considered “nice-to-have”.

If your team works on non-bottleneck parts of a process and is always busy, watch out: non-bottlenecks always have, BY DEFINITION, more capacity than the process needs and so, if full, they are working on irrelevant stuff.

What do you do then?

You choose to allow idle time because you realize it is needed to have the bottleneck - and therefore the process - work at full steam.

Then you design your team’s work to support the bottleneck in working as fast as possible; if an initiative serves any other purpose, you kill it.

If your team is already buried and you can’t back off, at least prepare yourself to drop everything as soon as the bottleneck calls for aid.

Marketing - example

You lead a marketing team built to support sales with marketing material, social media and conferences.

Everything else - internal communication, patient advocacy, market analysis and segmentation - is out of scope by design.

You are working with an external agency on a marketing campaign to launch a new product:

1. Input by you

2. Proposal by agency

3. Review by you

4. Re-work by agency

5. Deployment

The bottleneck in the process is the agency, because it has multiple customers and everything you ask takes weeks.

What happens in reality

You want the development process to go fast, but waiting for the agency takes time and you refuse to stay idle.

So you ask your team to take on more projects and use the spare capacity: you help HR with an internal communication, you review the Leadership Team slides for the investors, you commit to supporting a local sales team for an important event.

The agency comes on Tuesday with questions, but you don’t have time and respond on Monday: the bottleneck has been idle for a week and the delay will translate as a delay to the final delivery.

What should happen if you want your process to go as fast as possible

You understand that the development process will go only as fast as the agency (your bottleneck).

You assign Person A to work with the agency and ensure that your team is available every day for 30min to answer Person A’s questions, ensuring the agency receives inputs immediately.

You accept that those daily 30min might not be needed and you accept that Person A might have spare time while waiting for the agency, knowing that Person A’s “empty time” is exactly what is needed to ensure that, as soon as the agency asks, he is able to answer.

The pushback

“Why don’t you simply cut the unoccupied employee?”

Spare capacity is justified by what happens when the bottleneck calls, not by how busy the calendar looks.

Otherwise, the bottleneck asks for help and none comes, slowing down the bottleneck and thus the whole process.

Or, even worse, the bottleneck now moves to the piece of the process with one fewer resource, dropping the performance of the whole process to a yet lower ceiling.

A process can only go as fast as its bottleneck and idle time on the non-bottleneck parts is the prerequisite for it to happen.

Either use that capacity to better serve the bottleneck or leave it idle for when you need it.

If your team is a non-bottleneck and it is at 100%, you are, by definition, filling its time with crap.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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“The only piece of feedback my boss gave me in the past three years is that I need to be more decisive,” MM told me last week.

Yes, this is terrible feedback, neither specific nor actionable. Yes, a manager who provides feedback only during the performance review cycle is doing a poor job. These will be topics for future articles though.

Instead, the purpose here is to show you, MM, that making more decisions independently is easy once you overcome the two big fears.

Overcoming the fear of overstepping

For years you have played a specific role and you believe that stepping up could come across wrongly, as if you wanted to steal from your boss’ plate.

I understand where you are coming from and yet, in ten years of corporate life, I have never heard a manager complain that his people were too independent. Not even once. For all practical purposes, the risk of overstepping is zero.

Just make these decisions.

Likely case, your manager will thank you; unlikely case, he will tell you to run some of those decisions by him; in any case, you will be better off than you are today.

And you will land much further than you would have thought possible.

The pushback

“But I have already tried and he jumps in and corrects me every time!”

Then you need to have a conversation.

You need to understand why it is that he jumps in - mistrust in your judgment, desire to be helpful, instinct, need for control, habit - and disclose how you feel about it. Then share with him that you are trying to be more independent and obtain his “permission” to keep doing so.

I firmly believe that, once you have this conversation, he will be very happy to let you have more space and to see you take on more decisions and, thus, more responsibility.

Overcoming the fear of being wrong

Nobody likes being wrong and the more decisions you make and the more wrong you will be - it’s just how things are.

And yet, here’s a secret: most decisions don’t matter.

Out of the hundred things you do and out of the hundred decisions you make every day, only the tiniest fraction actually moves the needle. Of course, this does not mean “make decisions at random and quit working because your job is pointless,” but it does mean that you can be more relaxed because, if the decision doesn’t matter, making a mistake doesn’t matter either.

If still not convinced, think of decisions as if living in a 2x2 space:

Spend time and ask for support on the decisions that are consequential AND irreversible. Here you want to be right and 97% sure before pulling the trigger.

Everything else, either because reversible or inconsequential or both, is irrelevant: once you are 60% sure, jump.

A real life example

Imagine that your boss is relying on you to organize a congress: when should you seek his input?

Here’s how I would use the matrix.

Consequential and irreversible - ask for input:

• When to organize the congress, irreversible because the dates are hard to change once set and consequential because a mistake might mean fewer participants and a lower return on the investment.

• The topic of the lunch symposium, consequential because the right topic might unlock new deals and irreversible because you need to support it before the congress with a marketing campaign, which costs time and money.

• The chosen speakers, consequential because they give credibility to the whole congress and irreversible because you can’t retract the invitation once you have extended it.

Irreversible but inconsequential - decide on your own because they don’t matter:

• The hotel you book for the team, irreversible because it is hard to change once booked, inconsequential because nobody really cares.

• Whether you have organized a transfer from the airport for the customers, irreversible because you can’t organize it on the very day, but inconsequential because they can just grab a taxi.

• The graphics of the leaflet, irreversible because you would need to re-print everything, but inconsequential because customers will only glance at them anyway.

Consequential but reversible - decide on your own because you can always go back and change:

• The messages to pass during the company-led session, consequential because they advance the commercial agenda, but reversible because you control all speakers and can change at the last moment.

• The phrasing of the questions you’ll be asked during the survey, consequential because the phrasing shapes the data you gather, but very easy to change.

Inconsequential and irreversible - decide on your own because irrelevant on all fronts:

• What gadget to provide to customers.

• Whether to have a cake celebrating a specific milestone or not.

• How to arrange the products on the table.

MM, there you have it!

As long as you keep in mind that your boss wants you to make more decisions and that most of them don’t matter anyway, you will do just fine.

I look forward to hearing how the next performance conversation goes.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

If someone in your network would find this useful, forward it their way - it costs you little and might just make their Monday morning slightly less painful.

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The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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“Great job with the presentation! Just change [X], [Y] and [Z] and it will be ready to go.”

You noticed what could be improved and you jumped in. You demand and expect excellence from your team and excellence was that extra tweak to the slides. You have been doing this for years and you were the only one who could catch this - and that’s why you intervened.

You did the right thing.

Did you?

What happens when you intervene

No, you didn’t.

When you intervene, you steal part of the other person’s accountability for yourself, diminishing their sense of ownership.

Think of it this way: if you invite friends for dinner and they bring the ice cream, that’s fine. But if they bring the appetizer, the first and second course, the ice cream and the wine, it goes from being “your dinner” to “their dinner at your house”. Being educated, you will still go through the motions and smile, but your heart will no longer be in it.

And so he will thank you and implement the suggestion, but he will be disconnected and will withhold the discretionary effort necessary to go from average to great.

And so he will not exert any effort, because waiting for you is cheaper and safer. He will be an addict to your heroin. You will be exhausted for being everywhere and satisfied for still being the best at your craft. In reality, you are the bottleneck and the cap on what your team can achieve.

And so he will not level up, because learning happens in the last, uncomfortable, 10% and you are taking that away. He will sit comfortably, avoid stress and call it work-life balance. You will keep the team sheltered and safe, believing you are being a very good manager indeed. In reality, the team stalls and you are the culprit.

The team’s capabilities will drop and the multiplication of output you should be after as a manager will never happen.

The pushback

“I am their manager, of course I need to intervene! Otherwise, what do I do!? Should I just accept subpar output to preserve my team’s ego?”

You exist to multiply your team’s overall output, not to maximize the single unit of work.

To achieve it, the whole team needs to own whatever it is that they do, which will push them to level up; if you step in, you remove the very ownership needed to multiply.

That said, “not stepping in” differs from “abdicating any responsibility and standard” - in practice:

• instead of giving them the answer, provide them the context and the mental models to reach an acceptable solution themselves;

• instead of fixing the slides, explain why it’s important to make them a certain way and ask them to revise their work accordingly;

• instead of telling them how you would present to the group, tell them what you expect the presentation to deliver, walk them through the few key concepts necessary to present well and let them build their own script and presentation style.

So when should you intervene?

If a decision is consequential AND irreversible, then you MUST step in.

• Consequential: the decision has actual impact.

• Irreversible: the cost of reversing the decision is high.

Here you cannot afford to go wrong, because the damage is real and going back costly. In these cases, stepping in is required and to hell with the team’s sense of ownership; in any case, if you’ve let them decide on everything else, they will have enough in their ownership bank account to survive a withdrawal.

Every other decision, either inconsequential or reversible or both, should be left to the team.

If it’s consequential but reversible, it will have an impact, but it will be relatively easy to change. If it’s irreversible but inconsequential, you won’t be able to change it, but who cares anyway.

Spoiler: 90% of the decisions fall in this group.

Graphically:

The temptation to step in and improve things is always there.

And yet, every time you do it, you lower the team’s capability and ownership, creating long-term damage.

Tread carefully.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

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This is a guest post by , the creator and writer behind , a newsletter for senior product managers and product leaders who want to move past surface-level frameworks.

Drawing directly from his extensive career as a product manager and product leader, Benedikt bypasses generic advice to focus on the complex realities of product leadership.

You have probably heard it by now: AI is coming for the PM role. Some say it will shrink the job. Others say it will eliminate it entirely. And if you are honest with yourself, there is a part of you that wonders whether they might be right.

Let’s settle this. Because the answer is not complicated. It is just buried under a lot of hype.

What actually changed, and what didn’t

Generative AI is a new tool. A genuinely powerful one. It can help you synthesize research faster, draft documents in minutes, and surface patterns you might have missed. Smart PMs are already using it, and they should be.

But what didn’t change is the thinking. The carpenter who gets a better saw still needs to understand what the customer wants built. The saw makes the work faster. It does not replace the judgment behind it. The same logic applies to every PM who picks up an AI tool today.

What is the PM job, actually?

Strip away the jargon and the frameworks. The job looks the same whether you are building a traditional SaaS product or an AI-powered one:

• Understand your customer deeply. Not just their stated needs, but the problems they cannot always articulate. That requires real conversations, careful observation, and genuine curiosity. No model does this for you.

• Create value for that customer. Value means enabling something they could not do before, or solving a problem that was costing them time, money, or frustration. Vague value propositions don’t ship.

• Create value for your company. A product that delights users but destroys margins is not a success. The business side is just as much your job as the customer side.

• Make it usable. Great ideas that nobody can figure out how to use are just expensive experiments.

• Build a business model that works. How does this product make money? Who pays, when, and why? These questions do not answer themselves.

• Define your go-to-market strategy. Who are you selling to, through which channels, with what message?

• Know your ICP. Trying to build for everyone is the fastest way to build for no one.

Why the “AI will kill PM” argument falls apart

This claim comes up constantly. On LinkedIn, on Reddit, in Slack channels. It sounds plausible at first. And then you think it through.

The job still needs to be done. Someone still needs to talk to customers, make sense of what they hear, decide what to build next, align stakeholders who disagree, and take responsibility when the call turns out to be wrong. AI does not do any of that. It assists. It accelerates. It surfaces information. But it does not decide, and it does not own the outcome.

Saying AI will eliminate the PM role is like saying GPS eliminated the need for drivers. Navigation got easier. The driving still requires a human making real decisions in real time.

What does a PM actually look like in an AI world?

More powerful. Not obsolete.

AI handles the repetitive and the mechanical. The summarizing, the drafting, the first pass at analysis. That frees up time and mental energy for the work that actually moves products forward.

What fills that space? The things AI cannot replicate. Taste: knowing what good looks like, even when the data is ambiguous. Differentiation: making choices that are not obvious, that competitors have not made. Courage: committing to a direction when reasonable people disagree and the outcome is uncertain. Judgement: knowing which signal to trust and which to ignore.

These are not soft skills. They are the job. They always were.

The PMs who will struggle are not the ones replaced by AI. They are the ones who never understood what the role actually required in the first place.

What I read

As usual, I will list some of the best articles I read on the Internet. I will keep a list of the best articles (currently >900) at https://www.digital-product-management.com.

These are today’s picks:

The Leadership Leap We Don’t Talk About: The Leadership Domains framework distinguishes between functional and organizational leadership work.

Why your team keeps shipping products nobody buys: Aligning go-to-market strategy with product discovery prevents the gap between shipping features and achieving market success.

Displacement of Cognitive Labor and What Comes After: Artificial intelligence fundamentally shifts human identity, productivity ratios, and the nature of intellectual work through iterative collaboration.

The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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This piece belongs to the Worth Arguing With series, where I write back to other people’s thinking - because the best compliment you can pay an idea is to take it seriously.

I don’t know you, but I know that it will take you less than 5 seconds to name the one person who is holding things together by himself.

If this person stops doing his thing, a piece of the machine will simply stop working.

calls this “donated competence”. Across three pieces (here, here and here) it describes how the employee feels the load creeping up and the leader sees the work getting done, showing what it looks like when the system is held up by people covering for a poorly designed structure.

The thing is: someone holding things together outside of the formal structure is the system screaming at you that, left alone, it would not produce the performance you are seeing.

Once you see this, it is prime time for a tough choice.

If you are the employee

Option 1: you stay quiet.

You accept that you are overcompensating for somebody else’s failure at design and that you will never be recognized for the competence you are donating.

This makes sense only if you actually enjoy the extra work or you are learning things that will help you transition to your next role.

Warning: if you stay quiet long enough, whatever you do will become “normal” and you will lose your window of opportunity.

Option 2: you make the invisible work visible.

You take it to your manager and have a real conversation: what is my actual role, what am I actually responsible for, where does this go and what is it worth.

This makes sense if you are fed up with the situation and willing to leave if it doesn’t change or if you want to grow in the company and believe the moment is ripe to enjoy the fruit of your extra work.

Warning: if you go into the discussion expecting things, you’ll be picking a fight that will leave you bleeding. Thread carefully!

Choose.

PS if you choose not to say anything because of [insert random reason here], you are choosing option 1.

If you are the leader

You own the structure, which means the symptom is yours to read and yours to act on.

Option 1: you ignore the problem.

You accept a system whose performance will be sub-par, as it depends on someone’s discretionary effort. It is also fragile, as that person might leave tomorrow.

This makes sense if you plan to leave soon (and to the hell with everything!) or if your company rewards heroic firefighting more than it prizes silent problem-preventing.

Warning: ignore the problem only if you are sure that nobody else sees it well enough to diagnose it, else you’ll look like an overpaid idiot.

Option 2: you re-design the system.

You take the invisible work and give it a name, an owner, a standard and a moment where someone checks it happened, even accepting a decrease in performance in the short term as everyone re-aligns.

This is what you choose if you want to sustainably achieve results.

Warning: once you start the re-design, resist the temptation to keep tweaking your solution. Things take the time they take and you need to wait to see what is actually working.

Choose.

PS if you choose not to do anything because of [insert random reason here], you are choosing option 1.

Conclusion

Donated competence is the system telling you that it no longer works.

At that moment, the employee and leader need to make a choice.

If both choose to keep quiet and keep carrying, the system has just told you exactly what it will keep producing.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

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The Intentional Manager is for the corporate professional who is tired of surface-level advice — each issue works to understand the why behind strategy, leadership and execution, from first principles.

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The Employee fired up his laptop and stared at the screen.

It was an anonymous morning and yet it was not like all the others: for today, he needed to make a Very Important Decision.

This Very Important Decision concerned the Very Important Project that he had been working on for the last few months.

It was a cross-functional project of international scope, which was the thing that made it Very Important. It was so Important that the scope was not clear, as often these big projects spiraled off and took on a life of their own; so Important that the timeline was vague, as such projects could hardly be compressed into a calendar; and so Important that the outcome was unspecified, as it was very hard to put a number on such a big project.

Now the Employee had to make a Very Important Decision, and he would do it following the steps highlighted in the latest instance of the Manager’s Digest.

This is how it went.

1. Do you need a meeting?

From the Manager’s Digest: “A meeting shall be set only if its purpose is to make a decision or to discuss a matter of utmost complexity that requires multiple inputs.”

Of course, he needed a meeting. This being a Very Important Decision, the meeting was an absolute necessity.

2. Sending the meeting invite

From the Manager’s Digest: “A well written meeting invite shall have an agenda that specifies the purpose of the meeting, the preparation needed, the expected outcome and any relevant background information.”

And so the Employee set out to think and to write the agenda.

And yet, as soon as he started, he realized that the questions he had were so many, and the decision so Very Important, that he just could not make it into words. Soon he concluded: “This is just too complex and too time-consuming. I’m just gonna explain everything we need to do in the meeting itself.”

And so he resorted to sending the meeting invite without any agenda at all.

As for the subject, he concluded that “Very Important Project - status update” would suffice.

3. Including the right attendees

From the Manager’s Digest: “As few people as possible should be invited to the meeting; only those who own a piece of the outcome should have a say in the decision.”

At the end of his pondering, the list of participants read as follows:

• 4 key stakeholders, each owning a piece of the outcome; for each, his intern, because everybody knows that interns are the ones who do the actual work.

• The stakeholders’ bosses, because it is better to be aligned; for each, his secretary, because secretaries own the calendars.

• The stakeholders’ bosses’ bosses, because alignment has no limit; for each, his right-hand man for helpful context and a secretary.

• 6 other stakeholders who had asked to be kept in the loop.

• 1 representative each from legal, finance, compliance, regulatory, quality, marketing, supply chain and operations, because their support was going to be crucial.

• A priest.

• A dog.

A total of 44 participants.

At this point, the Employee realized that the initial forty-five-minute meeting he was planning was not going to be enough and that in fact it was better to just meet in person, as such Important matters are better discussed face to face anyway.

He looked at the calendar and sent the invite for the next available spot: October 28, 2029.

4. Leading the meeting

From the Manager’s Digest: “The meeting time shall be spent on the few items that carry the most value, while everything else can be dealt with via asynchronous communication.”

Three years had passed and the day of the meeting had arrived. He was late.

“Welcome, everyone. I apologize for being late, but I was in a meeting with a Very Important Person. In any case, now we are all here and there are a few Important points that we need to cover today to make this Very Important Decision - and some minor ones that need to be covered as well.

Let’s start from the minor ones so that we can quickly get them over with before moving on. Bob, do you have any update on X?”

Bob smiled. “In fact, I do,” and he started talking. And Bob’s point was so immensely intricate that the four hours of the meeting flew by in a breeze.

Only at that point, the Employee interrupted Bob and said: “Thank you, Bob. That was a very comprehensive discussion we just led. We’re running a little bit late, and I need to join another session in the other room. So we better take the rest of this discussion offline.

As for the Very Important Decision, we didn’t make it today, but we did cover a lot of ground, so it is probably better to schedule another meeting in the next few weeks. I’ll reach out. Thank you all.”

He ran for the door.

5. Sending the meeting notes

From the Manager’s Digest: “A meeting should always end with the organizer sharing the meeting minutes, capturing the main points covered, the decisions made and the next steps, with their timelines and owners.”

And so the Employee went to the other meeting.

And after the meeting he rushed to grab a taxi and then a plane until, finally, he was home by eleven thirty. Tiring, but such a productive day! But he was just too tired to write the meeting notes.

He would do them tomorrow.

The days went on until finally, on November 22, the Employee sat down to write: he did not remember a thing. That, however, was to be expected, as he was working on so many Very Important Projects that he couldn’t possibly remember each and every detail.

And so he resorted to only capturing the Important, strategic points.

Below is the email he wrote, as it was forwarded to me by one of the 44 participants (the priest):

The Employee in the story is you, for you have made each of these mistakes at least once.

Even worse, at times you consciously acted this way, to ensure the appearance of busyness and to avoid any accountability for a decision. I know, because I did the same.

Meetings are crucial tools for collaboration and decision-making, but it is very easy to abuse them.

Don’t do it.

If you want to run an effective meeting, follow the brief instructions from the Manager’s Digest; if in doubt, just think of what our Employee would have done and do the opposite.

Thanks for reading,

Luca

If someone in your network would find this useful, forward it their way - it costs you little and might just make their Monday morning slightly less painful.

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This article is a collaboration between Luca Foppoli of The Intentional Manager and Elina of Leadership Capability System. We wanted to take a pattern most managers will recognise and argue opposite sides, before looking for a way through.

Luca writes for those who have been sucked dry by corporate, providing deep thoughts regarding leadership, execution and strategy as an antidote.

Elina writes for managers stuck between knowing and doing. Leadership Capability System publication breaks leadership down to the practice level, one capability at a time.

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The story

It’s Thursday, 6.15pm. Marta’s eyes feel sandy and her head is throbbing. Teams beeps, it’s Bruno, again asking for help on a case she expected him to close on his own. A doctor wants two more sub-analyses. Each will cost weeks and a slice of the budget while adding little, so the answer should be an easy no. Marta, who has run Medical Affairs for fifteen years, feels her patience thin: why can’t he just make the call?

Bruno remembers why. A month ago he made exactly this call, told the doctor the data was enough and closed the file; Marta reopened it the following week and approved one of the analyses after all. He felt humiliated in front of the customer and decided that if Marta wanted to do his job, so be it. So he brings her in.

Now they sit in a meeting that neither of them wanted, deciding together something that one of them should have decided alone. She thinks the team has stopped owning its decisions. He thinks he is not allowed to make them.

Who is right?

Manager’s view: it’s the team’s problem

“I do not have the f*ing time! This should be on him, else what did I even hire him for!?”. Marta is tired and she feels stretched too thin. She just doesn’t have the time to deal with this, but also knows that, now that Bruno has asked for help, either she provides it or the project will just stall. This always happens: her people don’t have the guts to make decisions and she needs to step in to get things moving.

When she thinks more coolly about this, she also realizes that the best decisions are made by the person who is closest to the problem; in this case, Bruno. She can help and support and her superior experience would allow her to quickly close the gap in knowledge, but it doesn’t change the fact that Bruno was the one in front of the customer, not her, and no amount of experience fills that gap. She knows that, as a manager, one of her main roles should be to enable her team to make better decisions and she promises herself that she will spend more time on context-setting with Bruno.

Finally, leaving this to Bruno feels, identity-wise, right. She attended an inspiring course on leadership and reflected on her role as team coach: if you elevate the team, their output will multiply and engagement will go up. This is the kind of manager she wants to be and the decision should sit with Bruno.

The weight of this problem sits with the team: they are grown-up professionals and should act as such. She is a manager, not a babysitter, and needs to see that the team can stand on their own feet when push comes to shove.

Team’s view: it’s the manager’s problem

Bruno’s story was written the moment Marta reopened the file he had closed. And it was not just an overridden decision, it was a signal: “your opinion doesn’t matter”. What’s more important is that the situation exposed a real risk for Bruno, his status and credibility were compromised, it was a humiliation in front of the client.

The risk of not guessing the boss’s judgement correctly becomes too high.

So Bruno has options: seek conflict openly, which brings even more risk, or adapt quietly. He chooses to adapt in order to protect relationships, reduce exposure and protect himself from public correction. And, until something changes in Marta’s management style, his strategy of deferring decisions to her is a safer bet.

The weight of this problem sits with the manager: and not only because she has formal authority. Marta created the conditions Bruno is responding to. Her frustration is real, but it is directed at the symptom (Bruno’s withdrawal from decision-making) while the real cause is a pattern she owns and cannot yet see.

Both are right. Neither can fix it alone.

Marta thinks Bruno has an ownership problem. Bruno thinks Marta has a management problem.

Each of them is describing the situation accurately, but from inside their own story - and they are unaware of the gap.

We do not experience situations directly. We experience them through our operating model shaped by personality traits, patterns, and previous experiences. Add to this the organizational context and hierarchical nature of a corporation and things get even harder to untangle. Authority changes what your position costs you if you get it wrong.

How can this self-reinforcing loop be broken? Better communication? The likelihood that another conversation will break the loop is thin, until at least one of them is ready to make one critical move.

And this move is a shift in what you see.

We naturally see the world from our own perspective: we are the hero of our own story. What if, for a moment, we could imagine the story where the other person is the hero, not a supporting character in ours?

• What if Marta could hold Bruno’s story for a moment without needing to agree with it? She might see a person who learned, from direct experience, that his judgement gets overridden and who adapted to protect himself from another situation he found humiliating.

• What if Bruno could hold Marta’s story? A manager stretched too thin who is not trying to humiliate him, but to move faster.

They would be more likely to shift from blame to empathy and from there move toward a genuine solution that not only fixes the practical problem, but strengthens the relationship and trust.

The loop persists because both sides are stuck inside their own story, constantly seeking the clues to reconfirm it.

Breaking it means making what is currently invisible visible - the frustration, the stories - into a shared space, while keeping it safe for both parties. It requires something from whoever moves first: enough self-awareness to see beyond their own position, enough courage to take a step into the unknown and enough skill to open the conversation without destroying the trust that made it possible in the first place.

And in breaking the loop lies freedom.

If this resonated, the next step is practice. The skill this article is about is seeing beyond your own story to influence what happens next; it is something that takes deliberate practice. I have put together a Capability Practice Guide on influencing stakeholders, taking you through Notice, Experiment, and Integrate. Free for subscribers, instant download. 👉 Free Practice Guide: Influencing Stakeholders