Mindset

In 2014, a Gallup researcher named Randall Beck sat in front of a dataset most social scientists would trade a tenure track to access: engagement surveys from 2.7 million employees across 100,000 teams in hundreds of organizations worldwide. The question was deceptively simple. What explained why some teams were thriving while others, in the same company with the same benefit...

In September 1942, a 37-year-old Viennese psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl was shoved into a cattle car with 1,500 other people and transported to Auschwitz. He had a manuscript sewn into the lining of his coat — years of work on a new theory of psychotherapy. The guards took it from him on the first day. His parents, his brother, and his pregnant wife would all die in the ca...

In the summer of 1998, four months before Toy Story 2 was scheduled for release, Pixar screened an early cut for the leadership team. The room went quiet in the wrong way. The story was flat. The characters felt lifeless. The jokes weren’t landing. Ed Catmull, the company’s co-founder and president, had a $90 million production headed for disaster.

What happened next b...

A few years ago, our team hit a ceiling. We had a good product, a decent pipeline, and still watched deals stall for reasons that felt fuzzy. Skill drills helped, but attitude and beliefs kept showing up as the true lever. That sent us down a rabbit hole: which sales mindset books actually change behavior, not just pump you up for a week?

In early 2007, a surgeon named Atul Gawande sat in a conference room at the World Health Organization’s headquarters in Geneva, staring at a problem that killed more people every year than malaria or tuberculosis: surgical error.

An estimated 234 million surgeries were performed globally each year. Studies suggested that complications occurred in 3% to 17% of them. In ...