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In the airline industry, turbulence is a fact of life. They aren’t trying to get rid of it, but rather, they train pilots to safely adjust to it. Notice I said adjust rather than adapt, because adapt implies a sort of status quo, whereas adjustment implies gradual changes based on the operational environment.
AI is here to stay even though some believe they should be granted religious exemptions from using it in the workplace.
Disruption within our operational environments requires the proverbial surgery. Think of Apple and the iPhone. To thrive, Apple’s competitors had to develop a strategy to regain market share.
General of the Army and later President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, is the epitome of the HERO Mindset™. He was a staff officer who never commanded troops until the North African Campaign (Operation Torch), when he served as a three-star general. That campaign was successful but not perfect. There were failures, and if Ike had done like most today and made himself into a victim and ceded total control to external factors, perhaps we would be living in the German or Japanese-occupied United States.
When colleagues at Apple Inc. talked about Steve Jobs, they often used a strange phrase: the Reality Distortion Field. It wasn't about deception. It described Jobs's uncanny ability to make people believe that what looked impossible might actually be achievable. As Walter Isaacson notes in his biography, engineers frequently found themselves accomplishing things they had previously dismissed as unrealistic.
Psychology defines psychosis partly through two hallmark symptoms: delusions and hallucinations. Delusions are fixed beliefs held despite contradictory evidence. Hallucinations are perceptions experienced as real, even though no external stimulus exists.
We often say we live in polarized times. But polarization assumes something important: that we still share the same reality and disagree about what to do with it. The more troubling possibility is something deeper—what I call The Epistemic Psychosis™.
There was a time when disagreement meant debate. Today, it increasingly means something more dangerous: we cannot even agree on what is real. The issue is no longer simply polarization—it is the erosion of a shared reality.
The language of victimhood has become trite in public discourse. We demand normative treatment, and when we don't get it, we blame the organization and decry its toxicity.
One of the most common frustrations in professional life is a lack of recognition. People believe their work should speak for itself, and when it doesn’t, they conclude the system is broken. However, organizations rarely operate that way. Effort may be admirable, but visibility and impact are what actually shape advancement.