Don Schmincke

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We’ve been celebrating the wrong day. For decades, I’ve watched people talk about the 4th of July as if the Founding Fat...
10/13/2026

We’ve been celebrating the wrong day.

For decades, I’ve watched people talk about the 4th of July as if the Founding Fathers gathered in one room, signed a beautiful document, and launched America in one glorious afternoon. Sounds great. It’s also not what happened. If you were committing treason against the most powerful empire on earth, would you invite every revolutionary leader into one building so British spies could arrest them all at once? Exactly. Most of the Founding Fathers weren’t even there. The vote for independence actually happened on July 2.

New York abstained. Seven colonies wanted to postpone the decision. Five opposed it outright. Not exactly the tidy story we teach around the fireworks. And that’s the point. Organizations do this too. We take messy, uncertain, political reality and turn it into a clean story that makes everyone feel better.

If you want authentic leadership, you have to be willing to autopsy the story, not just repeat it. The real lessons often hide inside the disagreement, hesitation, and mess we conveniently leave out.

Read the full blog for the rest of the 4th of July myth and more unconventional, practical leadership insights. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-we-want-authenticity-in-our-leaders-history-says-otherwise

Your company probably has Slack. Email. Teams. Zoom. Town halls. Dashboards. Maybe enough communication tools to launch ...
10/12/2026

Your company probably has Slack. Email. Teams. Zoom. Town halls. Dashboards. Maybe enough communication tools to launch a small satellite. So why does ex*****on still crawl?

Because communication isn’t coherence. I call much of what happens inside organizations “traffic.” Messages moving everywhere. People copying everyone. Decisions waiting for someone else to approve them.

Strategy takes months. Projects stall. And somehow, that 15-minute meeting becomes an hour. We keep confusing more communication with better connection. The result? Gridlock with emojis.

My Quantum Coherent Leadership experiment asks a different question: What if teams didn’t need constant instructions because the organization had already embedded shared mental models, strategic clarity, values, and decision boundaries? Think of them as organizational “microtubules” signals that help people sense what’s changing and respond without waiting for headquarters. Replace some approval with trust. Replace some meetings with clarity. Replace heroic individual performance with coherent ex*****on.

Crazy? Maybe. But that’s exactly why I think it’s worth testing. Read the full blog for the rest of my QCL experiment and the five ways I think leaders can start building a more coherent organization. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-quantum-coherent-leadership-qcl-execute-at-the-speed-of-entanglement

What if your leadership program can’t create something that isn’t there? That idea makes the leadership-development indu...
10/02/2026

What if your leadership program can’t create something that isn’t there?

That idea makes the leadership-development industry uncomfortable. Good. It should. We’ve spent decades repeating, “Leaders are made, not born,” as though enough workshops, coaching, and competency models can turn anyone into an exceptional leader.

But when I started digging into the research, the story got more complicated. Twin studies have found substantial genetic influence on leadership traits and leadership role occupancy. Other research has identified genetic factors associated with who ends up occupying leadership roles.

That doesn’t mean environment doesn’t matter. It does. Training matters. Experience matters. But nurture needs something to work with. Training enhances what’s there. It can’t invent what isn’t. So instead of asking, “How do we turn everyone into a leader?” maybe ask, “Who already has the capacity and how do we sharpen it?” That changes how you hire, develop, promote, and spend your L&D budget.

Read the full blog for more unconventional, practical leadership insights. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-leaders-are-made-not-born

We tried this experiment before. We just gave it a corporate badge. In the 1980s and ’90s, the self-esteem movement told...
10/01/2026

We tried this experiment before. We just gave it a corporate badge.

In the 1980s and ’90s, the self-esteem movement told us that protecting people from failure would help them thrive. Competition softened. Participation replaced performance. Failure became something to prevent rather than something to learn from. So why did we later take the same basic assumption into the workplace? Make people feel good → performance improves.

Sounds compassionate. Sounds modern. Sounds like a great conference keynote. But organizations don’t perform because everyone feels comfortable. People develop confidence by facing real challenges, failing, recovering, and discovering they can handle difficulty. That’s a very different proposition from giving everyone another compliment. Maybe the employee problem isn’t entitlement. Maybe sometimes it’s fragility. And if that’s true, protecting people from difficulty is the last thing we should be doing.

Don’t protect people from every failure. Prepare them to handle it. Teach them how to recover, learn, and keep moving when things don’t go their way.

Read the full blog for more unconventional, practical leadership insights and follow the evidence behind this surprisingly familiar management experiment. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-happy-employee-initiatives-increase-performance

Your company probably isn’t a boiled frog. But your people might be getting very good at ignoring change.That’s the part...
09/30/2026

Your company probably isn’t a boiled frog. But your people might be getting very good at ignoring change.

That’s the part of the famous story that actually interests me.

The science says frogs don’t simply sit there while the temperature rises. They try to get out.

Humans are different. We can watch a bad process become normal. Watch meetings multiply. Watch decisions slow down. Watch a once-sharp culture get buried under approvals, policies, and “just one more initiative.”

Then six months later someone announces, “We have an urgency problem.” No. Maybe you have a noticing problem.

The original frog story gives managers an easy explanation: The organization didn’t notice the temperature rising. But the more uncomfortable question is this: What did you notice and decide to tolerate?

That question is much harder to put on a PowerPoint slide.

I’m not throwing the metaphor away. I’m putting it where it belongs, in the metaphor box, not the science textbook.

Because the real lesson isn’t about frogs. It’s about what happens when people normalize small changes until the accumulated mess looks like “just the way we work.”

Read the full blog for the evidence behind the myth and more unconventional, practical leadership insights. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-the-boiled-frog

Stop asking whether people are following you. Ask what they’re following. I spent years hearing the same leadership form...
09/29/2026

Stop asking whether people are following you. Ask what they’re following.

I spent years hearing the same leadership formula: be trustworthy, communicate clearly, inspire people, develop your followers, create a vision. Sounds right. But history creates an annoying problem for that formula. Some extraordinary leaders were not exactly models of workplace kindness.

So what explains the loyalty? I went looking for the answer and eventually found a clue during an expedition halfway around the world. We had a capable leader. Yet once the expedition was essentially over, our team began breaking apart.

That taught me something I now think executives should ask themselves regularly: If the title disappeared tomorrow, what would people still follow? Your authority? Your personality? Your charisma? Your management techniques? Or a compelling story about where you’re taking them? Because people need more than instructions. They need a reason to endure the uncomfortable parts. They need to know why the destination matters and why they need each other to reach it. That’s the difference between managing activity and creating movement.

So ask yourself: What future do I represent? What sacrifice am I asking people to make? And what makes winning worth the pain? Read the full blog for more unconventional, practical leadership insights. Link in bio.

ALIGNMENT. There’s that word again. Every conference. Every consultant brochure. Every meeting where everyone agrees…and...
09/28/2026

ALIGNMENT. There’s that word again. Every conference. Every consultant brochure. Every meeting where everyone agrees…and nothing happens.

I’ve watched organizations spend months “getting aligned” while ex*****on moves like molasses in a walk-in freezer. So I started wondering: What if alignment is the wrong goal?

We keep adding meetings, memos, approval chains, and communication tools, then wonder why decisions still crawl. Everyone is talking. Nobody is moving.

Quantum physics gives us a strange metaphor: entanglement. What if teams could share a deeper connection to purpose, strategy, and decision boundaries without needing another memo or meeting? That’s the idea behind Quantum Coherent Leadership (QCL) not more communication traffic, but deeper coherence. Not control at every step, but people capable of making bold moves because they understand what matters.

I’m not claiming your company is about to become a quantum computer. I’m asking a more useful question: What would change if your people could act without waiting for you? Read the full blog for my experiment with Quantum Coherent Leadership and some unconventional ideas for executing at the speed of entanglement. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-quantum-coherent-leadership-qcl-execute-at-the-speed-of-entanglement

We’ve spent billions teaching people to lead. So why are companies still starving for great leaders? I started asking CE...
09/25/2026

We’ve spent billions teaching people to lead. So why are companies still starving for great leaders?

I started asking CEOs and HR executives a question that makes conference rooms suddenly quiet: How many people became great leaders because of your leadership development program? Not how many attended. Not how many completed it. How many actually changed financial performance, direction, or results?

Then I asked the nastier question: How many of those “successes” were already strong leaders before the training? The reactions were interesting. Very interesting.

I’m not arguing that training is useless. I’m arguing that training may sharpen leadership capacity rather than manufacture it from scratch. Research into twins, genetics, and leadership role occupancy suggests nature has been sitting at the table all along. Maybe your L&D budget isn’t failing. Maybe your assumption about what training can create is.

I dig into the research and what CEOs should actually do about it in the full article. Read the full blog for more unconventional, practical leadership insights. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-leaders-are-made-not-born

What if your employee happiness program is making you feel productive instead of making your employees productive? I’ve ...
09/24/2026

What if your employee happiness program is making you feel productive instead of making your employees productive?

I’ve watched organizations spend heavily on engagement surveys, wellness programs, free food, shout-outs, purpose statements, and other carefully branded happiness machinery. Everyone feels good about doing something. But the harder questions get ignored: Is the work meaningful? Are people properly resourced? Is the compensation fair? Does anyone actually know what they’re supposed to accomplish?

Here’s the uncomfortable part: happiness may not be the fuel for performance. It may be the feedback. People often feel better because they’re accomplishing something meaningful, not the other way around. That changes the entire HR conversation.

Instead of asking, “How do we make employees happier?” I’d ask, “What’s wrong with the work that’s making happiness necessary to manufacture?” That question gets much more interesting. And much harder to answer.

Read the full blog for more unconventional, practical leadership insights and see why I think we’ve been trying to paint over organizational rust. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-happy-employee-initiatives-increase-performance

I used to tell the boiled frog story, too. Then I did something dangerous: I checked the science.You know the story. Put...
09/23/2026

I used to tell the boiled frog story, too. Then I did something dangerous: I checked the science.

You know the story. Put a frog in cool water. Slowly turn up the heat. The frog doesn’t notice. Eventually, dinner is served.

Great metaphor. Terrible science. Researchers have been testing this idea for more than a century. The frog doesn’t politely sit there waiting for management consultants to explain incremental change. It tries to escape.

That forced me to rethink something I had repeated to audiences myself. How many other “management truths” survive simply because nobody bothers to check where they came from?

That’s the dangerous part. A bad metaphor can become accepted wisdom, then accepted wisdom becomes management practice, and eventually everyone wonders why nothing works.

Use the frog as a metaphor if you want. Just don’t dress it up as science.

And if your favorite management advice falls apart when someone asks, “Where’s the evidence?” …you may have a bigger problem than a frog.

Read the full blog for the research, the surprising evidence, and more unconventional, practical leadership insights. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-donversation/posts/executive-edge-memo-management-myth-busted-the-boiled-frog

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