How To Slay Dragons

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How To Slay Dragons

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The best-selling explorer and scientist who trained over 15,000 CEOs now shares his secrets for life success in career, entrepreneurship, sales, leadership, and relationships using genetics, evolution, and anthropology.

05/01/2026

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your strategic plan might be the reason you’re losing.

You’ve got the mission, vision, SWOT, KPIs, all the right boxes filled in. It’s clean. Logical. Impressive.

And completely insufficient. Because none of that tells you how to win. It just tells you how to operate. History is full of companies that executed flawlessly…and still died.

Winning requires META-Strategy, the messy, intuitive, uncomfortable art of redefining the battlefield and outmaneuvering the real enemy (hint: it’s often not who you think). Strategy isn’t a template. It’s perception.

Read the full post if you’re ready to rethink how winning actually works and if you’re tired of strategies that look good but go nowhere. Link in comments.

04/30/2026

You don’t have a strategy problem. You have a thinking problem.

Executives rely on templates, SWOTs, mission statements, KPIs to “create strategy.” Feels productive. Looks sophisticated. It’s neither.

I’ve watched thousands of leaders build plans that check every box and still fail. Because no template has ever produced an epiphany.

Without insight, you’re just organizing mediocrity faster.

Real strategy doesn’t come from spreadsheets. It comes from understanding how humans actually compete, adapt, and survive under pressure.

Planning executes. Strategy wins. Know the difference.

If this hits a nerve, good. Read the full post if you’re serious about doing strategy differently. Link in comments.

04/29/2026

Leadership lesson: Gravity always wins.

We love to think we’re in control of meetings, outcomes, even our coffee cups. But physics (and reality) doesn’t care about your confidence.

A fancy conference room. A “designer” mug. A split-second of inattention. That’s all it takes. Not a crisis. Not a failure of strategy. Just a predictable, preventable mess you didn’t prepare for.

Stop overthinking leadership and start managing the obvious risks. I now travel with a keyboard cover everywhere. Why? Because I got tired of relearning the same dumb lesson.

The full blog breaks this down (with a few painful stories). Link in comments.

04/28/2026

Your competitor just beat you. Not because they’re smarter because you showed up to the wrong fight.

Most executives double down when threatened. More budget. More features. More meetings. Same battlefield.

That’s exactly how you lose, slowly, expensively, and while convincing yourself you’re “being strategic.” Meanwhile, someone else already changed the rules while you were arguing over tactics.

Caesar didn’t outfight Vercingetorix, he outmaneuvered him. Netflix didn’t out-store Blockbuster, they made stores irrelevant. META-Strategy isn’t about better moves. It’s about changing the gameboard before the first move.

Read the full breakdown and see what you’re missing. Then subscribe on Substack because your competitors won’t stop at “working harder.” Link in bio.

04/27/2026

Your strategy isn’t failing because it’s wrong. It’s failing because your competitors don’t believe it.

Most leaders obsess over what they think, vision decks, SWOTs, KPIs while ignoring the only thing that actually drives competitive behavior: what the OTHER SIDE believes about you.

That blind spot is expensive. You launch initiatives assuming logic wins. Meanwhile, your competitors are reacting to assumptions, reputation, and half-baked perceptions about you. You’re playing chess. They’re hallucinating and still beating you.

META-Strategy fixes this: shape their beliefs, then exploit them. Cambyses didn’t defeat Egypt, he weaponized their beliefs about cats. Zhuge Liang didn’t fight, he let reputation do the killing. Stop managing reality. Start managing perception.

Want the uncomfortable truth about how belief, not brilliance wins? Read the full memo and subscribe on Substack. Stay dangerous. Link in bio.

04/24/2026

You didn’t lose because your strategy was bad. You lost because it wasn’t a strategy.

Most executive teams confuse planning with strategy. They build beautiful decks, KPIs, budgets, timelines and call it “winning.”

It’s not. It’s organization. And while you’re busy polishing scorecards, your competitors are rewriting the rules of the game. You’re executing straight into irrelevance.

You need two layers: TACTICAL-Strategy to run the business and META-Strategy to win the war. One organizes. The other outmaneuvers. If you don’t have both, you’re just making noise before defeat.

Read the full memo and stop confusing motion with victory. Then subscribe on Substack because your competitors already are. Link in bio.

04/23/2026

Strategic planning is alive and well. That’s the problem.

Companies still build detailed plans, KPIs, timelines, budgets believing that’s strategy.

And yet 70–90% of those plans fail in ex*****on. Not from lack of effort. Not from lack of intelligence. But because we’ve confused planning with thinking.

You can organize activity all day. It won’t make you win.

Strategy and planning are not the same. One creates insight. The other coordinates action. Most organizations skip the first and overinvest in the second.

So they move fast in the wrong direction.

I break this down in my latest memo. Read the full post and subscribe on Substack before your next “strategic plan” becomes another expensive guess. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-mega-strategy-dispatch/posts/executive-edge-memo-strategic-planning-is-dead-again

04/22/2026

I paid $800 to learn something you can buy for $10.

Most executives think risk comes from big decisions, strategy, hiring, market bets. Wrong. It’s the small, stupid stuff that gets you.

One badly placed coffee. One distracted moment. One “that won’t happen to me.” And suddenly your day is shot, your work is gone, and you’re sprinting to the Apple store like a caffeinated lunatic.

I stopped trusting luck and started planning for inevitability. Enter: the keyboard condom. Not sexy. Not strategic. But it works.

Read the full story (and save yourself $800) in the blog. Then subscribe to my Substack because the lessons you ignore are usually the ones that cost you most. https://www.sagaleadership.com/newsletters/the-mega-strategy-dispatch/posts/executive-edge-memo-road-warrior-tip-use-a-condom-for-your-keyboard

04/17/2026

“Authenticity” might be the most dangerous leadership buzzword right now.

Leaders are told to “be authentic” as if truth alone drives performance.

But here’s the uncomfortable reality: humans don’t organize around truth. They organize around stories. And those stories are often simplified, distorted… or flat-out wrong.

Even the founding story of a nation, messy, delayed, contradictory got rewritten into a clean moment of unity. Why? Because it works better. So when you demand “authenticity” in your organization without understanding this, you create confusion, not clarity.

Great leaders don’t just tell the truth. They understand which narratives drive behavior and how to use them without becoming blind to reality. That’s the balance most leaders miss.

Read the full post for the story behind the myth and what it means for your leadership. Then subscribe on Substack. Stay dangerous. Link in bio.

04/16/2026

Most people optimize for food. I optimize for table space.

On the road, dinner isn’t just dinner. It’s your second office.

Bad setup = lost hours. And those hours don’t come back. So you compensate. Work later. Sleep less. Show up worse tomorrow. And then you wonder why performance drops mid-trip.

Simple rule: If the bar can’t handle your laptop, it can’t handle your business. Use tools like OpenTable. Find another hotel. Scan for wide counters, outlets, and people doing the same thing you are.

Don’t fight the environment. Choose one that works for you.

Read the full breakdown of this road-warrior strategy and subscribe to Substack for more ideas that survive outside the boardroom. Link in bio.

04/10/2026

Want to know the problem with your leadership team? They’re chasing a story that never happened.

We build organizations the same way we tell history, neatly packaged, inspirational, and mostly wrong.

The truth? Real progress looks like delays, disagreements, missed signals, and people showing up late…sometimes years late. Not exactly the kind of thing you put in a slide deck.

So leaders invent cleaner narratives, “alignment,” “clarity,” “shared vision.” Sounds great. Executes terribly. Because reality doesn’t behave like your offsite agenda.

Stop managing the myth. Start managing the mess. Understand how humans actually behave in groups and design your ex*****on around that, not the fantasy version.

I break this down (with a story you thought you knew) in the full post. Read it, then subscribe on Substack if you’re serious about fixing what isn’t working. Link in bio.

04/09/2026

Great restaurant. Great people. Great food. Completely useless for getting work done.

Someone gives you a “can’t miss” local recommendation. You go. It’s amazing…if you’re not trying to work.

No space for your laptop. Crowd wants conversation, not spreadsheets. Now you’re the jerk hogging bar space or the executive falling behind.

This is how productivity dies. Not from laziness. From bad context.

Stop chasing “great places.” Start choosing functional environments. A hotel bar isn’t exciting. That’s the point. It’s designed for ex*****on.

Romance is for vacations. Efficiency is for the road.

Want more tactics that actually work in the real world? Read the full post and subscribe to Substack before your competitors do. Link in bio.

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Baltimore, MD

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https://donschmincke.substack.com/

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