Last weekend on a wedding. The background the Austrian Alpes. The air at the wedding was heavy with the scent of white roses and champagne, a setting meticulously designed for romance and the celebration of two people promising each other a lifetime. Yet as I looked around the room, I realized the music was entirely drowned out by the familiar, sterile discussions of corporate negotiation. At every single table, men and women sat with expensive drinks in hand, but instead of sharing in the joy of the couple, they were effortlessly trading quarterly numbers, analyzing market positioning, and calculating who was moving where, who had just secured funding, and whose organization was currently undergoing a painful restructuring.

It was a stark, almost haunting realization that kept me quiet for the rest of the evening. We have completely lost the art of being genuinely curious about one another. This is a failure that extends far beyond a simple lack of social grace and cuts straight to the heart of how we lead, because the performative, distracted way we converse at a wedding is precisely how we show up in the boardroom, constantly waiting for our turn to speak rather than truly listening.

The true enemy of connection is not silence. It is the transactional nature of modern small talk, which always carries a painful, unmistakable tell. You find yourself in the middle of answering a question that they asked you, only to watch their eyes slowly drift over your shoulder toward the entrance, searching the room for someone more useful or influential who might have just walked through the door. In that brief, dismissive moment, the illusion falls away and you realize the initial question was never an act of curiosity at all, but merely an opening move in a calculated social transaction with zero interest in the actual response.

We have manically optimized ourselves into a state of hyper-efficient conversational exhaustion, where we strive to know a hundred people and touch base with everyone while retaining absolutely nothing. And then we wonder why our teams refuse to tell us the truth, why we feel utterly isolated in crowded rooms, and why we leave networking events feeling deeply drained instead of connected.

As a mother of two sons who are now grown and at university, this realization hit me with an entirely new weight, forcing me to look at my own behavior and question what kind of relational footprint I have left, and still leave, for my boys. They do not come to me the way small children do, tugging at a sleeve. They come less often now, and when they do, it matters more, not less. Our conscious minds operate under a strict biological constraint, processing a mere 10 bits of information per second, and when I allow my own 10 bits to be fractured by phones, emails, or the lingering stress of my schedule while one of my sons is actually talking to me, I am teaching him that presence is negotiable and that efficiency matters more than depth. They are old enough now to notice. They always were.

I want to fundamentally change this pattern within myself, shifting from a manager of conversations to a true role model of human presence, so that when my sons reach me, by phone or across a kitchen table, they do not find a mother whose attention is drifting over their shoulder toward the next task, but a parent who is anchored, entirely still, and fully invested in their world. Being a role model did not end when they turned eighteen. If anything, it became harder, and more important.

Moving forward, I am committing myself (even more than before) to three quiet disciplines:

First, I enter every conversation fully or not at all, choosing to give my complete, undivided attention until the interaction naturally ends, because a half-present conversation costs both souls far more than a polite absence.

Second, I continue to practice asking questions to which I genuinely do not know the answer, stripping away all professional agendas to simply ask, what was that like for you? What is the funniest thing that happened to you this week? What is joy for you? Or, what are you not saying? I want to observe the profound shift that occurs when people realize they are not being scanned for utility.

Finally, I find the discipline to stay through the boring part, that awkward, quiet threshold where the rehearsed, polite answers finally run out, because everything beautiful, true, and interesting about a human being lives directly behind it. We just have to activate the courage to let us be seen.

To be honest: I am already that person, but I want more of it, not less.I am the one who asks the stranger at the next table what they are reading. I am the one who, in the middle of a dinner party, will ask someone a question so direct and spontaneous that my partner quietly shifts in his seat, though he would never tell me that. I have always been this way. Curiosity is not something I need to learn. It is something I need to protect, and sharpen, and stop apologizing for.

Because here is what I have noticed: the moments people remember me for are never the moments I was polished or strategic. They are the moments I asked the question no one else would ask, and then stayed quiet long enough to hear the real answer. That is not a social skill. That is a way of being. And I want more of it, not less.

I no longer have any desire to know a hundred people superficially. Instead, I want to know a few people deeply, to ask beautiful questions, and to find the stillness required to stay for the entire answer.

Curiosity is not a personality trait we are born with. It is a deliberate, daily decision about exactly where our 10 bits of consciousness go, and the people standing directly in front of us, especially the ones we love the most, deserve all ten. Even when they are grown. Especially when they are grown, and could so easily slip out of reach if I am not paying attention.

Let me tell you up front what this piece is about, so you can decide if it is worth your 10 bits per second.

I am going to make one argument: that the thing which actually makes people feel safe at work and in life is not money, not perks, not finacial incentives. It is information. Clarity. Knowing what is happening and why. I am going to show you a study from LMU University Munich that proves this in an organizational setting, explain the neuroscience of why it works, and tell you why it frustrates me that so few leaders act on it. And I am going to be honest about the fact that I did not learn this from research. I led this way for 15 years first, and thought (arrogantly) it was the unique Adela-Leadership-Style. Nope!

So let’s dive into it. Lately, almost everywhere I look, I see the same strain: People moving fast. People being umpatient with themselves and with everybody else. People with more tools and more information than any generation before them, and somehow less ground beneath their feet.

For 15 years, across six languages and several European markets, I led teams through change. Mergers. Rapid scaling. The kind of transformation where everything familiar dissolves and people do not know what tomorrow looks like. And I always did one thing instinctively, long before I could have told you why it worked.

I told people the truth. Clearly. Repeatedly. Even when the truth was incomplete. Even when it was uncomfortable. Even when it put me at risk.

Let me give you one example, because abstractions are cheap and this one cost me something.

In my third week as a newly appointed Sales Director, I knew I had to tell a sixty-year-old man that he would no longer be part of the team. Everyone advised me the same thing: stay silent, let HR handle it, do not get personally involved. It was the safe move. It was the standard move.

I could not do it. Maybe it was ego, maybe I wanted to be better than the playbook. Finally I simply could not stand the idea of letting a man learn his fate through a process instead of a person. I didn’t want to start in my new Position like that, even though I understood (the politics) why he was still there when I arrived….So I sat down with him and I told him myself.

Ten minutes into that conversation, he had tears in his eyes. And so did I. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. But something happened in that room that no HR process could have produced: he thanked me. And I was thankful too. He found a new position almost immediately. The truth, delivered by a human being who was willing to stay in the discomfort, gave him something to stand on. It was clarity and respect to him. From a human being to a human being.

I want to be clear about what this cost. I was new, I was exposed, and I was saying far more than was politically safe. The years that followed were not gentle. I faced mobbing and disrespect you would not believe. But I held my ground through all of it, because I had already done the hardest thing. I knew it would never be harder than that conversation.

This is what I mean when I say I did not learn clarity from a study or in standard “How to be a better Leader” - Coaching. I learned it in rooms like that one, where telling the truth was the hardest, the most dangerous and the most necessary thing I could do. I learned information and being told what happens next calms people and their nervous system.

Being in the KNOW put people in a calm state and they could carry almost anything if they understood what was happening and why. AS SIMPLE AS THAT.

The study

Three researchers at LMU University - School of Management in Munich (Anke Schulz, Anja Tuschke, and Niko Stampfl) studied what makes employees genuinely commit to major organizational change.

Not just go along with it, but actually believe in it and want it to succeed.

They compared three levers a leader can pull:

1. Information

2. Participation

3. Financial incentives.

The finding was unambiguous. Information was the strongest lever by far. Employees who felt well informed, the why, the what, the how, the when (think about Simon Sinek;), showed the highest commitment to the change. The connection between feeling informed and truly believing in the change was far stronger than for participation, and dramatically stronger than for money.

HERE IT IS: the part that should reorganize how we think about leadership: information is the least resource-intensive of the three tools, and it delivers the biggest impact. AS SIMPLE AS THAT.

Not the expensive incentives. Not the elaborate participation structures. Just honest, clear, repeated explanation. I read this and felt something between relief and frustration. Relief, because it was the language of my whole career and yes I admit I feel good when science supports my doing. But if it is this well established, why does almost no one lead this way?

Why knowing is safety

Here is the part the study points toward but does not spell out and it is where neuroscience makes the whole thing click.

The brain is, above all else, an anticipation machine. Under the surface, all day long, it is predicting what comes next. That is most of what it does. When it can predict, it settles. When it cannot, it burns enormous energy scanning for threat, filling every silence with worst-case stories, bracing against what it cannot see.

And it has almost nothing to work with. The Caltech researchers Zheng and Meister showed that our senses take in around a billion bits of information per second, but our conscious mind processes only about 10 bits per second. 10. (I annot stop repeating this in my writing sorry for those who already read this 2-3 times). We are slow, deliberate, one-thought-at-a-time beings trying to navigate a world of overwhelming input.

So when a person does not know what is happening, in their company, their role, their future, that scarce, precious bandwidth gets eaten alive by anxiety and rumor. The LMU Munich study names this directly: uncertainty and rumors drain attention and energy. The brain cannot rest, because it cannot predict.

But tell someone the truth, clearly, fully, again and again, and you hand the anticipation machine something solid to hold. You lower the threat. You free up those ten bits for something other than fear. Being “in the know,” as the researchers put it, tells a person they are a valued stakeholder and not cannon fodder. It is, in the most literal neurological sense, an act of safety.

This is why a calm, clear leader changes a room. Not by removing the difficulty but by removing the uncertainty about the difficulty. I felt this in rooms years before I had the words for it. It happens in life the same way as far I can tell from living experience. Being in the Know of what and why happens makes me feel more safe.

Why this frustrates me

We have the research now. LMU showed the effect. Caltech showed the mechanism. It is no longer a mystery what steadies human beings and lets them commit to hard change: tell them the truth, clearly and often, and stop draining their attention with noise.

And yet most organizations still reach for the expensive lever instead of the simple one.

They restructure.

They incentivize.

They launch programs with impressive names.

And they skip the one thing that actually works, because it is so quiet it looks like nothing. We underestimate clarity precisely because it is cheap, and we have been trained to believe that what costs more must matter more.

It is not true. It was never true. The most powerful thing a leader can offer costs almost nothing and asks for almost everything: the courage to be clear, the discipline to repeat yourself, and the respect to treat people as though they can handle the truth.

If leaders took studies like this one seriously - genuinely seriously - people would feel more at peace. Not because their problems would disappear, but because their nervous systems would finally have something solid to stand on.

In a time of change this steep - change none of us can fully picture from where we stand - that may be the most important thing we can give one another.

Not more. Not faster. Just the truth, clearly told, so the slow human mind can rest enough to think.

Sources:

Caltech / 10 bits: Zheng, J. & Meister, M. (2024). The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why Do We Live at 10 Bits/s? Neuron. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.11.008

LMU München / Information & Change Commitment: Schulz, A., Tuschke, A. & Stampfl, N. Being “In the Know”: The Effectiveness of Organizational Instruments in Enhancing Employees’ Attention and Affective Commitment to Major Change. LMU Munich School of Management.

This happened two days ago, on May 26, in the Romanian Senate.

A girl named Ilinca, 11 years old, fifth grade, stood up at a debate on children’s mental health and spoke directly to the Minister of Education, Mihai Dimian.

She talked about exhaustion. About being judged constantly, by teachers, by classmates, by parents. About being loaded with tests and homework and 27 books to read, and understanding none of them. About being told she is zero. About schools banning phones while never teaching children how to use them. About being asked to exercise while being given nowhere to do it. About arriving at school with, as she put it, her social batteries completely drained.

She ended in tears. The room applauded.

And the Minister of Education was looking at his phone.

Not once. Repeatedly. Throughout her speech. To the point where the moderator of the debate had to draw his attention back to the room.

The video went viral. Romania split into camps. Outrage. Defense. The minister later explained he had been awake since two in the morning, that urgent messages about PNRR deadlines had accumulated, that it had been a very long day.

I am not here to judge him. I am here to say what this moment teaches about leadership, because it teaches more than any leadership seminar I have ever attended.

What happened in that room

A child asked to be seen. An adult was not present.

That is the entire story. Everything else, the politics, the justifications, the public debate, is noise around this single, quiet fact.

She was not asking for a policy change. She was not delivering a political speech. She was telling a room full of adults what it feels like to be a child in their system. And the person in charge of the system could not put his phone down.

This is not about one minister. This is about us. All of us. Every leader, every parent, every person who has ever been physically present and emotionally absent when someone needed to be heard.

The phone is not the problem

It would be easy to make this about phones. About screens. About banning devices or limiting screen time. Romania is already deep in that debate, and it is an important one.

But the phone is not the problem. The phone is the symptom. The problem is that we have built systems, in education, in organizations, in families, where the people in charge are too exhausted, too overloaded, too pulled in too many directions to do the one thing leadership actually requires:

Be present!! Actually be there with your attention, your feeling, your willingness to be moved by what is in front of you.

The minister was tired. I believe him. He had been awake since two in the morning. He had urgent messages. He was under pressure. All of this is probably true. And none of it matters. Because an eleven-year-old girl was standing in front of him, in tears, telling him the truth about his system and he missed it.

Leadership is not about the moments when you are rested and prepared. It is about the moments when you are exhausted and the person in front of you still needs you to be there. Those are the moments that define what kind of leader you actually are.

What we can learn instead of criticize

The easiest response to this moment is outrage. The internet is already full of it. And outrage, while understandable, teaches nothing. It only produces more outrage.

What interests me is the learning.

Here is what Ilinca demonstrated, at eleven years old, without any leadership training, without any title, without any power: she stood in a room full of authority figures and told the truth about what she was experiencing. She was SPECIFIC. She was CLEAR. She was emotional in a way that was not performed. She was brave in the quietest possible way.

That is leadership.

And here is what the minister demonstrated, without meaning to: that even people with good intentions, even people who care about the system they run, even people who probably went into education because they believe in it, even those people can fail at the most basic thing leadership asks of them. Not because they are bad. Because they are human. Because they are tired. Because the phone is always there, offering an escape from the discomfort of being fully present.

The question is not whether the minister is a good or bad person. The question is whether he, and whether we, can look at this moment honestly and let it change something.

Being a role model is not a decision you make once

This week, my son Lucas told me I am his role model. He was going through a difficult time and had me as a role model? I felt responsibility and accountability at the same time and it reminded me that it never ends. You do not stop being a role model when your children grow up. You do not get to retire from it. They are still watching. They are still learning from how you carry yourself especially when things are hard and you are tired.

Being a role model is a decision you make in every single moment. In the moment when you are tired and the child is still talking. In the moment when the phone vibrates and the person across from you has tears in their eyes. In the moment when nobody would notice if you checked out except that someone always notices. Children always notice. And adult children notice too.

Ilinca noticed. The whole country noticed. And the minister learned, in the most public way possible, that leadership is not what you say about children’s mental health. It is what you do when a child is standing in front of you, telling you her truth.

What I wish for Ilinca

I wish her courage stays intact. I wish the system she challenged does not punish her for challenging it. I wish she does not learn, from this experience, that speaking truth to power leads nowhere.

And I wish the adults around her take this not as a scandal to argue about for a news cycle, but as a mirror!!

We are all the minister sometimes. We are all tired. We all reach for the phone when the moment asks us to stay. The difference between leadership and its absence is not perfection. It is the willingness to catch yourself, put the phone down, look up, and be there.

That is it. That is the whole lesson.

An eleven-year-old girl taught it to an entire country in under three minutes.

What I started watching

I began paying attention to this a long time ago: not as research. As instinct. I would walk into a room and notice who I was drawn to and it was almost never the person speaking the most.

It was the person who listened in a way that made you feel heard before you had finished your sentence. The person who asked one question that reorganized the entire conversation. The person who disagreed without sharpening their voice.

I started writing these observations down. Not as a list of rules. As a record of something I kept seeing confirmed.

Here is what I noticed people are actually attracted to, not what they say they are attracted to, but what I watched them move toward, again and again, in rooms and conversations and relationships:

Stillness under pressure. Not the frozen kind. The kind that comes from someone who has already decided who they are. When everything around them accelerates, they do not. They stay at the same tempo. And people gravitate toward that tempo because it feels like ground.

The person who remembers what you said. Not in a calculated way. Genuinely. They heard you three weeks ago and they bring it back today, naturally, because they were actually paying attention. This is rarer than almost any credential. And it is more attractive than almost any achievement.

Disagreement without theatre. The person who says I see it differently and then explains why, calmly, without needing you to immediately give up. Who can change their mind in front of you without losing face because their identity was never dependent on being right.

Presence without agenda. The person who is simply there, not managing the impression they are making, not calculating the next move, not performing interest. Just there. Attentive. Available. This is almost shockingly rare. And when you encounter it, you remember it for years.

None of these are loud. None of them announce themselves. None of them require a stage.

How to live toward it

Read slowly. Not to finish. To encounter something that changes the shape of what you already think.

Discuss with people who see the world differently, without needing to convert them. The goal is not agreement. The goal is to understand how another mind works, and to let that do something to yours.

When you have nothing helpful to say, say nothing. This sounds simple. It is one of the rarest and most powerful practices I know. The person who speaks only when they have something real to offer becomes, over time, the person whose words the room waits for.

Be patient with confusion. Confusion is not failure. It is the beginning of real thinking the moment just before clarity, which only arrives if you do not reach for a premature answer.

Notice what gives you peace. Not pleasure, peace. They are different, and the difference matters more than most things. Pleasure is loud and temporary. Peace is quiet and it compounds. It makes you more intelligent, not less. It clears the noise between you and what you are actually trying to think.

And when you find it bring it into the room with you. Not by talking about it. By being it.

Peace of mind is the condition, not the reward

We have been taught that peace comes after. After the achievement, after the resolution, after the list is done. It does not. Peace is the condition under which intelligence actually functions. Not the reward for having been intelligent enough.

When you are genuinely at peace with yourself, ideas arrive differently. Not faster necessarily. Cleaner. With less noise around them. You can hear what is actually there rather than what your anxiety is projecting onto the situation.

And here is what changes everything: peace of mind is contagious.

Not in a sentimental way. In a neurological way. A calm presence in a room shifts the room. A leader who is not performing safety but actually inhabiting it creates the condition for everyone around them to think more clearly. A parent who is genuinely at rest communicates something to a child that no words could reach.

We live in a time addicted to activation. To urgency. To the performance of always being sharp, always ahead, always already optimized. Into that noise, the most radical thing you can offer is stillness. Not passivity. Stillness, the kind that comes from knowing who you are and what you actually think.

Zeitgeist is a German word for the spirit of a time. I think the quiet spirit underneath all our noise right now is a hunger for exactly this. Not more information. Not more performance. More peace. More rooms where someone walked in already at rest, and made it easier for everyone else to breathe and think.

Intelligence is not a performance

There is a quote attributed to Stephen Hawking, one of the most widely shared things he supposedly said, that intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. Whether or not the words were precisely his, the idea is worth sitting with. Because it strips intelligence of everything decorative. No performance. No credential. Just the capacity to meet what is actually happening and respond to it honestly.

This is very far from how intelligence has been packaged and sold. For a long time, intelligence meant belonging to the right institutions. Speaking in the right register. Having the right kind of confidence in the right kind of room. It was access dressed as ability. And many people were quietly taught that intelligence was not something they possessed.

That was never true. I think , it was always a story about power.

What intelligence actually is

Curiosity without aggression. The desire to understand, not to win, but to genuinely grasp how something works, how someone thinks, why the world is the way it is and not some other way.

Patience. The willingness to stay with a question long enough for it to open, rather than reaching for the first available answer because the silence is uncomfortable.

Modesty. Not performed. The kind that comes from having learned enough to know how much you do not know. The most intelligent people I have met were never the ones who filled the room with their certainty. They were the ones who asked the question no one else had thought to ask.

Helpfulness. If you have something useful to offer, offer it. If you do not, offer nothing. Silence from a place of awareness is more intelligent than noise from a place of habit.

And the capacity to adapt, not just to circumstances, but to people. To what is actually in front of you, rather than what you expected to find.

What intelligence is not

It is not speed. The fastest answer is rarely the truest one.

It is not volume. The person who speaks most is not the person who thinks most.

It is not certainty. Certainty performed too loudly is almost always protecting something an ego, a position, a fear of being wrong in public.

It is not credentials. I have met people with extraordinary formal education who could not sit with uncertainty for thirty seconds. And I have met people with no formal education at all who carried a quality of attention, of genuine curiosity, of patient observation, that I would call the most intelligent thing I have encountered in my life.

Intelligence is not something you perform in order to attract something. It is something you inhabit in order to live well. And the condition for inhabiting it is not achievement. It is not optimization. It is peace.

Motivation brings us into motion. Curiosity helps us keep going. And peace? Peace is what makes the motion worth something.

Gartner senior director analyst Alex Coqueiro predicts that by 2028, 70% percent of enterprises will be forced to abandon agentic AI solutions from forward-deployed-engineer-led engagements because of high vendor costs and lack of internal skills to evolve them independently.¹

Let that land.

70%. Forced to abandon. Not because the technology failed. Because the organization never learned to own it.

“Flat FDE effort across successive deployments is the signal that an engagement has produced a dependency, not a capability. When effort does not decrease as use cases mature, the organization is paying consulting rates for operations it should own.”

This is not about AI. This is about the oldest failure mode in organizational life. And it applies to every leader, in every domain, who has ever confused buying expertise with building it.

The pattern we already know

The pattern is always the same. A company faces a challenge it does not have the internal capability to solve. An external provider arrives with expertise, frameworks, and a team of smart people. They solve the problem. The company feels relieved. The engagement extends. Then extends again. And at some point someone asks: Can we do this ourselves now?

The answer, often, is no. Not because the challenge has become harder. Because the organization has outsourced knowledge building.

Gartner is now predicting that this pattern, which has played out in IT outsourcing and in management consulting is about to repeat at unprecedented scale in the domain of agentic AI. Over 40% percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value, or inadequate risk controls.² And 70% percent of enterprises will be forced to abandon AI solutions from vendor-led engagements because they never developed the internal capability to run them.¹

This is not a technology prediction. This is a leadership prediction. And it has implications far beyond AI.

Dependency is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem.

The Gartner warning is ultimately about a failure of organizational self-knowledge. It is about leaders who do not ask the second question.

The first question - Can this technology help us? - is easy. The answer is almost always yes. AI can optimize supply chains, predict customer behavior, automate document processing, and run financial crime detection at a scale no human team can match.

The second question is harder: Are we building the capacity to own this, or are we renting someone else’s?

This is the question that separates organizations that grow from organizations that become dependent. And it is the question that most leaders skip - not because they are incapable of asking it, but because the immediate pressure to deliver results makes the renting model irresistibly attractive.

The vendor shows up. The forward-deployed engineers embed themselves. The first use case works beautifully. The board is impressed. Nobody asks whether the internal team is learning or just watching.

And then the invoice arrives. And the second invoice. And the third. And the organization realizes it has purchased a solution it cannot operate, modify, or extend without calling the people who built it.

This is the dependency trap. And it is not new.

What this has to do with leadership

Here is where I want to connect this to something deeper. Because the dependency trap is not only an enterprise strategy problem. It is a mirror for how many leaders relate to expertise in general.

I have watched C-level leaders outsource their thinking to consultants for twenty years. Not just their AI strategy. Their organizational design. Their talent strategy. Their cultural integration plan during a merger. Their communication strategy during a restructuring.

Each of these outsourcing decisions follows the same logic: We do not have the internal expertise. Bring in someone who does. And each one carries the same risk: that the engagement produces a deliverable, not a capability.

The diagnostic sentence from the Gartner analysis applies everywhere:

When effort does not decrease as engagements mature, the organization is paying for dependency, not development.

This is true for AI vendors. It is equally true for management consultants, executive coaches, and every other external advisor. Including, people like me.

The C-Suite Co-Pilot principle: make yourself unnecessary

This is why the first principle of my advisory work is: I make myself unnecessary.

A six-month engagement. Embedded. In your corner. But with a non-negotiable design principle: by month six, the leader must be able to do without me. The frameworks must be theirs. The behavioral codes must be internalized. The capacity to read the room, to regulate the team, to navigate uncertainty, these must live inside the leader, not inside an external advisor’s retainer.

The biological argument for building, not buying

There is a biological dimension to this that matters.

The human brain learns through doing. Not through watching. Not through receiving a framework. Through the messy, uncomfortable, often failing process of trying something, reading the feedback, adjusting, and trying again. This is how neural pathways form. This is how competence becomes embodied. Not intellectual but somatic, stored in the body, available under pressure without conscious effort.

When a leader outsources a capability, their brain does not develop the pathways. When a vendor solves the problem, the organization’s collective intelligence does not grow. The knowledge remains external. Accessible only through a contract and an invoice.

The Zheng and Meister paper on cognitive bottlenecks tells us that humans process about ten bits per second.³ But those ten bits are not just consumed. They are the mechanism through which we learn, adapt, and develop. Every decision a leader makes personally, even badly, strengthens the neural architecture for the next decision. Every decision outsourced is a missed repetition.

This is not an argument against external expertise. It is an argument for a fundamentally different relationship with it. One in which the external expert’s success is measured not by the quality of the solution they deliver, but by the speed at which the internal team stops needing them.

The coming crisis and the opportunity

Gartner is predicting that 70% percent of enterprises will be forced to abandon their agentic AI solutions by 2028.¹ Over 40% percent of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027.² Gartner estimates only about 130 of the thousands of agentic AI vendors offer genuine capabilities, with most engaging in “agent washing” - rebranding existing chatbots and RPA tools.²

This is going to be the next big enterprise crisis. And it will land directly in the territory of leadership, not technology.

Because the organizations that will survive this wave are not the ones with the best AI vendors. They are the ones whose leaders had the foresight and the discipline to build internal capability from the beginning. Who asked, at every quarterly review: Is our dependence on this vendor going up or down?

And the leaders who navigate this best will be the ones who understand something that no Gartner report will ever say explicitly:

The temptation to outsource is not just an economic calculation. It is a psychological one. It is the temptation to avoid the discomfort of not knowing. The temptation to let someone else carry the cognitive and emotional load of learning something new.

Who do we become through the act of leading?

That question again. Because it is always the same question.

Do we become leaders who build capability, in ourselves, in our teams, in our organizations? Or do we become leaders who buy it, rent it, and then discover, too late, that we cannot operate without it?

The dependency trap is not a vendor problem. It is a leadership problem. And the solution is not better contracts. It is better leaders.

Leaders who are willing to learn. Willing to be uncomfortable. Willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of building what cannot be bought.

Ten bits per second. That is all we get. The question is what we do with them.

Sources

¹ Coqueiro, A. (2026). Cited in: CIO Magazine, “Anthropic’s Financial Agents Expose Forward-Deployed Engineers as New AI Limiting Factor,” May 2026. Gartner prediction: by 2028, 70% of enterprises will be forced to abandon agentic AI solutions from FDE-led engagements due to high vendor costs and lack of internal skills to evolve them independently.

² Gartner, Inc. (2025). “Gartner Predicts Over 40% of Agentic AI Projects Will Be Canceled by End of 2027.” Press release, June 25, 2025. Gartner estimates only about 130 of thousands of agentic AI vendors offer genuine agentic capabilities. Also cited in: HPCwire/BigDATAwire, April 2026.

³ Zheng, J. & Meister, M. (2024). “The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why Do We Live at 10 Bits/s?” arXiv:2408.10234v2 [q-bio.NC]. California Institute of Technology, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering.

Here is another: 70%-90% of mergers fail to deliver the value that justified the deal. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the financial model was flawed. Because the integration EXECUTION collapsed and the majority of that collapse traces to the first ninety to one hundred days after close.² ³

The value does not leak slowly. In the first week, your best people are already updating their LinkedIn profiles. In the first month, your customers are taking calls from your competitors. By day 90, the informal networks that made both organizations actually work have been severed, and nobody has built new ones to replace them.

Everyone knows this. The data has been available for decades. KPMG reports that 83% of deals fail to boost shareholder returns, with 57.2% actively destroying shareholder value.⁴ Bain & Company finds that only about 30% of acquirers achieve their synergy targets.³ AND STILL, the integration playbooks begin with synergy trackers and IT migration timelines, not with the question that actually determines whether the deal succeeds or fails:

What is happening inside the people who are supposed to make this work?

The biology of the first 90 days

When a merger is announced, every person in both organizations enters a state of biological alert. This is not a metaphor. Cortisol rises. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and the ability to trust a stranger loses bandwidth.

A remarkable paper from Caltech, The Unbearable Slowness of Being, established that human beings process information at a maximum throughput of approximately 10 bits per second, while our sensory systems absorb roughly one billion bits per second from the environment.⁵ The ratio is 100 million to 1. We are, at our biological core, extraordinary filtering machines. We sift a billion inputs down to the ten that matter.

Under stress, that filter narrows further. Chronic cortisol elevation impairs working memory, reduces cognitive flexibility, and contracts the field of attention.⁶ In practical terms, a stressed leader, and in a merger, every leader is stressed, literally thinks less well. Their ability to select the right ten bits from the billion deteriorates precisely when the quality of that selection matters most.

In this state, humans default to survival behavior. They protect territory. They hoard information. They form tighter bonds with their in-group and regard the other side with suspicion. They become worse at exactly the things the integration demands: collaboration, flexibility, trust, and the willingness to rethink how they work.

This is not resistance. This is physiology. And it begins on Day One.

The simplest finding nobody acts on

There is a study from LMU Munich’s School of Management that should be required reading for every integration leader. Schulz, Tuschke, and Stampfl studied 306 employees at a leading German multinational corporation that had recently implemented a major change program. They tested three organizational instruments for building employee commitment: providing information about the change, offering participation in its implementation, and creating financial incentives tied to its outcome.⁷

The finding is unambiguous. All three instruments had a positive effect. But information - simply keeping employees informed - had by far the greatest impact on affective commitment to change. For every 1 point increase in perceived information on a 5 point scale, employee commitment increased by 0.694 points. The correlation between feeling informed and affective commitment was r=0.74 — stronger than participation (r=0.53) and dramatically stronger than financial incentives (r=0.17).⁷

And here is the part that should stop every executive in their tracks: information was also the least resource-intensive instrument. It required primarily management’s time and willingness to communicate. Not budgets. Not restructured incentive programs. Not elaborate participation frameworks. Just: tell people what is happening.

The researchers titled their paper Being “In the Know”, because that is what it comes down to. Employees whose perception was that they had been sufficiently informed showed the highest commitment to change. Not employees who were paid more. Not employees who were given a seat at the table. Employees who were told what was going on.

The study found this effect held across all hierarchical levels, department heads, team leads, and waged staff all responded positively and significantly to information. In contrast, participation enhanced commitment only among department heads, and financial incentives showed no significant effect for team leads at all.⁷

This is a biological finding dressed in organizational clothing. The human nervous system is a prediction machine. It constantly models the near future. When it can predict cortisol stays manageable. The prefrontal cortex stays online. The person can think, collaborate, and adapt.

When information is withheld, or worse, when people sense that information exists but is not being shared, the prediction system fails. Uncertainty spikes. The threat response activates. And every subsequent communication from leadership is filtered through suspicion rather than trust.

As the LMU researchers put it: keeping employees “in the know” builds feelings of inclusion, trust, and belonging. It signals that the employees are valued. And it counteracts the rumors and anxiety that a major change inevitably generates rumors that, left unchecked, waste precisely the cognitive resources that are scarcest during integration.⁷

I have seen this in every organization I have worked in over 15 years. The merger is announced. Leadership goes silent for weeks while the integration plan is finalized behind closed doors. By the time the first town hall happens, the damage is done. Not because the plan was bad. Because the silence was interpreted correctly, biologically as danger.

McKinsey’s global transformation survey confirms the same pattern at scale: the largest share of respondents said that if they could do their transformation again, they would spend more time communicating about the change. Communication-related actions were consistently identified as both the most common and the most effective engagement technique: ahead of financial incentives, structural changes, or leadership alignment programs.⁸

The insight is almost embarrassingly simple. People want to know what is happening. They want updates. They want to be treated as adults who can handle complexity, not as risks to be managed through carefully staged messaging.

And yet, in company after company, merger after merger, the information is held back. Because leadership is afraid that sharing uncertainty will create panic. The opposite is true. The LMU data proves it: sharing uncertainty, honestly, regularly, from the direct leader, is the single most effective commitment-building strategy available to an integration leader. Not the most expensive. Not the most complex. The most effective.

What the playbook gets wrong

The standard integration playbook is designed to answer the question: How do we combine these two organizations as efficiently as possible?

It is the wrong question.

The right question is: How do we create the conditions in which two groups of frightened human beings can begin to trust each other enough to do their best work together?

These are fundamentally different design briefs. The first one produces workstreams, milestones, and governance frameworks. The second one produces something harder to measure and infinitely more valuable: a functioning human group.

Research from EY confirms that navigating cultural alignment is the top people challenge when executing M&A, and that leaders must put humans at the center of transactions to unlock greater performance. Multiple studies show that 70-90% of M&As fail or underperform and that human-centered integration, where culture is treated as a key asset, can more than triple the success rate.⁹ ¹⁰

The question nobody is asking

There is a deeper issue here. One that goes beyond process optimization and even beyond biology.

Every merger asks the people involved to become someone different. The sales director who built her career in one culture must now lead in a new one. The CTO who designed systems for one organization must now think for a combined entity twice the size. The CEO who was a founder must now be an integrator.

This is not a skills challenge. It is an identity challenge. Adam Grant argues in Think Again that rethinking is cognitively harder than thinking, that we cling to our existing mental models because revising them threatens our sense of who we are.¹¹ A merger forces rethinking at the deepest level. Not just what do I do? but who am I in this new reality?

Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset established that the belief in one’s own capacity to develop is a stronger predictor of performance than innate talent.¹² But the growth mindset is not just cognitive. It is somatic. A leader whose nervous system is locked in chronic stress cannot grow. The body must be in a state that permits learning. Growth mindset requires a growth-ready body.

In a merger, this baseline safety is destroyed overnight. Every relationship is uncertain. Every hierarchy is in question. Every neural threat detector is firing. The leader who understands this - biologically, not just intuitively - can intervene at the right level.

The leaders who navigate this well are not the ones with the best strategy decks. They are the ones willing to ask themselves the hardest question leadership ever poses:

Who do I need to become to lead through this?

Not: What do I need to know? Not: What should I do? But: Who must I become?

What the first 90 days actually require

If I could redesign the first ninety days of every post-merger integration, I would start with three commitments that appear in no standard playbook.

The first commitment is biological honesty. Acknowledge, out loud, to the combined leadership team, that everyone in the room is operating under elevated stress, that this stress is affecting their judgment, and that the most important thing they can do in the first weeks is not to make decisions but to create enough psychological safety for good decisions to become possible.

The second commitment is relentless information flow. Not town halls. Not quarterly updates. Daily. From the direct leader. In human language. Including what is uncertain. Including what leadership does not yet know. The LMU research and the McKinsey global transformation survey both confirm the same finding: being informed is the number one thing people need during organizational change.⁷ ⁸ It is also the cheapest, simplest, and most consistently neglected intervention in post-merger integration.

The third commitment is the one that makes this work transformational rather than transactional. It is the commitment to treat the integration not as a project to be completed but as a process of becoming. The merger is not something that happens to you. It is something that changes you. And the leader’s willingness to be changed - to grow, to shed old identities, to become someone they have not been before - is the single strongest predictor of whether the people around them will do the same.

When the leader grows, the organization can grow. When the leader clings, the organization fractures. The forty-seven percent who leave in the first year are not leaving the new company. They are leaving a leader who was not willing to become.

De montis ad mentis

My grandfather was a shepherd in the mountains of Transylvania. He never managed a merger. He never read a synergy tracker. But he understood something about leading a living system that most executives have forgotten.

He knew that when you move a flock to new grazing land, you do not push them. You lead them. And you lead them not by knowing the destination better than they do, but by being steady enough that they are willing to follow you into unfamiliar territory.

Steadiness. Presence. The willingness to go first into uncertainty and absorb the anxiety of the group so that the group can move.

This is what the first ninety days require. Not a better process. A better leader. One who understands that the value does not leak through the spreadsheet. It leaks through the nervous system. And the only way to stop the leak is to be the kind of human being that other human beings feel safe enough to follow.

Who do we become through the act of leading?

This is not a philosophical question. It is a 90 days question. And the answer determines everything.

Sources

¹ EY, “How a New Talent Mindset Can Solve the Post-Merger Integration Puzzle,” 2023. The 47%/75% employee departure figures originate from EY’s longitudinal M&A workforce research. Also cited in: Directors & Boards, “Protecting Value After the Deal,” April 2026.

² Ferdinand Partners, “Post Acquisition Integration Plan: How to Avoid Value Destruction in the First 100 Days,” April 2026. Citing Harvard Business Review, KPMG, and Bain & Company data on M&A failure rates.

³ Bain & Company, Post-Merger Integration Practice, 2025. Based on analysis of 2,200+ prior integrations. Approximately 30% of acquirers achieve their synergy targets.

⁴ KPMG Global M&A Integration Survey. The 83% failure rate and 57.2% shareholder value destruction figure are widely cited in the PMI literature, including in TransJovan Capital’s 2026 post-merger integration statistics compilation.

⁵ Zheng, J. & Meister, M. (2024). “The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why Do We Live at 10 Bits/s?” arXiv:2408.10234v2 [q-bio.NC]. California Institute of Technology, Division of Biology and Biological Engineering.

⁶ Lupien, S.J., Maheu, F., Tu, M., Fiocco, A., & Schramek, T.E. (2007). “The effects of stress and stress hormones on human cognition: Implications for the field of brain and cognition.” Brain and Cognition, 65(3), 209–237. See also: Arnsten, A.F.T. (2009). “Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.

⁷ Schulz, A., Tuschke, A., & Stampfl, N. (forthcoming). “Being ‘In the Know’: The Effectiveness of Organizational Instruments in Enhancing Employees’ Attention and Affective Commitment to Major Change.” Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research (SBUR). LMU Munich School of Management. Based on a 2019 survey of 306 employees at a leading German multinational corporation. SSRN preprint available.

⁸ McKinsey & Company, “The Science Behind Successful Organizational Transformations,” 2021. Global survey finding that communication about the change was the most frequently cited factor respondents would increase if repeating a transformation.

⁹ EY, “How Culture Can Unlock M&A Performance,” November 2025. Reports that 70–90% of M&As fail or underperform, identifying cultural alignment as the top people challenge.

¹⁰ Loeb Leadership, “Culture Clash in M&A: How to Set Culture Integration Up for Success,” 2025. Citing FranklinCovey research that up to 30% of M&A value loss stems from unresolved cultural friction, and that human-centered integration can more than triple success rates.

¹¹ Grant, A. (2021). Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking/Penguin Random House.

¹² Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

¹³ Coan, J.A. & Sbarra, D.A. (2015). “Social Baseline Theory: The Social Regulation of Human Body and Brain.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9(2), 87–104.

We speak about leadership as if it begins the day someone gives us a title.

It doesn’t.

Leadership begins in the first system we ever belonged to. The family. The place where each person either received their rightful place, or did not. The place where someone was seen, or overlooked.

Long before we learn to manage a team, we have already learned what it means to hold a system together.

For years I thought leadership was about process. Strategy. Structure. Decisions made cleanly, with clarity, in rooms where PowerPoint is(was) King.

I was wrong.

Leadership is about feeling.

Not the sentimental kind. Not the performative kind that corporate culture has co-opted and drained of meaning. The other kind. The kind that costs something. The kind that requires you to stay present with what is uncomfortable in yourself, and in the people you lead, and in the system you are part of.

A leader who cannot feel cannot LEAD. They can manage. They can direct. They can move people across a chessboard of projects and quarters. But they cannot lead, because leadership asks for something that process cannot deliver: contact with what is actually happening, including the parts no one is saying.

This is what the family system teaches first. Long before the leadership seminar.

There are things you inherit that you do not know you inherited.

A tone of voice. A posture in conflict. A reflex to carry more than is yours. A silence where a name should be. The feeling, without language, that you are responsible for something you did not cause.

Most leaders are moved by forces they have never examined. The best leaders, the ones who actually change something in the people around them, have done the slow, private work of looking at what moves them. Not to eliminate it. You cannot eliminate it. To see it. To name it. To stop being operated by it.

This is not therapy. This is leadership infrastructure.

The family is the first place you learn that every system has a place for every person. The child who was there. The child who was not. The parent who gave. The parent who could not. The ones who came before, whose lives shaped the ground you were born on. Everyone has a place. When a place is denied, the system reorganizes around the absence and someone, always, takes on the shape of what is missing.

Leadership in organizations works the same way. Every company has its absences. The person who left badly. The decision that was never named. The grief after a layoff that no one addressed. The founder who is gone but whose shadow still shapes the room. When these are unacknowledged, the whole system reorganizes around what is not being said. Culture goes strange. People feel it without being able to name it.

The leader’s first job is to notice.

The leader’s second job is to have the courage to feel what they notice.

The leader’s third job is to hold the system steady while what was hidden becomes visible, because when it does, people get scared, and the temptation is always to push it back down.

This is not taught in any business school I know of.

I have led teams for years. In six languages. Across European markets. At the top of organizations. And I will tell you plainly: the leadership that changed anything for anyone was never the leadership that came from strategy documents. It was the leadership that came from staying present with my own feeling, with the feelings in the room, with the unspoken things that everyone could sense and no one wanted to touch.

That kind of leadership requires courage. Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. The kind that makes you tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.

It requires that you know yourself. That you know what you inherited. That you know what you have been covering up for the system that raised you, and that you are ready, slowly, without drama, to set some of it down.

The leaders who keep growing are the ones who stay willing to be surprised. To be curious about the things around them. To discover at forty, or fifty, or sixty, something about themselves that reorganizes their whole understanding of why they do what they do.

This is not weakness. This is the bravest thing a leader can do.

Leadership is not a role you take on. It is a relationship you have with what is real in yourself, in the system you are part of, in the people who depend on you.

It begins in the family, whether you want it to or not. Whether you remember it or not. Whether anyone ever named it for you or not.

It begins in the feeling of knowing something before you have words for it. In the sense that something is missing without being able to say what. In the courage to stay with that sense long enough for it to become clear.

Everything else, the frameworks, the methodologies, the strategy, is downstream of that first, quiet act:

I see and feel this. I will not look away.

This is where leadership begins.

For hours I could not stop reading. Interview after interview, clip after clip. I kept going back, compelled by something I could not immediately name. Then I understood it. Relief. The relief of discovering that people like Lucescu exist. Quietly, without theater, without the performance of greatness. Just a man who watched basketball to learn about football training. Who studied swimming coaches to understand how the body moves under pressure. Who called this, simply, curiosity, and science would call it interdisciplinary thinking. He never called it anything. He just did it.

The Unconventional Builder

At Shakhtar Donetsk, Lucescu built something that had no precedent: a squad of young Brazilian players, in industrial eastern Ukraine, competing at the highest level of European football. Not one experiment. Twelve years of it. A consistent, deepening commitment to the idea that difference, cultural, linguistic, temperamental, is not a problem to be managed but the actual raw material of collective intelligence.

When people do not share assumptions, they have to communicate. When habit is unavailable, everyone has to think. When no one in the room is the default authority on how things are done, something generative becomes possible. Lucescu did not build teams despite their heterogeneity. He built teams through it, deliberately, patiently, over years.

Then the war came. Shakhtar lost their home city of Donetsk to conflict, became a displaced club, played their European matches as people without a place to return to. And they held together. Not because the strategy was good. Because what Lucescu had built between those people was not dependent on stable conditions. Relationship adapts. Collective identity, when it has been genuinely constructed, travels.

This is what breaks conventional teams under pressure: they were never really teams. They were individuals organized around a plan. When the plan fails, and it always fails eventually, there is nothing underneath. What Lucescu built had something underneath.

My First True Lessons In Leadership. What Six-Year-Olds Taught Me

For two years I Football - trained a group of children. They were six, seven years old. Small humans with complete sincerity and absolutely no interest in performing for an adult’s agenda.

You cannot lead a six-year-old the way most leadership frameworks suggest leading anyone. You cannot appeal to long-term vision. You cannot manage their motivation. You have only what is happening right now: this child, this mood, this specific morning, whatever they carried in from home.

What worked, and I discovered this by failing at everything else first, was genuine attention, playfulness, and PRAISE specific enough to be real. Not good job, but I saw exactly what you just did. Not performance management but actual seeing.

One thing I learned to do: when a child needed to learn a new skill, I would not teach him directly. I would explain it to another child who already knew it, making sure the first child was close enough to hear. Within days, I would see him practicing alone, quietly, on his own time. He had absorbed it not as instruction but as something he had chosen. The learning was his!

Another thing: I would say to a child, with complete sincerity, by next week you will be one of the quickest on this team. And he would be. Not because of the words. Because genuine foresight, when a child feels it is real, becomes something he reaches toward. He does not wait to be pushed. He pulls himself.

I carried this later into my work with adults. Patrick, a young man on my team, impatient for a leadership role, pushing before he was ready. I said to him: wait one more year. Then you will not just be ready, you will be two, three steps ahead of where you would have been. He waited. He surpassed. When older colleagues would tell me: Patrick needs more “experience” in order to be good enough, I kept building his confidence: your are good enough!

The method does not change. The scale does. What changes is how much courage it requires to offer genuine foresight to someone who is not yet who they are becoming. And to mean it.

The Schüler-Principle

Lucescu said that every young man he trained inspired him. Not that he inspired them. That they inspired him.

This is either something coaches say, or it is the most important insight in the whole of leadership development.

With Lucescu, it was true. You can tell because fifty years of work showed it. A man who stopped learning does not keep reinventing at eighty. Does not watch other sports to find new methods. Does not walk onto a training pitch with a national team when his heart is failing, because there is still something he wants to understand.

He was a Schüler. A learner. Not as a brand. As an orientation. Lived, consistent, turned fully toward the people in front of him.

My children taught me the same thing from the other direction. The sessions where I arrived as the teacher, with a plan, with a structure, with clear goals, were the sessions that collapsed the moment reality did not match my design. One child having a hard morning. Energy in the room different from what I expected. Something interesting happening that was not on my agenda. If I insisted on the plan, I lost the group.

The sessions where I arrived as a learner, genuinely curious about what this particular group, on this particular day, needed, were the ones where something real happened. The children surprised me. They surprised each other. The session became something none of us had anticipated.

That in my eyes is not a metaphor for leadership. That is leadership.

Collective Thinking as a Feature You Build

Most organizations treat collective intelligence as an outcome, something you observe when the team performs well. What Lucescu practiced, and what two years with six-year-olds confirmed for me, is that collective intelligence is a feature you build. Through specific, repeated, intentional practices of encounter.

It does not happen because you gather talented people. It does not happen because you communicate a vision clearly. It happens when each person in the group has had the experience of being genuinely met, seen, taken seriously, believed in, by the person holding the space. Once that has happened, something becomes possible between the members of the group that was not possible before. They start to TRUST not just the leader but each other.

They start to think together rather than in parallel.

I watched this happen with six-year-olds. The shift was visible. Once each child felt genuinely seen, in their particular way of moving, thinking, engaging, they began to notice each other. Not just to play alongside each other but with each other. The collective emerged not from the structure I imposed but from the quality of individual attention I offered.

Lucescu built this at scale, across languages and cultures, over decades. Under political upheaval. Under war. The unconventional team compositions, the Brazilian players in Ukraine, the methods borrowed from other sports, these were not eccentricities. They were the consistent expression of a single belief: that the most important thing a leader can do is stay genuinely curious about the people in front of them, and trust that what emerges from that curiosity will exceed anything the leader could have designed in advance.

The Prophet Question

He was criticized most in the country he loved most. Romania, which he put on the European football map in 1984, which he returned to serve again at the end of his life, was often the harshest in its judgment of him.

This is its own chapter. But it points to something worth naming here: leaders who build genuine collectives, who practice radical curiosity, who refuse to perform authority, these leaders are often unsettling to the people around them. Not because they are difficult. Because they require something back. They require you to stop waiting to be led and start thinking TOGETHER.

Not everyone wants that.

The ones who do, they remember you for fifty years. They write about you the week you die, unable to stop reading, relieved to discover you existed.

Thank you Mircea Lucescu for the leadership lessons. Rest In Peace.

The board was assembled. Investors. CEO. The whole management team. And this consultant. I still don’t know what to call him. Management consultant? Moderator? The CEO’s right hand? The one who earned a lot of money playing ringmaster in a room full of smart people who wouldn’t dare say anything against him.

I had just presented my plan as the newly appointed Sales Director for the second business unit. One hour of being asked how I intended to increase revenue in a division that had been run into the ground by the people before me. I showed them the strategy. I defended my approach.

Then I left the room.

The assistant, a great, heartful woman who handled accounting in the company, had ordered cake. In Germany people love cake in the afternoon. It’s just what you do. But she came to me overwhelmed. “Adela, I don’t dare go into that room. All those investors and board members. It’s too much.”

I didn’t think twice. My instinct has always been to close the gap between people. “No problem,” I told her. “I’ll bring it in.”

So there I was, in my high heels, carrying cake back into the boardroom to serve my colleagues. Colleagues, I thought. Just colleagues having a meeting.

At the end of the day, the Consultant came to my office. He was furious. Perhaps I was destroying my career, he said. My reputation. As a High Potential of the company, this kind of behavior was unacceptable.

I was shocked first. I genuinely could not imagine that bringing cake to people could be something of such importance.

I remember grabbing my handbag spontaneously and saying: “Well, if after my presentation and that discussion, you think bringing cake diminished my reputation, my talent, my creativity, my courage to step up, then I pity you. Maybe I should leave this company.”

“Don’t be emotional,” he said.

Of course I was emotional. It was an emotional matter.

The corporate hierarchy was so incredibly fragile that a simple gesture of human hospitality was viewed as a structural threat.

Today, the same corporate world is loud with the language of “New Leadership.” The internet is flooded with posts about psychological safety, bringing your whole self to work. Vulnerability has become a corporate strategy. Authenticity is now a personal brand.

It brings a quiet kind of melancholy to me now to watch it unfold.

I think about all the people who were laughed out of rooms for suggesting that business is basically: a human endeavor. The leaders who were told to be less emotional, less creative, and more machine-like. I wonder how many brilliant ideas died because someone was too afraid to break the unspoken rules of the room. I wonder what we lost in all those years of pretending that business and humanity were separate things.

I was in rooms where talking about creativity got you laughed at. Where suggesting that people need to feel safe to perform well, made you the soft One. The One who doesn’t understand how business actually works. CEOs were really quite clear: What is she talking about? This is software. This is SaaS. This is revenue and margins and stakeholder value. Not a space for creative ideas. Perhaps they did not know better?

WHAT I COULD NOT UNSEE: when you lead teams through crises, through mergers, through transformation, you see very clearly that the human part is what makes everything else work or fail.

We know NOW that strategy is a commodity. Anyone can copy a framework. And as AI rises, we have machines that can generate perfect leadership advice in seconds. AI can write the beautiful post about authentic leadership.

What the machine cannot do is remember what it cost to learn these things when the rooms were still cold. It can’t remember being told you’re destroying your career for being too human. True relationship intelligence isn’t found in a polished LinkedIn post or a beautifully formatted slide deck about corporate empathy.

It is the quiet, unglamorous work of dismantling the circus. It is recognizing that we do not need more loud declarations of vulnerability to prove we are modern leaders. for whom human connection is not A STRATEGY but the baseline.

We need the confidence to stop performing, and simply be human in the silence, too.

The cake-situation happened four years ago. It’s not ancient history. It’s recent.

The same people who told me I was too creative, too spontaneous, too human for serious business are now posting on LinkedIn about authenticity and vulnerability. (It didn't destroy my career, by the way. I was promoted twice after the cake situation. Turns out being human isn't the liability they said it was.)

What I LOVE about these times or current Zeitgeist is this: Strategy is easy. Anyone can copy a good strategy. Technology is a commodity. You just buy it.

But whether people trust each other enough to execute? Whether they feel safe enough to tell you the truth? Whether they’ll bring their actual intelligence to work instead of just performing compliance? That’s what determines if you succeed or fail. And you can’t create that with perfect presentations and polished leadership frameworks or LinkedIN Posts.

Sometimes you create it by bringing cake. By doing the small human thing that says: we’re people here, not just functions in an org chart. By saying: “Sales rock`n roll.” (I did it a year ago and got laughed at for too much enthusiasm.)

This article seems to be a sort of settling accounts kind of writing, and I cannot deny all of it. What I feel is more like disgust mixed with melancholy.

Disgust because it’s performance. Again. A new kind of performance. Authenticity as PERSONAL BRAND. Vulnerability as strategy. The images are still polished even when they’re selling unpolished. Melancholy because I think about all the people who tried to say these things before it was trendy. Who got laughed at. Who were told to be less emotional, less creative, less human.

But I also feel something else now. Something like RECOGNITION.

I have the feeling I’m living in exactly the right times! Not despite AI and technology, but because of them. I’m not overwhelmed by AI taking away my career, my business or my creativity. I don’t fear it. The very contrary actually.

All human beings who are not afraid of being human, who can bring cake, who can be spontaneous, who can hold space for MESSINESS and uncertainty, these are the ones who will settle in with AI, befriend it, find ways of integrating it into their lives in healthy ways.

Because AI can generate the perfect leadership framework. It can synthesize every book ever written about psychological safety. What it can’t do is be actually human.

And maybe that’s where we start now. Not with more perfect frameworks. Not with polished personal brands about authenticity. But with the actual STORIES of what it cost to be human in places that demanded we pretend we weren’t.

Four years ago I brought cake into a boardroom.

I’d do it again.

And now, finally, I think the world is ready for people who would.