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Planet Labs PBC, a satellite imaging company founded in 2010, has more than 200 satellites that photograph Earth’s entire landmass every day, a frequency unmatched by the rest of the industry. Although most of its competitors sell isolated images on demand, Planet operates more like an open streaming service, allowing customers—which include commodity traders, governments and humanitarian organizations—to download, publish and build on top of its data.

Recently, for a large part of the globe, that operation stopped. On April 5, Planet announced to customers that the US government had requested that all satellite imagery providers “voluntarily implement an indefinite withhold” of imagery retroactive to March 9 across a broad swath of the Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and the Persian Gulf States. The company stopped releasing war imagery to its library and said it was moving to a “managed access model,” evaluating requests on a case-by-case basis. The Department of Defense and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which controls Planet’s ability to operate satellites, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Now its customers are turning to alternatives. Some have resorted to free lower-resolution data from NASA, which isn’t subject to the same restrictions. Others have switched to imagery from the European Space Agency and other international satellite operators that have no obligation to turn off their feeds in response to a war that the US and Israel are waging. Some are looking to China, which operates the largest commercial Earth-imaging program outside the US.

The fallout is reshaping the $5 billion Earth observation industry and raising the question of whether anyone can build a commercial business on infrastructure the government can effectively shut off at will. No other US company provides the same level of access to imagery that Planet historically has, an approach that’s provided value for an unusually wide range of clients. But that model also makes Planet vulnerable to government pressure. 

The situation exposes the complicated politics of geospatial intelligence. In the US, satellite imaging companies depend on licenses from the federal government that allow them to collect and sell imagery. The model dates to the 1990s, when the government first allowed private companies to operate their own imaging satellites, a technology previously reserved for intelligence agencies.

What is really worth your attention in the busy, buzzy world of AI? MIT reporters and editors have spent years thinking about this question, charting AI’s progress and mapping out what’s next. Now, for the first time, we’ve distilled our answers into a single list.

Inspired by MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, here’s a brand new look at the big ideas, trends, and new advances in AI that are driving progress or shifting power dynamics today—and will shape what’s possible tomorrow.

1. Humanoid data.  Just as our words became training data for large language models, videos of our movements are now being collected en masse to train humanoid robots. From sprawling “training centers” where workers repetitively complete tasks to tele-operated bots “puppeted” by strangers overseas, it’s a bizarre effort with no guarantee of success.
2. LLMs+.  Large language models took the world by storm. Now everyone in AI is chasing the next big thing. The low-hanging fruit may be gone, but LLMs aren’t going anywhere. There’s a lot of juice left to squeeze out of this technology.
3. Supercharged scams.  AI is lowering the barriers for scammers and hackers, making attempts to infiltrate targets faster, cheaper, and easier than ever before.
4. World models.  AI companies want to build systems that understand the external world. If they succeed, they may overcome limitations of LLMs and help AI enter physical environments.
5. The new war room.  Algorithms have long automated military grunt work, but now generative AI has its own seat in the war room, and commanders take its advice seriously. It’s reshaping how militaries share intelligence, work with Big Tech, and make lethal decisions.
6. Weaponized deepfakes.  Between improvements in generative AI, Grok’s mass generation of nonconsensual sexual images, and a US administration using the technology for propaganda, the long-predicted threat of weaponized deepfakes is here.
7. Agent orchestration.  The first wave of AI agents were able to run your browser or write snippets of code. But they could only act alone. Coming next are teams of agents that cooperate to achieve far more complex goals.
8. China’s open-source bet.  Giving away frontier models for free has earned Chinese labs global credibility and lots of good favor with developers. Is it financially sustainable? No one knows—but the world is already building on Chinese foundations.
9. Artificial scientists.  Academics and companies alike are developing agents that can carry out research tasks autonomously and work with scientists as genuine collaborators. Some believe these AI co-scientists will one day reach Nobel Prize–worthy heights.
10. Resistance.  After years of unfettered AI development, a powerful backlash is building around the world. From conservatives to liberals and artists to labor unions, activists are gaining momentum and starting to earn small wins.

The office wasn’t supposed to come back. Digital technology was going to make it obsolete. And for a moment during the pandemic it looked like remote and hybrid work were the future. But the “end of the office” didn’t happen. Instead, the office is being reinvented. That’s because for work that depends on collaboration, judgment, and learning from one another, being together still matters. Working side by side makes coordination easier and helps colleagues build the trust that organizations rely on. So rather than vanishing, corporate headquarters are being rebuilt as vehicles for collaboration, innovation, and talent attraction.

At the very moment when corporate headquarters were expected to fade away, they are being reinvented—at extraordinary scale and with unprecedented investment—as a new kind of urban campus, woven into the fabric of a city and drawing on the energy of urban life. We call this new model for corporate location the knowledge campus. It has more in common with a university campus than with a traditional office tower. It supports the full rhythm of daily life—work, meetings, learning, socializing, and movement—within a single, highly connected place. And because these campuses are often connected to major transportation hubs, they improve workers’ productivity and overall life satisfaction by reducing commuting time—a notorious drain on both quality of life and workplace performance.

What’s more, the shift to knowledge campuses is not limited to the world’s superstar cities. Variations are appearing in cities of all sizes, as well as in suburbs and even rural areas, as places move away from single-purpose office districts and residential-only development toward more dynamic environments that better integrate work, daily life, and connection.

Currently, the case for returning to the office rests on a narrow view of productivity: one that measures only what workers do at work (output per hour of work). But that approach misses a critical piece of the equation. Productivity has two interconnected dimensions. Work productivity—what is accomplished at the office—relies on life productivity—what gets accomplished outside of it. Life productivity includes activities such as commuting to the office, taking care of personal obligations, and getting enough rest to refuel our capacity to work. It makes sustained performance at work possible.

To forge a better connection between work and life productivity, leaders should think of the office not as the building itself but as the broader place in which it is embedded—an environment that integrates workspaces with transit, services, and amenities so that employees can move seamlessly between professional and personal responsibilities. The knowledge campus’s mix of spaces (work, retail, entertainment) and transit access cuts the cost of long commutes and fragmented routines.

Developed our knowledge campus index, built around four core dimensions that distinguish places where work and life productivity reinforce each other.

First, knowledge campuses reintegrate key parts of daily life with work. They bring offices together with housing, services, culture, and amenities—food, fitness, and even childcare are on-site or next door. Second, they intensify interaction and connection. By bringing professional and personal worlds into closer proximity, knowledge campuses generate the informal encounters that sustain culture, reinforce trust, and spark collaboration and new ideas.  Third, they take shape around distinctive industry clusters, such as finance, technology, or creative fields. Proximity strengthens knowledge sharing.  And fourth, because they are anchored to major transit hubs, they reduce commuting friction, which is a key driver not just of work productivity but also of worker life satisfaction.

A new playbook for place comprises of four set of factors:  A) Measure return on place.  The metric that matters most now is return on place (ROP): how effectively a location enables collaboration, reduces friction, and strengthens culture. The knowledge campus framework provides three variables along with the traditional metrics such as cost and utilization: Interaction and collaboration.  Life productivity and the commute.  And ecosystem strength. B) Build districts, not buildings.  C) Manage location as a portfolio.  And D) focus on housing.

Every organization aspires for its transformation to deliver sustainable impact. But achieving that outcome requires more than just a vision; it demands rigor.1 Rigor is the disciplined execution that turns bold ideas into measurable, lasting results. In addition to cultivating employee will2 and building critical skills, executing a plan for these bold ideas with rigor ensures ambitious transformation targets are met in a timely manner and cultures are set up to respond creatively and quickly to unforeseen circumstances.

Rigorous companies embody three important traits: 

1. Speed.  Having speed means more than meeting deadlines; it means acting decisively and executing at pace without sacrificing expectations for performance. From the authors’ transformation interviews for this research, leaders who sustained transformation momentum described how they created clarity of ownership for tasks or initiatives, empowered frontline teams to respond proactively, and removed bureaucratic barriers that slow decision-making. In these organizations, employees at every level understood the “why” behind each initiative and had the authority to move it forward. This combination of disciplined implementation and organizational agility enabled them to quickly translate their goals into real impact.
2. Resilience.  Even the most well-designed transformations encounter unexpected obstacles. Rigorous organizations differentiate themselves based on how they respond when progress falters or priorities shift. Companies that lose momentum often cancel or delay initiatives, inhibiting their progress toward their transformation goals. By contrast, rigorous organizations display resilience and adapt without losing focus. They continue to accomplish the milestones, initiatives, and impact they set out to, even in the face of hardship or unforeseen challenges.  One way to improve resilience is to monitor performance using both an internal and external lens.
3. Consistency.  Consistency is an essential complement to speed and resilience. Rigorous companies are disciplined in applying their transformation methodologies to achieve their goals.

Ultimately, rigor is about disciplined execution in service of outcomes, not blind adherence to a plan. It means knowing when to stay the course—when the value is real and within reach— and when to adjust the path to protect speed, consistency, and long-term impact.

Stephen Squeri appeared to check all the boxes as the next CEO of American Express. By 2016 he had spent three decades at the credit card colossus, reshaped tech operations, headed the corporate and merchant franchises, and orchestrated a spectacularly successful restructuring. But the Queens, N.Y., native had a giant liability in his quest to succeed the crisply tailored, cuff-link-sporting Ken Chenault: He didn’t dress like a Wall Street CEO.

A makeover helped get him the top job—and presaged the corporate makeover he has spent the past near decade enacting. Squeri has forged one of the top growth engines in financial services by luring lovers of luxe as never before, and trending exclusive and young in a big way. The success of Squeri’s highly original, against-the-tide strategy is something of a revelation. Though he heads the eighth largest U.S. player in financial services by market cap ($200 billion), and a fabled institution that ranks as Warren Buffett’s second largest holding at Berkshire Hathaway behind Apple, the Amex chief is little known to the public and keeps a far lower profile than, say, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon or Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon. 

Yet surprisingly, since Squeri took the helm in early 2018, Amex boasts the highest returns among the largest U.S. commercial banks and payment providers. In that eight-year span, its stock has generated total yearly returns of 16.6%, a record that beats all its major peers and the benchmarks (save for Goldman Sachs which barely edges it out over that timeframe).

Squeri’s innovation: shifting sharply away from the “start folks cheap then upgrade them” policy that Amex and its competitors had long followed. He saw that affluent young people would happily pay up for premium cards, as long as the perks were right. “The reality is,” intones Squeri, uncorking one of his favorite phrases, “these Gen Z and millennials love premium, they love getting something that’s luxe. I viewed them as educated consumers who love luxury. They also love value. I said, ‘Wait a minute, these kids are smart.’” 

Amex’s Platinum Card “refresh” in September raised the fee from $695 to $895, but added sweeteners Squeri says are worth an extra $1,500 a year (including credits for Resy, Uber One, and hotel stays). The relaunch proved the most successful in Amex history, the company says. To wit: In the three weeks following the refresh, new account acquisitions on U.S. Platinum doubled, and retention rates have stayed high since, despite the fee increase.

Squeri has more than proved he can crack the upper echelons—both as a CEO and diviner of what high-earners want. Now, he just has to do what’s arguably even harder: keep those millions of millennials and Gen Zers happy and charging against the backdrop of an economy where everything is highly uncertain.

It’s a matter of pride that some of his best ideas come not from surveys or focus groups but especially from surveying what his own kids and their friends are doing. How did he glean that the youthful and affluent would flock to Platinum? “I just looked at my own household,” he says. “I have four daughters. When they talk, I listen. They make me listen. They’re very value-conscious—it’s always about a deal. When my oldest graduated from college, she got a Platinum Card. She was traveling all over the country visiting friends and going to weddings. She told me she liked the lounge access, that she liked the Uber credits; she liked the early check-in and 4 p.m. checkout at the hotels. She went for the luxury stuff, not points, and it was the same for her friends.”

After a stint at consultancy Accenture, Squeri joined American Express in 1985 as a manager in the Travelers Cheque Group. Over the next 30 years, Squeri moved upward to bigger and bigger jobs, chiefly in tech operations and commercial cards. But at every level, he heard the same refrain: You’ve topped out.   Squeri turned all the negativity into a quest to prove the naysayers wrong. “I guess you could say I had a chip on my shoulder,” he allowed in a 2024 podcast. “It’s served me well.”

Still, Squeri partly credited moving up at all to strenuous effort to burnish his homespun persona. Long before refilling his closets, “I was told, early in my career, ‘English is your second language,’” he declares. “I grew up speaking English, but I didn’t speak the ‘goodly’ English. I didn’t use all the letters in the alphabet all the time, I spoke the way I spoke growing up.” So Squeri “voluntarily” took training in elocution. 

Squeri then recounts what must rank as one of the most surprising CEO succession dramas ever. The clear front-runner as Chenault’s successor was president Ed Gilligan, one of Squeri’s best friends and an executive whom he’d worked alongside in three different jobs. “I was planning on retiring at age 60 in 2018,” says Squeri. “Ken already told me he didn’t think I was going to be CEO, which was fine, because I had no aspirations to be CEO.” In May of 2015, Amex’s road map for leadership suddenly got shredded: On a corporate jet flying back from Tokyo, Gilligan suffered a fatal heart attack.

“We’d gone through the Global Financial Crisis, but we were still in recovery mode,” says Squeri. Then Amex’s largest partnership—the Costco card, which accounted for 8% of worldwide business—suddenly fell apart. Costco wanted Amex to accept an extremely low rate on the money folks spent at its stores, a shift that would have made that business uneconomical. Costco went with Citi instead, and they remain partners to this day. Suddenly, Amex needed a mammoth restructuring initiative, in part to offset all the lost sales. 

To make matters worse, the introduction of the Chase Sapphire Reserve card in mid-2016 posed a big threat to the supremacy of the Platinum Card, then sorely in need of a refresh. Chenault assigned the crisis management role to Squeri. 

Chenault, renowned for his understated demeanor, then suggested that despite his strong endorsement, Squeri could face significant pushback. “Ken said, ‘We have some work to do with the board,’” Squeri recounts, and perhaps recalling the incident involving the Jets jersey asked his boss, “How many directors are there?” Chenault said, “Fifteen.” Asked how many Squeri had to convince, Chenault responded, “Fourteen.”

“The board saw this inside guy who was focused on cost reduction,” says Squeri. “They didn’t really see me as someone who could shape strategy or be good externally with partners.” Squeri entered what he calls a “speed dating” process with directors. “Some it took two times, some it took three times, and one it took four times,” he notes.

Squeri won the job and embarked on his daring road map: Doubling down on premium and courting the young and affluent. He also pledged a “revenue first” enterprise that made top-line expansion the leading priority.

According to the author in her ongoing exploration about the patterns and changes in how people approach their working lives, she has found herself looking back at her own memories from over five decades of work. What stands out is not simply the steady progression of roles and achievements but the disproportionate impact of recurring moments of adventure that took her far beyond her usual experience.

At the time, these adventures each felt uncertain and sometimes even disruptive. More than that, they sat outside any clear narrative of progression. They did not register as forward movement. If anything, they felt almost indulgent.  Looking back, though,  now she sees these not as diversions from her working life. Instead, they were among the experiences that most shaped it.

According her, her reflections are not unique. In conversations with others about their own long working lives, a consistent pattern emerges. People describe moments of adventure that took them beyond what was familiar. Some stepped away entirely by, for instance, spending time in a different country. Others made smaller but still disorienting shifts, such as moving into unfamiliar roles or entering settings where they were no longer the expert.

Taking these kinds of leaps becomes more important as longevity reshapes our lives. Longer lives bring both opportunity and risk. They offer more time — to learn, to contribute, to explore. But they also demand more than a single way of working, thinking, or being. In short working lives, ossification matters less. But as working lives stretch, the ability to change becomes critical. Without periods of deliberate adventure and exploration, we risk becoming locked into versions of ourselves that no longer fit the future we are moving into.

The challenge is not just endurance; it is reinvention. And reinvention does not happen accidentally.

When the author talks to leaders about how they support their own longer working lives, they often emphasize the need for resilience, agility, and transformation. They rarely talk about adventure. It can sound frivolous: personal rather than organizational, or even risky in a corporate context.  Yet when people describe their own working lives, it is often the adventures that they describe. It becomes clear how profoundly such experiences support a long working life. Here are three reasons why.  Adventure disrupts accumulated patterns.  Adventure expands who we can become.  And adventure creates markers across the life course.

The Organizational Paradox.  What is striking is how unevenly these adventures are distributed. We recognize — and often encourage — adventure early in life, as part of education or early career exploration. But as our careers progress, adventure becomes harder to justify, harder to accommodate, and easier to defer. We encourage adventure at 20. We discourage it at 40 and 50.  The result is a paradox. The very experiences that most expand perspective and capability are the ones most likely to disappear, just as longer working lives make them more necessary.

Emerging in its place is a multistage life — one with more transitions, more variety, and more choice. In this model, exploration and adventure are no longer confined to the edges of life. They can now occur at multiple points: between roles, across careers, or within them.

We can see this shift occurring. Sabbaticals, secondments (temporarily working a different job at the same company), portfolio careers (combining multiple jobs, income streams, and side gigs), and midlife transitions are all becoming more visible. What matters is not the specific form of this shift but the principle: that long careers require moments of discontinuity, not just continuity.

Make Space for Adventure.  It is important to acknowledge that not all working lives offer the same scope for these experiences. Making time for new experiences is not simply a matter of individual choice. It reflects how working lives have traditionally been organized.  So for organizations, the challenge is to legitimize exploration across the life course — to create space for movement without penalizing those who step away.

For individuals, the challenge is different but equally real. As careers progress, time becomes more constrained, responsibilities accumulate, and stepping away feels harder to justify. Adventure is postponed — until there is more time, more certainty, or fewer obligations. But in a working life, that moment rarely arrives.  

Making space for adventure requires a shift in how we think about our lives and careers. We have become accustomed to valuing mastery and productivity, and adventure is often treated as optional — something peripheral rather than essential.

In longer lives, that assumption no longer holds. Adventure is not simply a break from work. It is one of the threads that keeps a life — and a career — alive. It is what allows a career to remain open, adaptive, and capable of renewal over decades. The risk is not that people take too many detours but too few.

What would your 80-year-old self ask of you? Yes — walk many steps a day, eat sensibly, sleep well. But also: Give me adventures. Give me moments I can remember, stories I can tell, conversations I can have with my grandchildren. Carve out time for extended travel or cultural immersion. Volunteer in unfamiliar contexts, in roles below your capabilities — or much higher. Ask to try a new task at work. Plan a weekend trip to someplace you’ve never been. Undertake a physically or creatively demanding challenge. Try out a self you’ve always dreamed of being. Some of these adventures are dramatic. Others are deeply personal.  In long working lives, the question is not only how long we can continue but also how often we are willing to step beyond what we know.

Executives often come to the author when they reach their wits’ end. These professionals have reached a breaking point and want out of their current situation. There is often a sense of urgency and despair.  According to the author, one’s career is an evolution, and even for people who are happy in their current roles, there is always work that can be done to prepare them for their next chapter. ​

The following five-point strategy will help propel your career forward preemptively. This way, when you are ready to make a transition to a new role, you have already completed some of the legwork. It’s like an insurance policy that prepares you for any scenario. ​

1. Have a clear objective for an updated résumé.​  Having a well-written objective on your résumé is paramount, and having it updated and handy to give to the right connection is key. Your résumé needs to capture exactly what you are looking for.  The objective should be a statement that is succinct and not vague. A confused hiring manager is not going to take the time to figure out what you are looking for. If your résumé is not crystal clear, the hiring manager and applicant tracking system will not know the role you are most qualified for or if you are even a strong candidate for a role.
2. Invest 20% of your time in job boards and 80% in networking.  ​Yes, job boards offer positions to apply for, and it is fine to apply, but people who only do this are limiting themselves. The other 80% of your job search should be networking, as a significant portion of the job market is never posted.  Build networking into a daily or weekly routine.
3. Build a target company list, and make it known.​  It is imperative for job seekers to have a vision of companies that align with their values and interests. Having a list of companies where you think you could be an asset gives your job search direction. This takes out the guesswork or doubt because you are keeping tabs on companies that you can already see yourself working at.
4. Craft and rehearse your professional story.​  Practice makes perfect. No matter what stage you are in during your professional career and no matter what job you are looking for, having a precise and clean story about your career development journey can set you apart.  People who ramble lose the interviewer and the opportunity. Make the expertise you have and the problems you are great at solving clear.  People often help and hire those they like and feel connected to, so make sure your story is interesting and easy to follow. It’s difficult to market yourself and not sound vain, but this is an important component.​  Dedicate five to 10 minutes a day to practicing in the mirror or even recording a video on your phone. Be mindful of cutting out filler words and presenting the most polished version of yourself while also letting your authentic personality shine through. Ask yourself, “Would I hire me?” and be brutally honest.​
5. Find problems to solve.​  The author’s favorite piece of advice is to find problems to solve. Don’t just try to fit into the mold of jobs that are posted. This strategy has gotten his clients hired faster than people who scour job boards for months.​  When you apply for a job, you’re competing with hundreds of other candidates; imagine 500 people fighting over the same plate of food.

Although the idea of followers has existed in various forms since the late 1990s, it was Twitter (now X) that first harnessed the modern follower concept in 2006.  LinkedIn came to this party late, essentially remaining a digital rolodex where you could connect with like-minded businesspeople until around 2011. It wasn’t until 2012 that the platform started allowing people to follow hand-picked influencers like Bill Gates, only letting people follow strangers without connecting in 2014. By 2021, following had become the default outreach action over connecting.

The rationale was obvious. If its greatest future value lay in scaling as a social media platform, and not purely as a business directory, then that scale could only come from audience, not connections. A single person might be able to physically accept a bulk load of connection requests at a time, but followers can accumulate 24/7 without action from the person being followed, quickly building a vast, selective, message-receptive audience far more conducive to monetization.

Through this mechanism, rewards earned by leading voices quickly turned them into a LinkedIn creator class. Names like Jasmin Alić, Lara Acosta and Justin Welsh have become familiar to regular users—they are now established voices blessed with public speaking invites, sponsorship opportunities, online tutorials and so on, not to mention the ability to openly boost their own personal business interests.

Yet right around late 2023, it became obvious that something was fishy in the world of LinkedIn followers. Influencers who’d spent nearly a decade assiduously stockpiling followers started to find that not all of them were being notified every time they posted.

Fast forward to 2026, and for the first time, LinkedIn itself (not to mention some of the sharpest algorithm analysts on the platform such as Melonie Dodaro and Richard van der Blom) has bluntly come out and said it: followers are no longer a key factor in building scale. In fact, for most people, the chance is that the vast majority of followers won’t even see the things you post on a weekly basis.  And what should you do instead to build scale?

Take one of the key changes identified by analyst Richard van der Blom in his recent 2026 algorithm report: topic consistency. Instead of lightly researched (or heaven forbid, AI-created) hit-and-hope posts about whatever topic takes your fancy, the platform now rewards subject experts.

Let’s take another metric: save-to-impression ratio. To understand this ratio, ask yourself: Are people casually cruising your content while waiting for their Zoom to start, like some kind of over-caffeinated LinkedIn window shopper? Or does your advice (or article) actually strike a chord with people—so much so that they save it? If so, this act of saving would seem to confer the post with a far deeper engagement signal than, say, a simple like or a laughing emoji.  Or what about completion rate? Namely, are people getting to the end of your video, carousel, or lengthy post about the current quality of AI-designed packaging for dog grooming products? A lifetime ago, back in 2025, carousels were the de rigeur format for those wishing to sort-of-game the system by generating clicks through highly-designed, 27-slide decks about every subject on earth. (Full disclosure: I actually lost many hours experimenting with these on my own feed, mainly when I first licensed Canva. Impressions were decent but not astronomic.)  Nowadays, there are only carousel crickets, for the pure reason that unclicked slides will actively hurt your reach, not benefit it.

Wrap into these other key metrics such as engagement from relevant professionals, meaningful comment-leaving, and AI-driven comparison of your profile against your professed subject areas, and you get the picture that LinkedIn is actively rewarding substantive, non-AI, value-led business content on its platform again. And it stands to reason. After all, who’d keep paying for a LinkedIn Premium account if they felt their latest corporate release was getting drowned out by less qualified voices who simply shout louder?

Of course, it goes without saying that all of this is for naught if you don’t have something tangible to say, and a unique way of saying it. After all, we can all study a hundred ways to write a book. But it’s only those with a voice worth hearing that eventually build a following that means something.

Even the most successful CEOs can point to decisions they wish they’d made differently. What sets great leaders apart isn’t the absence of mistakes; it’s how they respond to them.  According to the author, throughout his career, he has noticed that the most effective leaders approach regret with humility, using it as a tool to improve their decision-making, sharpen their judgment and hone their leadership skills.  The following are some common leadership regrets and the ways great leaders learn from them to make better decisions.

1. Not being present.  Many CEOs regret how they spend their time. When they are at work, they think about what they should be doing at home. At home, they think about work. As they juggle the demands of leading a business, they often find it difficult to carve out enough time with their loved ones.  Eventually, leaders learn that it matters most that they are fully present — whether they are with friends, family or in a business meeting. They strive to be intentional with their time and prioritize the things that matter most, both professionally and personally. Being a whole person allows them to show up as their best selves each day at home and at the office.
2. Getting stuck in the weeds.  Many CEOs regret spending too much time working “in” the day-to-day details of the business instead of “on” business strategy that leads to more opportunities for growth.  The best leaders know that when they fixate on execution instead of delegating, they forfeit strategic work only they can do, such as scouting new opportunities, setting direction and developing top talent.
3. Not acting fast enough on people issues.  Another recurring regret among CEOs is waiting too long to act on people issues. Even if it’s evident early on that an employee is not a right fit, leaders often take too long to do something about it.  This can put the organization’s operations and culture at risk. It can also jeopardize the credibility of the leader for failing to make a tough call.  The most successful CEOs make personnel decisions that align with their culture, even when it’s hard.
4. Making decisions in isolation.  Ego can lead CEOs to think they need to make decisions on their own. But making decisions in isolation almost always ends in regret. The most strategic decision-makers create time and space for feedback — and not just from those who they know will agree with them. Hearing diverse perspectives from people who will challenge their ideas ultimately helps CEOs make decisions with confidence.
5. Avoiding risk altogether.  The most common regret I hear from CEOs is about not taking a risk. CEOs regret what they didn’t do and the decisions they didn’t double down on. Rather than being paralyzed, high-performing CEOs recognize that there is often more than one right answer.  They move forward after a disciplined risk assessment: Do the homework, quantify the downside, set clear guardrails, and then act. Once a decision is made, they fully commit.
6. Justifying decisions that don’t align with core values.  Decisions that compromise organizational values erode company culture. It can be easy to align actions with core values when the business is doing well. But even when things get hard — or the tides change — the best leaders don’t abandon ship. They hold true to their values.  Great leaders align every decision to their organization’s mission, vision, purpose and values. This also means ensuring all the leaders on the executive team align their actions with the strategy.
7. Covering up mistakes.  How CEOs act after a mistake often matters more than the mistake itself. Great CEOs know that owning decisions and accepting accountability preserves trust and enables faster course correction. They take responsibility by processing how they made the decision, evaluating the outcomes and analyzing the circumstances that surrounded the bad decision. When a mistake has been made, they focus less on justification and more on correction and accountability.