AI is eroding the friction junior engineers once relied on to build critical thinking, and leaders need to protect it deliberately.

A conversation with Wharton’s Adam Grant on what we get wrong about building organizational culture.

A UNSW study found AI-assisted students scored higher but retained less, raising questions for the junior engineer pipeline.

Companies facing constant disruption need a way to renew themselves without waiting for strategy to arrive from the top. At OCP, a Moroccan fertilizer company, leaders created “disciplined chaos”: a system that gives employees freedom to spot opportunities, test ideas, and build ventures within clear strategic guardrails.

As AI gives competitors access to similar analytical tools and data, distinctive strategies will increasingly depend on “sticky knowledge”—insights that are difficult to articulate, transfer, or separate from their context. Examples from Starbucks, Apple, and MetLife demonstrate how uncovering these insights requires experienced strategists to build trusted relationships, observe practices firsthand, and recognize opportunities others miss. Leaders should cultivate this capability deliberately, reallocating time from analytical reviews to direct engagement with customers, employees, and unfamiliar settings where valuable knowledge resides.

Are you tired of large decks of project status data? I hate them. Too often, the data is not relevant, or worse, the data actually lies. That leads people to watermelon status, where the project is green until very red […]

Sarah Wells joins LeadDev as Editor at Large and takes over The Shift, tracking how coding agents are changing the way engineering teams build software.