#leadership

#leadership

Big ideas do not always arrive with attention or applause. Often, they are shaped quietly through experience, discipline, and persistence. That is how Thirukumaran Sivasubramaniam approaches his career. As Co-Founder and COO of Fintex Inc. in Toronto, he is known for turning complex ideas into working systems. His leadership style is practical, steady, and grounded in lived experience. It is a style shaped long before his professional career began.

OpenAI has disbanded a team that focused on - as the company itself described - ensuring that its AI systems are "safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values." At the same time, the team's former leader has been given a new role as the company's "chief futurist." OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that the team's members have now been assigned to other roles. The news was first reported by Platformer.

I'm really excited to show you guys the journey for me to get to an engineering org that's over 100 people. I'm going to be, of course, talking about the ups and downs, and also about some lessons that I learned along the way. I'm Thiago Ghisi. I'm an engineering director at Nubank. Before Nubank, I worked at Apple and American Express, and then even Thoughtworks.

While uncertainty hung heavy in the air, our small team was unusually open with each other. We talked candidly about the challenges, the personal toll, and what it might all mean for the business. Without setting out to do so, we had built a foundation of psychological safety-one that made navigating a global crisis far less stressful than it might have been otherwise.

Shilpan Amin sits at the operational core of General Motors. As the global chief procurement and supply chain officer, his remit cuts across engineering, manufacturing, finance, and the company's vast supplier network. At GM's scale, procurement is not simply about buying parts. It determines how capital is deployed, how risk is priced and absorbed, how quickly vehicles move from design to launch, and how the company navigates geopolitical shocks while protecting long-term margins.

Benjamin Nasberg is a Canadian entrepreneur and the CEO of Carbone Restaurant Group. He is known for building scalable hospitality businesses while staying closely connected to the people and communities behind them. His career reflects a steady focus on growth, culture, and practical leadership. Nasberg began working in restaurants at the age of 16. Those early roles gave him a ground-level understanding of operations, teamwork, and customer experience.

Leadership is often thought of as managing teams, strategies or organizations. But the truth is, leadership starts with managing yourself. A leader who lacks discipline in their personal life, whether in health, time or energy, will struggle to lead others with clarity and consistency. Without personal self-management, even the best leadership strategies fall apart. This is why self-discipline is often called the hidden foundation of leadership success.

1. Create predictability anchors, not just flexibility. When the world feels chaotic, people scan their environments for stability and safety cues. Identify one or two things that will not change this week-meeting cadence, response-time expectations, or decision processes-and name them explicitly. Predictability doesn't mean being rigid; it means offering a reliable foundation so teams can focus on problem-solving and collaboration. This steadiness becomes a form of trust, helping people stay engaged, resilient, and able to perform at their best.

Companies often hire new leaders to spark transformation, yet without structural support, even the boldest individuals tend to revert to established norms.

I'll never forget the moment that changed how I think about leadership. It happened during my tenure as president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, when I learned that one of our longtime supporters, a commercial real estate developer named Irwin, was nearing the end of his life and despairing that his contributions no longer mattered. We brought him to campus to show him otherwise.

As AI takes on more analytical and operational decision-making, the leaders who will stand out are those who can do what machines can't: read emotional cues, build trust, and inspire teams to act. In this new landscape, emotional intelligence is more than a soft skill. It's becoming the core differentiator of effective leadership. I once advised a CEO whose metrics looked flawless. Revenue was rising, costs were under control, and the company was steadily gaining market share.

Too many founders get stuck in reactive mode, buried in meetings and fire drills. But if you're always reacting, you're not really leading. You must move from reactive operator to strategic leader, which requires a mindset shift. Understand that you're not the firefighter - you're the architect. Ask yourself: If you disappeared for two weeks, what would break? That's where your real work begins.

In this issue of the HBR Executive Agenda, editor at large Adi Ignatius talks to Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati about how leaders can act with clarity amid rising social tension and rapid technological change.

Olimpiu Pop: Hello everybody. I'm Olimpiu Pop, an InfoQ editor, and I have in front of me Erica Pisani, one of the track hosts of QCon London 2025, and a very important track in my opinion. One that is important in general, but even more important these days. And the name of the track was performance and sustainability, which seems to be two opposing words. So, Erica, please introduce yourself.

Leicester City are exploring a move for Newcastle United defender Jamaal Lascelles, as the Foxes look to inject leadership and defensive solidity into a season that has not gone according to plan, as reported by BBC. With the club struggling to find consistency in the Championship, caretaker manager Andy King is understood to be pushing for reinforcements who can provide both immediate impact and dressing-room authority.

"We faced a challenging year with the loss of grant funding and tough staffing decisions," said Seletta Goodall, head of administration for the Department of Medical Social Sciences (MSS) in the Feinberg School of Medicine. "It wasn't easy for any of us. But our team pulled together, adapted and ultimately came out stronger and more aligned in our mission."

For the first time in our history, more than 70% of Africans are under the age of 30. This, along with entrenched inequalities, poverty, unemployment and socioeconomic fault lines, is reshaping how our societies interact with one another and the world. This is Africa's most consequential decade. Leaders who take office over the next 10 years will have to deliver on difficult mandates within a political, economic and social landscape that has been fundamentally altered.

It's not just about the procedural accuracy. It's about honoring these stories and the emotional and ethical terrain that doctors navigate every day that reflect similar terrains within us. It's kind of like an onion peel. The more you pull back, the more there is, and the more it moves you.

We've long misunderstood hope in the workplace. We've treated it as wishful thinking-a nice-to-have feeling that emerges when things are going well. But research from psychologist C.R. Snyder reveals something far more powerful: Hope is a cognitive process with three essential components: goals (what we want to achieve), pathways (our ability to identify routes to those goals), and agency (our belief that we can pursue those paths). This isn't passive optimism; it's an active strategy for navigating uncertainty and driving meaningful change.