This is our third entry in One Additional Thing. That makes it high time to step back and explain what we are doing here.
Most managers are never trained for the job they hold. They ascend to the front office because they excelled somewhere else. They were dominant in sales, brilliant in production, or flawless in corporate finance. Managing complex organizations requires a completely different set of skills. It requires grace under pressure, courage in the crunch, wisdom as a place to land.
When the stakes get high, common sense is usually the first casualty. Next, managers waffle — knees are always blamed, but that’s the mind making deflections — and abandon the plan they publicly committed to execute. Maybe they meant the other execute. Suddenly wisdom is about the size of that needle in that haystack.
When leadership works, a manager makes prudent, grounded decisions. When it fails, the misfires are spectacular.
This column exists to dissect those misfires as they happen.
News Item: Real-World Physics
Big Tech pledged roughly $650 billion in 2026 capital spending, much of it aimed at building out the AI infrastructure boom.
Then the digital gold rush slammed directly into a physical reality:
Physics.
Roughly half of planned U.S. data-center capacity for 2026 is expected to be delayed or canceled. Lead times for some critical electrical-grid equipment now stretch as long as four years.
Throwing balance-sheet cash at software models does not alter real-world physics.
When planning out complex things, always get your department heads to weigh in from their vantage point. Clearly, the Chief Engineer wasn’t at the table.
Capable executives align their capital plans with physical supply-chain reality before making promises to Wall Street.
News Item: Auto-Delete Is Not Governance
In ongoing Delaware shareholder litigation involving Rupert Murdoch and Fox Corp., court filings revealed that Murdoch had been auto-deleting his text messages.
The court ordered the production of years of board minutes and other records, including information concerning personal email accounts, while allowing shareholders access to material surrounding allegations that records had been destroyed.
Executives mistake Signal and disappearing-text settings for operational security.
Sometimes they are simply creating a future exhibit.
Smart leaders understand that critical, sensitive discussions belong in verbal conversations, not casual texts or emails. Transparency and trust are essential, but they must be balanced with discretion and candid directness.
Put something in writing when it belongs on the record.
But people are people, and this column will never be at a loss for material about what people text and email each other.
News Item: Inattention to Earning Media Attention
McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski recently became an unwilling social-media attraction while pitching the company’s Big Arch burger.
The performance was staged, stiff and instantly mocked.
Before Burger King could sound Taco Bell, TikTokkers had already spotted the manufactured executive charisma.
But here is where management gets interesting: the attention apparently helped sales.
So was it a communications failure?
Maybe not.
And that may be the better lesson.
Executives spend enormous amounts of money trying to manufacture authenticity. Then occasionally an awkward moment that no communications professional would deliberately design gets more attention than the polished campaign surrounding it.
Leadership should understand the difference between controlling a message and earning attention.
The public is remarkably good at spotting the first.
And remarkably unpredictable about rewarding the second.
In each story, none of the managers got where they are because they are stupid. Quite the opposite. They got there because they were very good at something.
Then the job changed.
The decisions got harder. The consequences got larger. Common sense became less common.
That is where you must work so management and wisdom intersect.
It is almost always where good decisions and well-run organizations call home.
Speaking of…
Eponymos. A three-year labor of hard work and love by our team debuts today. If you are in the media world, please take a look: eponymos.com, and find me anytime.