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The Lighthouse Leadership Newsletter

"The leadership newsletter that turns overwhelmed managers into confident team builders."

If you’ve ever been part of an amazing team and wondered how to create that magic as a leader, this newsletter is for you.

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Featured image for the Lighthouse Leadership essay "How Kennedy built the Why" — President Kennedy at a NASA facility, with a Saturn rocket on the launch pad behind him.

How to build team alignment: the JFK Play in 3 steps

How to build team alignment, the way Kennedy did: ask before you declare. The 3-step JFK Play any manager can run on a team of five — or five thousand.

Team Size and the Architecture of Interdependence

How team interdependence breaks at scale—and how to design around it. A diagnostic on Dunbar's number, the geometry of relationships, and team structure.

What New Managers Can Learn from the Physicist Who Helped Tesla Go International

Global expansion fails without operational clarity. Shan Nair’s system at Nucleus makes international expansion predictable, aligned, and low-risk.
An early multitouch keyboard concept (U.S. Patent 7,694,231, Fig. 12G) illustrating the kind of design that won Ken Kocienda the “Keyboard Derby” Public-domain image,

How a transparent creative process built the iPhone keyboard

How a transparent creative process turned fifteen Apple engineers into the team that built the iPhone keyboard—and invented autocorrect along the way.

The Power of Purpose: Connecting Personal and Shared “Why”

I’ve been thinking a lot about purpose—what gives us meaning lately. Sometimes purpose shows up in the hardest moments, like holding the hand of a loved one at the end of life. Other times, it’s as simple as answering a question at a cocktail party: “So, what do you do?” In both moments, the answer

How Bill Gates Learned Teams Outperform Individuals

Bill Gates believed in his individual talents over a team……until this happened. As a teenager, Gates thought genius was enough. He wrote entire systems alone — from a class scheduler at 16 to a traffic startup. But he took some time off in High School to work on the Northwest power grid at a company

Alignment — Getting Your Team Rowing in the Same Direction

Effective team alignment is crucial for achieving goals. Learn how Amazon designs, and how Jiminy Peak selects projects.
A simple blue-background graphic of a Kanban board with three columns. A hand is moving a pale yellow sticky note into the 'Done' column, which is marked with a yellow upward arrow. Bold white text above reads 'Make Progress Visible'

Make Progress Visible: The Power of Transparent Processes

Transparency gives progress a “sound.” In physical work, progress is visible and audible. A carpenter building a house feels progress with every nail she drives into a timber. It has a sound. It is visual. Her team feels collective progress with every rafter they raise. They can see the progress happening one day to the

Chart showing Sonos stock collapse with falling speaker icon and title 'The Collapse of Sonos: How Leadership Drift and Ignored Risk Lost the Room'

How trusted brands collapse: the Sonos case study

A Sonos case study for product leaders: how leadership drift and ignored risk wiped out $1.2B in shareholder value — and what to learn before your next launch.
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