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Twenty years ago, getting promoted to manager was a major milestone. Today its a punishment. Thats according to recent research from LinkedIn. In a survey of more than 10,000 LinkedIn users, nearly 7 in 10 said they would leave their job if they had a bad manager. But only 30% said they want to become a people manager within the next few years. So, why the change? Why doesnt anyone want to be the boss anymore? We could sum up the answer in seven words: Nobody showed them how to lead effectively. The data backs this up. Global consulting firm West Monroe surveyed 500 managers and found that 66% of those received eight hours or less of manager training. Of those who had been managers for less than a year, a stunning 43% had received no training at all. Why is this lack of training so problematic? And, more importantly, how can you inspire and prepare the next generation of leaders at your organization? Sign up here for my free email course on emotionally intelligent leadership. The leadership training gap The problem is the skills that get people promoted arent the ones that help them excel at the next level. Management experts Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and James Noel explore this concept in their book The Leadership Pipeline. They describe five different leadership roles: Leading self Leading others Leading leaders Functional leaders Business leaders The passage from one role to another requires new learning and new behavior, assert the authors. Whats more, they say, the leader who transitions from one role to the next has to acquire a new way of leading and leave the old ways behind. This calls for a fundamental adjustment in skills and in the way you use your time. The challenge here is that many of the things leaders need to stop doing are things they enjoy doing and which have brought them success. For example, a sales manager may be great at closing deals. But once he or she is promoted, closing deals on their own should no longer be the most important thing. Rather, they should be concerned with helping their reports to excelfor example, clarifying target setting, giving emotionally intelligent feedback, and coaching and development. This change in perspective will affect everything from what they believe is important to how they define success and how they allocate their time. It will also impact the effect they have on their people and the organization as a whole. The change in perspective should continue as a leader continues to transition across roles. A leader of leaders must recruit the right leaders and hold them accountable for their role in developing their people. A functional leader has to not only lead but also build competitive advantages and agendas that enable the company to do things better than competitors. A business leaders focus is long term, but he or she must also stay in touch with the short-term picture. Business leaders must develop strategy and build teams down the chain that assist in executing that strategy. One thing that all of these roles hold in common? They each demand emotional intelligence, skills and abilities like listening, empathy, effective processing, and delivering of feedback. How to fix your leadership problem How do you make sure your organization is preparing your leaders and managers for success? Here are some tips. Map leadership passages: Define the transitions in your organization (individual contributor, manager one, manager two, etc.). Specify what emotional skills are needed at each stage. Develop training: Whether designed in-house, with help from a leadership consultancy, or both, tailor management and leadership training to your organization. Schedule time: Each time a person is promoted, schedule the training and make sure you provide the time and resources they need to complete it. Provide a mentor: A mentor can guide the persons development, answer questions, and support them emotionally. Where possible, allow the person to choose their own mentor. Support mentors, too: Outline guidelines for how mentors can help, and a program for them to meet regularly (in addition to impromptu meetings when needed). Measure outcomes: Track metrics and results, but also look beneath the surface. Pay special attention to retention/turnover, team engagement, conflict rates. Remember, metrics are important but interviews with direct reports and team members can reveal much. Lead by example: Senior leaders must practice developing their emotional intelligence, share their mistakes and learnings, and ask for help. In doing so, they set the founation for the culture. Dont just dump a person into a new role and expect them to figure it out. Some will. Many wont. In contrast, if you prioritize leadership development, youll strengthen your teams and the organization as a wholenot just today but into the future. By Justin Bariso This article originally appeared in Fast Companys sister publication, Inc. Inc. is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters that represent the most dynamic force in the American economy.
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My wife and I visited Singapore last week for the first time in a couple of years, and I was reminded how impressed I am with the country. It illustrates a great strategy point, the subject of this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) piece, which borrows from Billy Preston, whose Billboard No. 1 hit song in October 1974, Nothing From Nothing, contained the immortal line: Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. This piece is a play on the line entitled Something From Nothing Leaves Something: How Strategy Choice Can Make Something out of Very Little. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. Impressive Singapore The minute you land at Changione of the worlds truly great airportseverything about the country works. Singapore is efficient, clean, and safe. It is always ranked at or near the top of the ratings for low crime rate. It has truly awesome food and great architecture. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/martin.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/Untitled-design-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Subscribe to Roger Martin\u0027s newsletter","dek":"Want to read more from Roger Martin? See his Substack at rogerlmartin.substack.com.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Sign Up","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/rogerlmartin.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#00b3f0","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91412496,"imageMobileId":91412493,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} And it is incredibly prosperous. The International Monetary Fund ranks it as the country with the second-highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. I rank it first because the only one ahead of it, Liechtenstein, is a medium-size town of 40,000, not a real country (similarly for sub-1-million population jurisdictions like Luxembourg, Macao, or Brunei). Singapore may be small (population 6.1 million), but it is bigger than Ireland or Norway, other famously high-GDP countries. Its 2025 GDP per capita is estimated at $157,000, which is 74% higher than the U.S.’s. (Though the U.S. shouldnt feel too bad. It is clearly harder to have a very high GDP per capita if you are a large country with more than 25 million people. The U.S. GDP per capita is 22% higher than the next biggest consequential country, Germany.) Some may argue that you shouldn’t compare a city-state like Singapore to entire countries because there are lots of very rich cities. But even by that standard, Singapore is impressive. The highest GDP per capita of any other large city is San Francisco, at $145,0008% lower than Singaporeand after San Francisco, there is a steep drop-off. The only sizable place richer is Silicon Valley, with a GDP per capita of $210,000, which is super impressive but not entirely comparable. It is a region anchored by one small city, San Jose. The truly impressive thing about Singapore is not its current prosperity, but where it came from. Singapore truly created something from nothingor at least from precious little. Singapore became an independent country in 1965 after a fractious two years as a state of the newly formed Malaysia. Its GDP per capita at the time was estimated to be US$516, or just under $4,000 in 2025 dollars, which is around the same as the current levels of Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Papua New Guinea. So, it was a very poor country. It had close to nothing with which to start. Its population was mainly ethnic Chinese, and there was no love lost between the Malays who surrounded it and the Singaporean Chinese. Singapore had zero natural resources. And in the 1960s global economy, it was in the middle of nowhere geographicallynot known for a single thing other than the Singapore Sling cocktail. But it then proceeded to increase its GDP per capita at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.3% for 60 yearsunprecedented in the modern global economy. No jurisdiction has kept up that rate of growth for that long. Something from Something Strategy If you have a rich endowment of valuable resourceswhether you are a country or a companythe strategy imperative is to exploit those resources to overwhelm any competitor (i.e., to play chicken). For example, if you are the U.S., you start with the richest endowment of natural resources in the world, the largest endowment of arable land, a favorable geography (mainly protected by oceans), and a large flow of motivated immigrants, and you invest heavily to exploit the natural resources. Then you use the wealth generated to invest more than any other country in becoming the worlds manufacturing superpower, including building a vast and efficient rail systemand later an interstate highway systemto move goods. Then you use that wealth to invest more in education and scientific research than any other country to become the worlds technology superpower. During your ascendancy, you simply out-invest every other jurisdiction in extremely expensive sources of advantageand there is nothing they can do to stop you. The same dynamic applies to companies. If you are relatively better endowed, your imperative is to invest in expensive advantages that your competitors cant match. For example, when upstart Reebok challenged Nike in athletic shoe sales, Nike invented a new scale-sensitive cost categoryathlete endorsement (e.g., Air Jordan, Dream Team, etc.)and cranked up the investments in this category to heights never even contemplated before until Reebok said “no mas.” The rest is history: Reebok flatlined and Nike solidified its dominance. The general rule, then, is that when you have a resource advantage over competition, look to invest in the most expensive sources of competitive advantage. Something from Nothing But if you are at a major resource disadvantage, like Singapore was in 1965, the imperative is to seek sources of advantage that are cheap and doable for you, but tricky for the competition to follownot an easy strategy choice task. That was the brilliance of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapores prime minister from before its independence through 1990. His fundamental strategy choice was to make Singapore the most efficient and secure place to do business in South Asia. He would ensure that it would be easy to do business in Singapore for foreign companies, and they could be confident that they could transact business without fear of the corruption endemic to that part of the world. Strategically, I love this because it didnt require a huge expenditure of capital (which they didnt have). It required clever choicesfor example, to have the best-paid bureaucrats in the world, so that they dont feel compelled to make extra money on the side. Is that free? No, but the cost pales in comparison to, say, a single giant infrastructure project. And it required building and nurturing a judicial system that was willing to fight corruptionand punish it severely. Again, his is not an expensive investment. Rather, it requires extreme commitment and careful ongoing attention. The other strategy tool that Singapore deployed was flexibility. The island nation famously transitioned through multiple economic phasesfrom labor-intensive to skill-intensive to capital-intensive to tech-intensive to innovation-intensiveacross its relatively short history, pivoting more quickly and proactively than competitive jurisdictions. These are the kind of things that many well-endowed competitors are just not willing to doi.e., they pass the “wont” part of the “cant/wont test.” They would rather spend big on something easier for them to carry out. Prime Minister Lee was absolutely resolute in ensuring adherence to his key strategy choices for the many decades during which he was in charge. Of course, as Singapore became rich, it was able to spend heavily on more expensive things like its massive investment in education and logistics infrastructures, like the aforementioned Changi airport in the late 1970sand then the airports recent enhancement, the award-winning $1 billion Jewel shopping mall featuring the worlds tallest indoor waterfall. Personal Cases of Something from Nothing The something-from-nothing strategy approach is near and dear to my heart because I have needed to employ it in multiple personal leadership rolesfor example, with the Rotman School at the University of Toronto and with Tennis Canada. Rotman SchoolWhen I became dean of the Rotman School in 1998, we had very little going for us. We were poor, with a budget one-quarter the size of our leading competitor, and we were running a deficit on that tiny budget. The business school was hemorrhaging professors to U.S. universities because the Canadian dollar had plummeted from 87 to 67 over the previous several years, leaving Rotman salaries uncompetitive relative to U.S. professorial salaries. The schools alumni were disengaged, and we werent connected at all to the Toronto business community. Overall momentum was significantly negative. We had to figure out how to build advantages cheaplyand I mean really cheaply. One way was to take our very expensive academic researchthat only other academics normally readand make it readable and interesting for a broader business audience, which we did inexpensively through Rotman Magazine, transforming it from a mediocre alumni magazine to an internationally valued source of business thinking. It helped put the school on the map for its business ideas at a tiny cost. Other schools didnt follow because they were run by academics who placed a low value on engaging businesspeople with their research findings. We developed a narrative that Rotman stood for fundamentally transforming business educationA New Way to Think. Our boldness earned us a massive amount of earned mediamore than all the other Canadian business schools combinedat a time when we had zero resources to invest in paid media. I learned that I had a cheap but valuable currency when it came to motivating professorsmy love and affection. The ones that taught well and contributed to translating research into actionable business ideas received disproportionate public accolades from me, and that moved the needle on their efforts more dramatically than I might have imagined. They would bring back stories from colleagues at other competing schools who wished their deans cared as much as I did for the work of my professors. Those cheap but effective strategy choices enabled us to build resources to subsequently invest in expensive thingslike professors, student services, and a new building. Tennis CanadaWhen I joined the board of Tennis Canada in 2005, we were deeply in debt from having built a new tennis stadium in Toronto, we had little history of success internationallyand the modest successes were in the relatively distant pastand, as a cold country that had never prioritized tennis, we had very few year-round tennis courts. (They had to be indoor courts or outdoor courts that were bubbled during the winter months.) We were an also-ran competing against established tennis nations that had historical advantages and orders of magnitude more resources. Nonetheless, we sought to become counted among the leading tennis nationslike the U.S., Spain, France, Germany, Australia, and Russia. A key potential resource that wasnt being exploited was Tennis Canadas ownership of both a mens (ATP) and womens (WTA) top level (1000 series) tournament (of which there are only nine and 10, respectively), the biggest and most important annual tournaments after the four Grand Slams (U.S. Open, Australian Open, Wimbledon, and Roland Garros). We ran it as a competitive sports event, not a valuable economic property. We hired an experienced sports entertainment executive, Michael Downey, as our new CEO, and he turned them into the second-highest revenue pair of 1000-series tournaments, trailing only Indian Wells, the plaything of Larry Ellison, the centibillionaire with unlimited investment resources. We were able to invest the massively increased cash flow provided by the tournaments in an innovative approach to player development. The resulting success of our Canadian tennis stars generated plenty of earned media and sponsorship dollars. We leveraged Canada into a leading tennis nation by inexpensively transforming a wasted asset into a powerful strategic tool. Practitioner Insights If you lag your competitors dramatically in resources, dont cry yourself to sleep at night and give up. You have a tough and tricky strategy taskbut not an impossible one. Your central task is to think through how you can gain an advantage on the cheap. Start by refusing to focus on and obsess about how and on what your competitors are spending their massive resources. Instead ask, despite all that spending, what are customers missing? By the way, that means customers of all sorts because many modern markets are two-sided (including Rotmans and Tennis Canadas). Then spend all your strategic thinking energy on finding inexpensive ways to achieve uniqueness in meeting those unmet customer needs. Search along two vectors. The first is to recognize the assets right under your nose that you arent utilizing for strategy purposeslike the two 1000-level tournaments, academic research that had zero impact on businesspeople, and the deans love and affection. The second is to identify cheap but valuable assets that you can createlike a low-corruption environment, or a more exciting and appealing approach to business education. As Lee Kuan Yew amply demonstrated: Where there is a will, there is a way to create something from nothing. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/martin.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/Untitled-design-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Subscribe to Roger Martin\u0027s newsletter","dek":"Want to read more fro Roger Martin? 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Below, co-authors Ruth DeFoster and Natashia Swalve share five key insights from their new book, The Fear Knot: How Science, History, and Culture Shape Our Fears and How to Get Unstuck. Ruth is a journalism professor and media scholar who teaches at the University of Minnesota, where she is also the Director of the Undergraduate Studies for the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Natashia is a neuroscience professor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where she teaches psychology and psychopharmacology. Whats the big idea? The Fear Knot explores our misguided human fears, from premature burials to GMOs, while explaining the real dangers out thereand why youre less likely to be afraid of them. With the right tools, we can all be better equipped to untie the fear knots misleading our behavior. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Ruth and Natashiabelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Fears are at least partially hardwired Not all fears stem from trauma, but most of them are built upon our most primal anxieties. Our bodies are naturally geared to experience fear, and rightfully so. The famous neuroscience patient, known by her initials, S.M., has a biological glitch that makes her unable to feel fear. While this may sound enjoyable, its incredibly dangerous. S.M. constantly finds herself in risky situations, like the time she was held up at knifepoint and responded by laughing at the criminal. S.M. shows us that sometimes fear is a necessary evil. It helps us avoid deadly scenarios and keeps us alive in a constantly evolving world. But our fears also make us jump to worst-case scenarios, setting us up to believe in conspiracy theories and fall prey to misinformation. Parents worry about their children, so they chide them about playing in the dirt, likely increasing their chances of developing an allergy by avoiding dust and dander. We fear sickness and work hard to treat our ailments. But by doing so, we spark the spread of antibiotic resistance, many times more deadly than the original diseases. We fear the fate of our world, and so we build backyard honeybee hives, creating an army of new competitors for the creatures that are actually vulnerable: wild bumblebees. Frauds and hucksters thrive on our instinctual fears, selling so-called cures like bleach as a treatment for everything from autism to HIV. But recognizing where those fears originate from can help. It can cause you to pull back from buying the untested treatment or trying out that new parenting technique that, while your neighbor vouches for it, is not backed by any science. While it may feel like your fears are driving your decision, you ultimately have the final say. 2. Fears are cyclical In much the same way that diseases spread, so do cycles of overblown fears, which sociologist Stanley Cohen referred to as moral panics. Throughout history, moral panics have cycled with surprising regularity, often tied to concerns about childrens safety. The Salem Witch Trials of the late 17th century alleged that witches were tormenting and even possessing local children, while the Satanic Panic of the 1980s picked up on similar themespromoting the myth that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles was operating out of American daycare centers. Even today, the QAnon conspiracy preys on the same fears of innocence lost and threats to American children. Throughout history, moral panics have cycled with surprising regularity, often tied to concerns about childrens safety. But whether these moral panics are associated with witchcraft or terrorism, one thing remains the same: we continue to repeat the same mistaken fears. The targets differ by year, but while the villains change with the decade, the tactics used to maneuver us toward those fears remain similar. Thankfully, ways to counter misinformation can be recycled as well. 3. We need shades of gray in a black-and-white world If youve heard of the drug kratom, youve likely heard one of two tales: Its either a life-saving miracle plant, or its the lethal new opioid killing teenagers. As a drug researcher, I must mentally prepare myself if someone brings this drug up in conversation because I will likely be fighting misinformation from both sides. Drugs are an easy target for rampant misinformation. The social program called D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) has maligned drugs across multiple generations of children, warning us that all drugs are bad. But on TikTok, we hear that the terpenes in cannabis can cure cancer, and melatonin will help put a stop to all your sleep problems. The problem with this type of thinking is that the answer is somewhere in between. Kratom can help people quit using other, more dangerous opioids. But kratom also has addictive qualities and, because its unregulated, almost anything can be packaged into the product. Kratom samples frequently test positive for heavy metals and even Salmonella. Humans tend to use an all or nothing mindset. Your nemesis is pure evil, and your best friend deserves the world. When we fear something, this distortion becomes even more extreme. Humans tend to use an all or nothing mindset. As a result, our fears prompt us to swing wildly in the opposite direction of flawed trends. The laissez-faire parenting of the past is seen in the present as neglectfuland so, parents swing toward what is called helicopter parenting, hovering over our childrens every move. But the best parenting is more likely somewhere in between, promoting independence but ending the custom of literally throwing your children into the deep end of the pool. Its easy to picture a political opponent as trying to destroy the country you love and your choice for the role as a savior. But most of life exists within those more ambiguous shades of gray. The more we paint things solely in black or white, the more we lose the nuance of the everyday. 4. The biggest problems are complex, but crucial Every summer over the past decade or so, we have continued to see new heat records set. We watch floods ravage cities and hurricanes inundate areas previously considered safe. We avert our eyes, not because we dont fear what our future is going to look like but because we feel helpless in the face of it. The things we really should fear the most are often the hardest to wrap ones head aroundproblems like climate change, systemic racial and gender inequality, childhood poverty, and domestic terrorism, to name a few. As individuals, its easy to ignore these problems becausein the first placewe dont think that we can contribute productively to the eventual solution. And itsoften painful to confront the behaviors of our own that contribute to these nightmarish scenarios, from the seemingly humdrum algorithmic echo chambers in which far too many of us now exist to the emotionally and economically expensive decisions we will likely have to make to try to fix them. But these big, systemic problems, many of which have continued to plague society for centuries, are what we now should focus on the most. 5. We believe what we see Across the world, rates of reliable types of birth control have plummeted, while more unreliable methods have begun to skyrocket. The horrors of hormonal birth control are shared between inboxes with no fact-checking in sight. Daysy, a fertility tracker app, became a leading example of the new face of contraception, supposedly protecting women from the evils of hormonal birth control while preventing pregnancy. But behind the curtain, the popular app that influencers promoted relentlessly turned out not to be as effective as originally touted, with the science backing it having been retracted from the original journal. Our fears dont merely guide our daily actions; they also sharply define some of the biggest questions we face across society. Many social media stories turn out to be misleading or dangerous. Scientists talk about Andrew Wakefields study falsely linking vaccines to autism as a warning because this original source of misinformation has snowballed out of control. But every day, even more falsehoods flood social media, sometimes benign but other times deadly. Doctors plead for people not to rely on the new trend of cough CPR as a method to treat a heart attackand yet, videos make the rounds, shared by millions without thinking of its risk. Social media algorithms are designed to feed you what you want to see, and we want to see things with which each of us agrees. Over time in an algorithmic silo, our views become more extreme, and we become more at risk of sticking to our siloed positions. All the while, misinformation slides from one person to another, across countries and friend groups, exposing us to more of our own particular views. Recognizing that our algorithms drive these anxietiesshaping who and what were afraid ofis the first step toward taking a hard look at your own consumption and counteracting its persuasion. Our fears dont merely guide our daily actions; they also sharply define some of the biggest questions we face across society. Its getting harder to know what we should be afraid of, particularly when our news and social media feeds are increasingly full of deep fakes and lurid sensationalism. Our biggest problems can seem all but impossible to solve, especially when were struggling with daily concerns like what type of food to buy or whether our space heater is dangerous. Even though our fears might be based on something primal, always remember that you are still in complete control of your behavior. Being informed, counteracting your own biases, and thinking critically about the world are crucial. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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