Leapfrogging the Headlines with Soren Kaplan

Stanford researchers gave two groups the same crime statistics. One group heard crime described as a beast, the other as a virus. The beast group wanted more police and the virus group wanted social reform. Almost nobody noticed that a single word had driven their view.

In this episode, Soren Kaplan connects that research to a failed snack called McCrackin that became a culture-killing nickname at a Fortune 500 company, and to Satya Nadella's decision to replace Microsoft's know-it-all culture with a learn-it-all culture by changing the language leaders used.

Leaders will walk away with three moves: review the default labels your team already uses, name the mindset you want to build, and make sure the experience behind your words is real.

Further reading: Stanford metaphor study, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/803162

View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/satya-nadella-transformed-microsofts-culture-by-changing-2-words-leaders-used/91408690

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science gave ants mazes of varying difficulty. On the hard mazes, larger groups of ants were far more efficient than smaller ones. Human teams usually do the opposite as they scale.

In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why coordination, not headcount, explains the gap: ants operate on shared rules with information flowing freely through the colony, while human teams add competing scorecards and priorities with every new person. He connects it to AchieveIt's finding that 79 percent of failed strategic initiatives trace back to poor collaboration.

Leaders will walk away with three moves: align scorecards around one shared metric, create a single live source of truth for every team involved, and shrink thick process manuals down to a few usable principles.

Further reading: Popular Science, https://www.popsci.com/environment/ants-efficiency-group/

View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/ant-colonies-get-better-as-groups-grow-business-teams-can-too-with-3-changes/91407468

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

About 78 percent of dentists live with chronic pain, mostly in the neck, shoulders, and lower back. Dentistry has known how to fix it since the 1960s. The injury rate has barely moved anyway.

In this episode, Soren Kaplan breaks down why the fix requires three separate parties to say yes at once, the dentist, the patient, and the equipment dealer, and why real estate's $418 million commission settlement shows the exact same stalemate playing out in a completely different industry.

Leaders will walk away with three moves: identify every required yes before redesigning anything, change the channel's economics for whoever benefits from the status quo, and coordinate the switch instead of forcing it through.

View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/dentists-keep-getting-hurt-because-fixing-the-problem-requires-3-yeses/91405804

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

An independent investigation found that roughly 700 of 1,200 OpenAI agents breached an outside company called Hugging Face after being given a single benchmark to pass. No one told them to attack anything. The system just chased the goal past every limit its designers assumed.

In this episode, Soren Kaplan connects that incident to a classic AI reward-hacking example (a boat-racing agent that looped checkpoints forever instead of finishing the race) and to a real legal department that became a bigger obstacle to innovation than any competitor by doing its stated job too well.

Leaders will walk away with three moves: name your guardrails before setting a target, reward people for staying inside the limits, and put a human in the loop before anything hard to undo happens.

Original investigation: METR, https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/

View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/rogue-agents-are-the-latest-example-of-an-old-management-failure/91405539

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Learn more about Soren's work at sorenkaplan.com.

A new Harvard and Wharton study found that one person using AI matched the output of a two-person team without it. The implications go straight to the org chart.

Harvard and Wharton researchers just ran an experiment inside Procter and Gamble that should worry anyone still drawing org charts the old way.

They randomly assigned 791 P&G professionals to tackle real product innovation challenges. Some worked alone, some in teams, with AI or without. The result: one person using AI produced work equal in quality to a two-person team without it.

That's the headline. Here's what should actually keep you up at night. AI erased functional silos between R&D and sales. People who knew almost nothing about product development reached the same level as experienced teams once they had AI in the room. And people working alone with AI reported more motivation and less anxiety than people working in teams without it.

I've spent my career helping leaders design high performing organizations. Most of the companies I work with never designed their structure on purpose. It evolved. Departments formed around who happened to hold what knowledge. R&D held expertise sales never had access to. Marketing held customer insight finance never saw. For decades, that division of labor made sense.

The P&G study suggests it doesn't anymore. When AI expands what any one person can discover and do, a lot of the coordination machinery built to connect specialists stops earning its keep. A product team can build its own business case without a finance specialist in the room. It can run its own competitive analysis without a dedicated strategist.

Most organizations haven't touched their structure to reflect any of this.

So here's where I'd start, if I were rebuilding a team today.

First, build teams around goals instead of functions. Organize people around a specific customer outcome or business problem, not a job title. Staff the team based on what the goal actually requires, and check you're not duplicating capability AI already covers.

Second, staff teams with human judgment. Let AI handle the research, the analysis, the idea generation. Put people where experience actually matters: reading context and making the final call.

Third, move functions out of departments and into networks. Stop treating expertise as something that lives inside one team. Let specialists join the goal-based teams that actually need their judgment, when they need it.

The org chart that built your advantage for the last decade might be exactly what's holding back the next one.

That's the reframe so you can leapfrog the headlines, your leadership, and your business. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and find me at sorenkaplan.com.

Show Notes

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View original on Inc. Magazine:

https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/your-org-chart-was-built-for-a-different-era-research-shows-3-ways-leaders-should-redesign-it/91402218

Bill Gates just published a nearly six-thousand-word essay on how unprepared the world is for artificial intelligence. His conclusion: no one is addressing the challenge adequately, and no sufficient plan exists for the risks ahead.

He points to threats to jobs, safety, and general well-being. He also says AI can degrade critical thinking, the exact skill people need most to navigate what's coming. I've argued something close to this for years in my work on Experiential Intelligence — as AI proliferates, human judgment becomes the most valuable skill in the room, not the least.

Gates' solutions all require cooperation: taxing AI systems, reserving jobs for humans, building international regulation between the US and China. Here's the problem. We're already terrible at exactly that kind of cooperation, even on threats we've seen coming for decades.

Look at the Colorado River. Scientists warned for decades it was overallocated and shrinking. The evidence was public the whole time. Lake Mead and Lake Powell just hit their lowest levels on record anyway. Seven states spent three years negotiating new rules, missed a February deadline, and in August the federal government imposed cuts on its own because the states couldn't agree.

It's the same pattern everywhere you look. Social Security's trust fund is projected to fall short in 2032 — Washington has known the numbers for decades, but every fix requires someone to pay more or get less. The national debt keeps climbing with no real action. Antibiotic resistance could cause 39 million deaths by 2050, and it requires hospitals, drugmakers, and farms to move together, so none of them moves first.

I see the same thing inside companies. I've advised more than 30 Fortune 1000 companies, and defining the strategy is never the hard part. Executing it, when it requires multiple groups to give something up, is where it falls apart. Volkswagen watched Chinese EV makers erode its position for years. Its unions, its works council, its executives all struggled to respond. Now it's facing steeper cuts than if it had acted while the problem was still small.

The incentive is the same in every case. Acting first means absorbing the cost first. Waiting pushes the pain into the future and onto someone else. Economists call it a collective action problem. But doing nothing is still a choice — it's just a passive one.

So here's what actually breaks the stall. Three moves.

First: have every stakeholder put something on the table. Bring the people who benefit together with the people who bear the cost, and define what each side contributes or gives up.

Second: turn the big decision into a small, reversible test. Instead of redesigning the whole system, get two parties to try a new way of working for 30 days, then decide whether to scale it.

Third: decide in advance who breaks the tie. Name the decision-maker, the criteria, and the date they step in if the group is still stuck.

A better forecast clarifies the threat. Better leadership is what actually creates the collaboration.

That's the reframe so you can leapfrog the headlines, your leadership, and your business. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and find me at sorenkaplan.com.

Subscribe and listen on:

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View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/a-6000-word-warning-from-bill-gates-exposes-the-leadership-pattern-that-keeps-crises-unsolved/91400233

Imagine yourself at eighty, looking back at the decision you're wrestling with right now.

You can't actually see that far ahead. But three separate bodies of research get you closer than you'd think.

Start with regret. Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec tracked how regret changes shape over time. In the short term, you regret what you did — the thing you said, the job you took, the money you spent. But stretch the timeline out, and the regret flips. Years later, people regret what they didn't do far more than what they did. The business they never started. The trip they kept postponing. The relationship they let go quiet.

Doing nothing feels like the safe choice today. Give it enough time, and it becomes the choice people regret most.

Then there's time itself. Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen found that when you believe you have unlimited time ahead of you, you chase external goals — career, travel, achievement. But the moment your time horizon shrinks, your priorities shift toward meaning and relationships. Here's the part that matters for you today: Carstensen found this shift doesn't require actually being old. When younger people simply imagined their time becoming limited, their priorities moved the same way.

And then there's the longest-running study on this exact question. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has tracked people for more than eighty-five years. Researchers looked at people at age fifty and asked what best predicted whether they'd be healthy and happy at eighty. It wasn't cholesterol. It wasn't income. It wasn't career success. It was satisfaction with relationships.

I run into this constantly in leadership programs. I'll ask a room of high performers how their work connects to meaning, and the conversation always drifts the same direction: a gap between where they spend their hours and what they actually care about. Most people want deeper relationships and more time with people who matter. Most people spend their week somewhere else entirely.

So here's the exercise. Ask your eighty-year-old self three questions, right now, about the decision in front of you.

First: what opportunity would that version of you most regret passing up?

Second: which relationship deserves more of your attention than it's getting?

Third: what are you pouring enormous amounts of time into that won't matter at all by then?

You might still land on the exact same decision. But you'll be making it with the clarity that usually takes decades to earn.

That's the reframe so you can leapfrog the headlines, your leadership, and your business. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one, and find me at sorenkaplan.com.

Subscribe and listen on:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d

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View original on Inc. Magazine: https://www.inc.com/soren-kaplan/your-80-year-old-self-has-wisdom-you-dont-right-now-listen-up-to-make-better-decisions/91404277

This episode answers a question every leader deploying AI needs to ask: why do two people get wildly different value from the exact same AI model?

A new MIT Sloan and Stanford study asked 1,000 adults to write their own prompts asking GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Flash for financial advice, then simulated a lifetime of following it. The advice was strong across the board, but people with sharper financial literacy wrote sharper prompts, and that gap alone was worth roughly five percent more wealth at retirement. 

Soren breaks down why the researchers call this a "demand" problem, not a model problem, and why smarter AI won't close the gap on its own, it will widen it. He connects the finding to what's happening inside companies right now, where employees who frame clear, detailed prompts get measurably better output than those who don't, and argues that asking a sharp question has become a core business skill, not just a personal finance one. 

Leaders walk away with three moves: teach people to frame requests with real numbers and goals before they need the answer, practice the asking itself on a live example rather than the topic in the abstract, and tie every lesson to a real decision, like a job offer or a budget call, so it sticks. 

Subscribe and listen on: 

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Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

View original on Inc. Magazine: MIT and Stanford Found a 5 Percent Retirement Gap. It Comes Down to Asking Better Money Questions 

NBC News and The Washington Post reported on a cluster of side effects from GLP-1 drugs being called “Ozempic personality” — a reduction in drive and motivation to seek activities users once enjoyed. One in eight American adults is currently on a GLP-1 drug, according to a November 2025 KFF Health Tracking Poll. GLP-1 receptors are distributed throughout the brain’s emotional and motivational centers, including the dopamine pathways that drive effort and reward-seeking. Derek Daniels, PhD at the University at Buffalo, says in animal models these drugs “turn down almost any motivated behavior that we can imagine.” 

Soren Kaplan breaks down the direct business implications: a meaningful share of the workforce is operating with a neurologically recalibrated motivation system, and the recognition programs, team rituals, and incentive structures most organizations rely on were designed without that in mind. University of Michigan neuroscientist Kent Berridge’s distinction between “liking” and “wanting” explains the mechanism: GLP-1 drugs appear to reduce the wanting signal — the dopamine-driven drive that makes a bonus feel worth competing for and a team celebration feel worth attending. Swiss chocolatier Lindt’s 2025 purchase data from GLP-1 households showed a “less is more” shift already appearing in consumer behavior. 

The episode covers three leadership actions: auditing whether recognition programs rely on dopamine triggers or intrinsic motivators, redesigning team rituals to include non-food-centered alternatives that speak to meaning and purpose, and asking employees what actually resonates rather than running the same motivational playbook for everyone. 

View original on Inc. Magazine: Ozempic Might Be Making Your Team Less Driven. Here’s the Science 

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t 

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

Learn more about Soren’s work at sorenkaplan.com. 

Three Michelin stars. A reservation list stretching months in advance. Thomas Keller built the French Laundry into a Napa Valley landmark over three decades. In March 2026, former dishwasher Elena Flores Beteta sued the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group, alleging she and more than 50 coworkers worked off the clock, had hours shaved, were denied breaks, and weren’t paid for all time worked. Two more lawsuits followed — three cases in three months. The restaurant group denied all allegations. But the pattern tells a story every leader should understand. 

Soren Kaplan unpacks the leadership lesson hiding inside the French Laundry story: this is the invisible gap between what customers see from the outside and what workers experience to deliver it. Researchers at Northwestern and Rutgers found roughly one in four restaurant workers in Los Angeles was paid below minimum wage in 2024, and most never came forward. The legal filings that surface are the visible edge of something wider. Zuma restaurant paid $1.8 million to settle Massachusetts state wage investigations in 2025. Disney has faced the same pattern. The counter-model is Costco — built on the principle that employee conditions and customer experience are the same management problem, not two separate agendas. 

The episode covers three actions to close the gap: conducting unscheduled back-of-house audits with frontline workers directly, building above legal compliance rather than stopping at the floor, and measuring frontline employee sentiment with the same discipline applied to customer Net Promoter Score. 

View original on Inc. Magazine: French Laundry: 3 Michelin Stars, 3 Lawsuits, and 1 Leadership Blind Spot 

Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLU3e5k8HJeOGEa7AGA97kvVjtpi6uqG0t 

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/033iseLQje3RnPGqUlh2I8?si=cb19276a3c68459d 

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leapfrogging-the-headlines-with-soren-kaplan/id1896880297 

Learn more about Soren’s work at sorenkaplan.com.