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Originally shared in our October 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Three senior client partners from global consulting firm Korn Ferry recently published a piece that offers five ways for leaders to build emotional intelligence. ELI facilitator Stephen Taylor shared the article with us, along with his thoughts on how the authors’ suggestions overlap with how entrepreneurs already work. The authors sum up the skill in a simple line: “Emotional intelligence is relational.” It means reading…

Originally shared in our October 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania psychologist behind the research on learned helplessness and optimism, spends two Hidden Brain episodes with Shankar Vedantam on why some people act on what’s in front of them while others decide nothing they do will matter. In Part 1, he builds his case for agency, which he describes as having three parts, efficacy, optimism, and imagination. To illustrate this,…

Originally shared in our September 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Amar Bhidé taught entrepreneurship for 35 years at Harvard, Chicago, Columbia, and Tufts, and his 2000 study The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses remains one of the closest looks at how real companies get started. In this 40-minute talk at the Kansas City Public Library, he asks how anyone decides to act when the future can’t be calculated. His answer is imagination grounded in…

Originally shared in our September 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Owen Zidar (Princeton) and Eric Zwick (University of Chicago Booth) spent years working with U.S. tax data on business owners and found a large group of wealthy Americans most of us never think about. They own beer distributorships, HVAC companies, dental practices, and auto dealerships. By the authors’ count, there are 25 ultra-rich auto dealers for every member of the Forbes 400. Zidar suggests asking…

Originally shared in our August 2026 Top of Mind Newsletter. Sarah Hernholm taught elementary school for years before she left in 2009 to start WIT (Whatever It Takes), a nonprofit that teaches entrepreneurial thinking to teens. Her latest piece for Forbes takes on a question that’s come up in almost every one of our partner conversations lately: what happens to the entrepreneurial mindset when AI can do the thinking for you? She argues that AI…