Hi Reader, A team is no longer just a group of humans sitting in one office. It may include people working across locations, some meeting in person, some never meeting at all, and increasingly, AI agents participating in research, drafting, analysis, coordination, or execution. That changes the leadership question from "How do I manage people?" to "How do I manage a system of humans and AI working together?" In my recent conversation on The Tech Leaders Playbook, I made a simple point: what...

Hi Reader, Daria’s here. This email is more personal than usual. With the conflict affecting so many countries in the Middle East, it's hard to stick to original plans. We're experiencing pressure psychologically, wrapped in missile alerts — you don't know when they will come, and you need to drop everything and go to the shelter. That could happen in the middle of writing this newsletter, in the middle of a workshop planned two months ago, or at night. It's psychologically and physically...

Hi Reader! Daria’s here. Last week, I was recording a new episode of Built by People Leaders with Elena Krutova — and about 15 minutes in, she said something that made me stop and ask her to repeat it. She was talking about the hardest kind of leadership work. And it’s not scaling a team. Not building something from scratch. It’s the other kind of work: walking into an organization that’s struggling, where the processes exist but aren’t working, where people are in place, but their motivation...