How exceptional leaders communicate when the message has to land. Plus bi-weekly premium essays on “What the Best Leaders Say” in those moments.
Why is this so rare?
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Look at any message that actually moved people. You will find the same four properties every time. Plain and simple so people understand it immediately. Conveniently, the four spell PATH. Once you see the pattern, it feels almost embarrassingly obvious. Which makes this hard to explain: Why is it so rare? You would expect to see it everywhere. Most leadership messages fail at least one test. Often more. Crazy, given that it takes about 30 seconds to test your message against the checklist. Keep lighting the path, __ If you like podcasts but not the 2 min intros, my podcast “Irresistible Communication” is 2 minutes overall and always comes with an actionable insight you can try right away. |
This Moment Counts
How exceptional leaders communicate when the message has to land. Plus bi-weekly premium essays on “What the Best Leaders Say” in those moments.
THIS MOMENT COUNTS · ISSUE 02 Has the show finally won over substance? Wednesday, April 29, 2026 · by Dr. Michael Gerharz In the past months, several of my clients all brought up a very similar question. One that troubles them deeply. It goes something like this:I've always wanted to be the thoughtful, honest, no bullshit communicator. And it worked well enough. But now every event I go to, I see polished and loud and confident speakers and I'm standing there thinking, have I lost? Like, has...
What the Best Leaders Say Issue 12 Leadership has a Hollywood problem. Somewhere between Al Pacino’s locker room speech and every inspirational CEO profile ever written, we absorbed an idea about what a leader is supposed to say when the moment counts. We’ve seen so many versions of it, and it always looks so compelling on screen, that most leaders now walk into their first big moment trying to recreate it, often without consciously knowing that’s what they’re doing. Two CEOs in this issue...
THIS MOMENT COUNTS · ISSUE 01 Should you explain it simpler? Wednesday, April 16, 2026 · by Michael Gerharz At some point in your career, you sat in a room where someone was presenting something important. A strategy. A proposal. A decision that was going to affect your work. You understood exactly what they were saying. Every word was clear. And you wholeheartedly disagreed. You didn’t say anything because something about the room, the dynamic, the stakes, the relationship, made disagreeing...