Gallup surveyed leaders across seven core competencies in 2026 and found that only 30% of managers rate their direct leader as exceptional or outstanding at creating accountability, the lowest score of any competency measured, and the one area where leaders and the managers who report to them come closest to agreeing.
Read that as a diagnosis, not a complaint nobody asked for. Accountability is the one competency leaders themselves admit is weakest, and the managers watching them work agree. That gap does not stay contained to a performance review. It shows up as stalled cross-functional initiatives, postmortems with no identifiable owner, and a leadership team that can describe its mandates fluently and its deliverables not at all.
This is the second pillar in the Enterprise Value Playbook, and it inherits everything from the first. A documented strategy translated into function-specific priorities still fails if the leaders responsible for those priorities are not individually, specifically, and measurably accountable for delivering them. Strategy tells the organization where to go. Accountability determines whether anyone actually gets there.
GROSS MARGINS HAVE COMPRESSED FOR SIX STRAIGHT QUARTERS. YOUR NEGOTIATING SCRIPT HAS NOT.
I built the Price Pressure Playbook scaling fifteen organizations, five million to five hundred million. In October I am running it live for the first time: one virtual session, two in-person sessions, NYC and Austin. Price increases each week between now and the first session. This week is the lowest it will ever be.
This week’s concept sits in Pillar 2, Leadership + Talent: leaders carry clear accountability, defined deliverables, and KPIs tied to business outcomes.
Where You Stand
Ask each member of your leadership team, individually and without letting them compare notes beforehand, what specific outcome they are personally accountable for this quarter. A title is not an answer. Owning growth or owning operations is not an answer. If what comes back is a mandate instead of a deliverable, that is your actual score.
The Failure Pattern
Leaders carry broad mandates, own growth, own operations, without a specific deliverable or KPI attached to either. Cross-functional work stalls at the handoff every time, because the handoff was never actually assigned to anyone. When something fails, the postmortem cannot identify a single accountable owner, because the organization chart implied shared ownership, which functions in practice as no ownership at all.
Kotter’s Step 2, Build a Guiding Coalition, applies here from a different angle than it did in Pillar 1. A coalition only functions if each member inside it has clearly defined individual accountability. Assembling a guiding coalition of leaders who are each personally unaccountable produces the identical drift as having no coalition at all. Every leadership role needs one to three specific, measurable deliverables tied directly to enterprise outcomes, documented and reviewed on the same cadence as the KPI rhythm from Pillar 1. Every cross-functional initiative needs a single named owner from the outset, never a committee.
The Win Condition
Asked in isolation, every leader can state their specific accountable deliverables without hesitation or hedging. A failed initiative has one identifiable owner, not a diffused, unassignable failure spread evenly enough that no one has to answer for it.
FROM THE CHAIRMAN
“If this initiative fails, whose name goes on the postmortem? If you cannot answer that in five seconds, nobody actually owns it, and everybody will point at everybody else the day it matters.”
MARKET INTELLIGENCE
Three signals from this week across Venture Capital, Private Equity, Family Offices, and Capital:
Artisan Partners, a top-20 shareholder in Novartis, has called for a board shake-up after the company’s shares suffered a record fall on back-to-back clinical trial setbacks tied to its $12 billion Avidity acquisition. Managing director David Samra told Reuters the party is over, and specifically framed the problem as accountability: the board itself, not only management, needs to answer for a string of value-destroying deals. (Reuters, via Yahoo Finance, September 10, 2026: https://finance.yahoo.com/healthcare/articles/exclusive-major-novartis-shareholder-calls-102224490.html) This is Pillar 2 playing out in public. A $12 billion decision with no board member willing to be individually named is exactly the diffused ownership this week’s concept describes.
Apollo Global Management is in talks to acquire Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Synthes orthopedics unit for close to $20 billion, what would be Apollo’s largest healthcare investment to date. (Reuters, via Investing.com, September 11, 2026: https://www.investing.com/news/company-news/apollo-in-talks-to-buy-jj-orthopedics-unit-for-nearly-20-billion-4898554) J&J named this separation a strategic priority last October. Eleven months later, the deal is close to done. That is what a documented, function-specific strategic bet looks like when leadership stays accountable to the timeline instead of letting it drift.
Harvey, the legal AI startup, raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, nearly doubling its valuation in nine months and crossing $400 million in annual recurring revenue. (TechCrunch, September 9, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/harvey-hits-15-5b-valuation-months-after-reaching-11b/) Growth capital moving at that velocity does not fund a mandate. It funds a company whose leadership can point to specific, measurable outcomes quarter over quarter. Investors are not rewarding vision here. They are rewarding a scoreboard.
WHY ONLY 100 PEOPLE WILL EVER GET THIS
This newsletter has run for over a year, most recently built around the Price Pressure Playbook framework. Starting this month, I am building a second home for this work on Substack, with a new Enterprise Value Playbook focus and a paid tier alongside the free issues you already receive.
The paid tier is called From the Tip of the Spear: Executive Briefings. Every month I release one Executive Briefing Framework, thirteen in total, each a board-ready deck answering the only question my work is built around: how you scale the organization and maximize enterprise value. Membership also includes a monthly Insider group briefing with live Q&A.
Founding Member seats are capped at 100, priced once at $1,200 for lifetime access. Annual access is $400. Seats will not reopen once the cap is reached.
Reply “Briefings” for early access before the general list opens, and I will send you the first one free. The free weekly edition continues without interruption either way.
FROM THE TIP OF THE SPEAR
Thirty percent. That is how many managers believe their leader actually holds people accountable for the work in front of them. Not thirty percent of employees complaining about a boss they resent. Thirty percent of the people closest to leadership, watching it operate every day, willing to say the standard is being enforced.
The other seventy percent are not describing bad leaders. They are describing leaders who are inspiring, communicative, and strategic, and who quietly let accountability slide because holding someone to a standard is uncomfortable and vision is not. Gallup measured seven leadership competencies this year. Accountability finished last, by a wide margin, and it is the one competency where leaders and the people who report to them come closest to agreeing on the verdict.
A Novartis shareholder said the quiet part out loud this week. If a twelve billion dollar decision goes to zero, someone has to be penalized for it, not just the balance sheet. That is not a punitive instinct. It is the recognition that a decision without a named, accountable owner is not a decision at all. It is an event that happened to the company.
Every pillar in this playbook assumes the one before it is functioning. Strategy without accountable owners is a slide deck with better production values. The fix is not complicated, and it is not comfortable either. One to three deliverables per leadership role, tied to enterprise outcomes, reviewed on the same cadence as the numbers. A single named owner for every cross-functional initiative before it starts, not after it fails. Ask your leadership team, individually, what they own. Then listen for whether the answer is a mandate or a deliverable. The gap between those two answers is where enterprise value is currently leaking out of your organization.
I WANT YOUR SCAR TISSUE IN MY NYU CLASSROOM
The discipline behind this newsletter is the same discipline I teach at NYU, across two courses: Scaling and Exiting the Business for Maximum Value, and Funding and Legal Approaches for Start-Ups. Each semester I bring operators into the classroom, live in NYC or virtual, to sit with graduate students working through the same problem from the practitioner side.
If you have scaled a company, exited one, raised capital, negotiated the legal terms of a deal, or sat across the table at the moment it was won or lost, I want to hear from you.
From the Tip of the Spear is my weekly publication for executives who are building something real. One issue, every Tuesday. A field report from active operator engagements, one principle with supporting data, and market intelligence from across my VC, PE, and family office network.
