No #177 | July 13, 2025

by Matthew Boyd

Good morning, welcome to the weekly Lead It Cool newsletter.

I'm going camping this week, which means I've spent the last few evenings playing my guitar and refreshing my memory on how to play a few crowd favourites.

Here are my go to song campfire songs:

• ​I Want It That Way (90s nostalgia is a helluva drug🎵)
• ​In the Jungle (gotta hit those high notes🦁)
• ​Your Love ("I don't wanna, I don't wanna"🤣)
• ​Itsy, Bits, Spider (everyone knows the words😜)

What are your go-to sing-alongs?

In this week's Lead It Cool newsletter:

• ⚡Forming, Storming, Norming, (Deforming), Performing
• 📉Margin Call
• 😂Manageable Tasks
• 😎Cool Links

⚡Forming, Storming, Norming, (Deforming), Performing

Ask any recent grad of a business-related program what the most challenging part of their degree was, and chances are you’ll get the same answer: group work.

It starts out innocently enough.

The forming stage is a bit like the honeymoon: everyone’s polite, eager, full of ideas, and still pretending they've read all the material.

Then comes the storming: miscommunications, missed deadlines, power struggles, the quiet one who never responds to group chats, and the Type-A who passive-aggressively rewrites everyone’s slides at midnight.

If you’re lucky (and persistent), you eventually make it to the norming phase: where people accept their roles, lean into each other’s strengths, accept each other's weaknesses, and agree to stop using Comic Sans on the PowerPoint.

And if you’re really lucky?

You hit performing. That’s the magic zone where everything clicks. Tasks get done. Ideas flow. And you start having fun again.

This four-stage journey, form, storm, norm, perform, applies to more than just business degree projects. Take, for example, the famously combustible British rock band Oasis.

Their early days? Pure forming. Two brothers, one dream, big eyebrows, and even bigger ambition.

Storming?

Oh, did they ever.

Fistfights, walkouts, public insults, and the kind of sibling rivalry that would make the Roy family uncomfortable. They skipped norming entirely and went straight into a bonus round: deforming.

The band imploded in 2009, with Liam and Noel Gallagher vowing never to work together again.

But then something unexpected happened. After many years of feuding and fallout, Oasis announced a reunion world tour this summer.

And you know what? It seems to be going pretty well!

Does this mean the Gallagher brothers have finally reached the performing stage?

Maybe.

Maybe they’ve learned to accept each other’s quirks. Maybe they’ve matured. Or maybe they’ve just realized the magic of cash flow. Either way, they’ve found a way to work together again.

So the next time you’re knee-deep in a messy group project, wondering if you’ll survive another meeting, remember this: if the Gallagher brothers can find a way, so can you.

📉Margin Call

One movie I like to revisit every few years is Margin Call.

It tells the story of a banking firm in New York City on the eve of the 2008 financial crash. It’s not the most action-packed film, but the acting and dialogue are superb.

One scene in particular always stands out. It’s the climax of the film, when the powerful CEO (Jeremy Irons) calls an emergency midnight meeting. He interrogates a junior analyst (Zachary Quinto) in front of the firm’s senior executives and partners, pressing him to clearly explain the unfolding crisis, something none of the senior leaders have been able to do.

Here’s a snippet of that dialogue that really stands out. Watch the full scene here.

JOHN TULD (CEO)
​How old are you Mr. Sullivan?​
​
PETER (ANALYST)
​I'm twenty-seven sir.​
​
JOHN TULD (CEO)
​Please call me John.​
​
PETER (ANALYST)
​Yes sir.​
​
JOHN TULD (CEO)
​So Mr. Sullivan why don't you tell me what you think is going on here, and please speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever, I didn't get here on my brains I can assure you of that.​
​

😂Manageable Tasks

I feel this way about yardwork... 😂

😎Cool Links

🤔Scaling the 21st-century leadership factory. Building a leadership factory, which involves taking a systematic approach to identifying, nurturing, and empowering future leaders, is a group activity. But its lessons are more likely to stick, and growth opportunities are more likely to emerge, when CEOs, working closely with their leadership teams, take an active, hands-on role in building the factory.

🦸‍♂️'We all want to be Superman; Superman wants to be us' We all want to be Superman. We want to fly, we wanna shoot beams out of our eyes, have super strength to be able to beat up anybody who comes at us. We go into the movie wanting to be Superman. And I think that by the end of the movie, we realize that Superman wants to be us. He wants to be a human being. That is his biggest desire.

💡What is fractional leadership, and why is it booming right now? Fractional leaders work in part-time, high-impact roles across multiple companies. They are self-employed and operate on an access pay-as-you-go basis, often supporting a portfolio of organizations and adjusting their support based on each company’s needs at any given time. They frequently sit at the head of various functions, such as finance, marketing, or technology. Organizations often hire them to help grow the company during stages when it doesn’t require a full-time leader in that area.

🤯Some guy kicked a rock during his walks for 85 days and the results are pretty cool.​

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