Everyone loves talking about “culture.” Most leaders don’t actually build one.

Tonight’s national championship isn’t being decided by hype speeches or talent alone. It’s being decided by standards, the kind most organizations say they have but don’t enforce.

In this week’s Insights episode, I break down what Curt Cignetti’s leadership teaches us about winning:

• Why motivation is overrated

• How performance earns opportunity (not potential)

• The danger of hiring résumé instead of fit

• How belief is built with proof, not posters

• Why calm leaders outperform loud ones

Five minutes. One story. Five takeaways.

If your culture collapses under pressure, don’t blame your people. Blame your standards.

Listen before the game. Then ask yourself, would your team win tonight?

Read Emil’s book Leading With Trust:

⁠⁠Amazon⁠⁠

⁠⁠Barnes & Noble⁠⁠

Visit Us at: ⁠ThinkNewAmsterdam.

He’s been behind some of the biggest power shifts in modern sports, yet most people have never heard his name.

Free agency, athlete compensation, equal pay, and structural reform didn’t result from clever words at the table. They came from leverage built long before negotiations even began. Nearly 70% of his most important cases never went to trial; they settled because the system itself was under pressure.

In the latest episode of Insights, I break down how he approaches negotiation, how he builds leverage before the conversation, shapes the narrative to shift power, anchors decisions in objective standards, and negotiates for systems rather than just one-time wins.

If you lead, influence decisions, or negotiate at any level, this episode will change how you prepare for your next conversation.

Most people still see AI as just a research tool for negotiations, but that belief is outdated.

In 2024, Amazon announced that AI agents were negotiating supplier contracts and cloud-service pricing directly with partners, analyzing patterns, adjusting concessions, and closing deals more quickly and sometimes more effectively than human teams. This wasn’t just experimentation. It was operational. It worked.

Negotiation is no longer solely a human skill. It’s evolving into a hybrid approach: partly strategic, partly relationship-focused, and partly AI-led.

In this Insights episode, we examine what AI negotiators can currently do, how they will transform deal-making, and what leaders must begin doing now to remain competitive as AI progresses from being an assistant to an active participant.

Read Emil’s book Leading With Trust:

⁠Amazon⁠

⁠Barnes & Noble⁠

Sign up for the Insights email: ⁠ThinkNewAmsterdam.com⁠.