The 1% Book Shelf — All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value by Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman, and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Leslie C. Smith (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026).
I don’t normally review a book five days after it lands, but the timing did this one a favour. The same week I read it, Fortune ran an excerpt under the headline “The four hidden landmines destroying your team’s performance.” That headline undersells the book. It makes All the Difference sound like a risk register. It’s actually an operating manual for the one variable every reorg, platform migration, and AI rollout depends on and none of them budget for: whether the people on the team can disagree without the team losing trust in each other.
This isn’t a book about AI deciding things for you, and it isn’t a book about finding your purpose. It’s about the older, harder problem underneath both: two people leaving the same meeting with two different, sincerely held versions of what just happened. Three authors wrote it — Susan MacKenty Brady, who runs Simmons University’s Institute for Inclusive Leadership; Stuart Kliman, a Harvard Negotiation Project alumnus; and retired Lieutenant General Leslie C. Smith, formerly the US Army’s inspector general. Smith once commanded the Army’s Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosives Command, and that’s where the book’s central image comes from: landmines are invisible until triggered, disproportionate once they go off, and defused by knowing where they’re buried.
The four landmines
The authors name four, and the fourth is the one that makes the other three worse.
| Landmine | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Certainty | “I know what I saw, so you must be wrong.” |
| Inconsistency | The gap between the values you state and the behaviour you actually show |
| Emotional reactivity | The same remark lands as harmless for one person and hostile for another |
| Justification | The story you build afterwards for why your reaction was fine |
Justification isn’t presented as a fourth, equal item on the list — it’s described as the fuel for the other three. Once you’ve decided you’re right, or explained away the gap between your stated values and your behaviour, or defended your reaction as the reasonable one, you stop examining any of it. That’s the reframe worth taking from this book: difference isn’t what damages teams. The story you tell yourself about why your reaction to it was justified is what damages teams. Difference just pulls the pin.
McKinsey put a number on the cost of getting this wrong: disengagement and attrition can run a mid-sized S&P 500 company $228–355 million a year, more than $1.1 billion over five years. That’s not a diversity statistic. It’s what unexamined landmines cost on a P&L.
Three ideas worth stealing
1. Know yourself before you manage anyone else. Chapter 2 opens with a three-circle diagram: your strengths, what energises you, where you add value, meeting in a “best-self zone.” The exercise that follows is blunt: recall a moment you were at your best, name the feeling, name the strength behind it. I’ve watched enough transformation programmes stall to know why this matters. You can write the most elegant target operating model on the wall and it won’t survive a leader who’s tired, certain he’s right, and shuts down a good question in a governance meeting — the book’s own opening example, and uncomfortably familiar to anyone who’s sat through a steering committee.
2. Return to respect is a loop, not a lecture. Chapter 3 gives you four moves, drawn as a cycle rather than a checklist: recognise what’s happening inside you, reset before you answer, reframe what triggered you, respond from respect rather than reactivity. What I like here is the honesty built in: the book pairs a “best-self enablers” exercise with a near-identical “best-self blockers” one, and states plainly that your blockers aren’t the mirror image of your enablers — they’re a different list entirely. True in delivery too. What derails you under a hard deadline is rarely the exact opposite of what keeps you sharp on a good day.
3. Accountability is a tracker, not a resolution. Chapter 7 closes the book with a five-column weekly worksheet: target behaviour, did I model it, what helped or hindered, what I’ll adjust tomorrow. On its own that’s a tool you’d file under “won’t use.” What makes it land is the worked example alongside it, which includes a failed Tuesday, the behaviour didn’t stick, the adjustment is small, sitting next to a Monday that worked. That’s the whole argument in one table: consistency, not perfection, earns trust back after a landmine goes off.
Consistency, not perfection, earns trust back after a landmine goes off.
The 1% takeaway
If you keep one idea, keep this: the landmine you can actually defuse is the one underneath the other three. You can’t stop being certain sometimes, or reactive sometimes, or inconsistent sometimes — that’s how people work under pressure. What you can catch, with practice, is the justification: the sentence you construct afterwards to make your reaction the reasonable one. Catch that sentence before you say it out loud, and the other three landmines lose most of their blast radius.
The landmine you can actually defuse is the one underneath the other three.
Applying it to delivery and change
Theory doesn’t survive a sprint retro unless it’s small enough to fit inside one. Three ways I’d wire this into a team going through change — platform migration, AI adoption, reorg, doesn’t matter which:
- Name the landmine live. When a disagreement flares in planning, someone says which of the four is in the room — “I think that’s certainty talking” — out loud, without blame attached. Naming it does most of the defusing.
- Run the tracker as a retro column, not a private diary. Add “target behaviour” and “what I’d adjust” as a standing column on the retro board, filled in by whoever wants to. Public and small beats private and thorough.
- Audit your own justification sentence. After a hard call, write down the one sentence you’d use to defend your reaction if someone challenged it. If it comes out fluently, that’s the tell — you’d already built the justification before anyone asked.
None of this is exotic. I’ve sat through enough platform shifts, mainframe to client-server, on-prem to cloud, waterfall to agile, now whatever we end up calling the AI shift, to know the technical migration is never what kills the programme. It’s the accumulated, unexamined justification behind a dozen small reactions that nobody named at the time.
The technical migration is never what kills the programme.
Sources used
- Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman, and Leslie C. Smith, All the Difference: Six Leadership Actions to Bridge Perspectives, Strengthen Teams, and Create Value (Harvard Business Review Press, 2026).
- Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman, and Leslie C. Smith, “4 Hidden Traps of Team Dynamics,” Harvard Business Review, 15 July 2026.
- Susan MacKenty Brady, Stuart D. Kliman, and Leslie C. Smith, “The four hidden landmines destroying your team’s performance,” Fortune, 14 July 2026.
- “Some employees are destroying value. Others are building it. Do you know the difference?” McKinsey Quarterly, September 2023.
- Paschal Sheeran and Thomas L. Webb, “The Intention–Behavior Gap,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 10, no. 9 (2016): 503–518.
- Albert Bandura, “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” Psychological Review 84, no. 2 (1977): 191–215.
- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (Doubleday/Currency, 1990) — the “cycle of inference” the book links to its certainty landmine.
- Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Penguin) — Patton, cofounder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, also blurbs this book; coauthor Stuart Kliman is a Harvard Negotiation Project alumnus.
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