Forthcoming from LEI Press · Fall 2026
The Drift Tax
Why organizations pay twice for the same performance, and how to stop.
Drift
Tax
You did everything right. You funded the strategy. You hired good people. You ran the training. The results came, briefly. Then, quietly, they faded, and you paid to get them back.
You have felt this. Most leaders have. Almost nobody can name what it costs.
Every organization funds capability in advance. Compensation, hiring, onboarding, strategy rollouts. The money is approved on the assumption that the behavior it buys will hold. Research shows only 12% of people trained on a new behavior apply it consistently over time. The other 88% drift. Not because they are uncommitted, but because the structural environment was never built to hold them.
So organizations pay again. And again. None of it appears as a line item. All of it compounds.
“The Drift Tax is the cumulative cost organizations absorb when behavioral stability decays after investment, forcing the same performance to be paid for again.”
Inside the book
An audit, not a training manual
The Drift Tax does not teach leadership skills. It does not blame leaders. It traces, cause by cause and cost by cost, how capability that was already purchased quietly fails to sustain, and what tolerating that failure authorizes.
Execution Drift
Why capable leaders drift under pressure, why it is biology and structure rather than character, and why the answer was never more willpower.
The Kinetic Chain of Execution
Execution is a chain of connected links, not a test of individual discipline. When one link breaks, effort keeps moving while results stop. Motion without momentum.
The FONE Factors
Fear, Overconfidence, Negative Impressions, and Execution Blindness: the four human patterns that quietly convert pressure into inconsistency.
Human capacity in the AI era
The world’s complexity has outgrown human capacity, and organizations keep running post-AI velocity on a pre-AI operating system. The book shows what holds instead.
Who it’s for
The leaders who sign for the spend
- ✓CEOs, COOs, and CFOs who keep approving budget for problems that were already funded
- ✓Operations and CX executives watching initiatives launch strong and quietly decay
- ✓HR and talent leaders tired of investments that fade before the next quarter closes
- ✓Any leader scaling AI on top of human execution that was never stabilized in the first place
Grounded in research
The evidence behind the audit
The book draws on research from the Leadership Execution Institute, published with permanent DOIs through Zenodo, the open research repository operated by CERN, alongside the work of Gallup, motivation science, Deming’s systems thinking, and hundreds of Fast Leader Show conversations with the researchers who built the frameworks the leadership industry runs on.
Leadership Execution Institute · Published by LEI Press
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The Drift Tax arrives Fall 2026. If you would like to know the moment it is available, leave your email and I will tell you myself. Nothing else. No sequence. No pitch.