Mordecai, a longtime CEO of a regional financial institution, avoided one of the most common leadership traps: assuming his experience was enough. While many CEOs drift into the Blind Zone—the place where leaders don’t know what they don’t know—Mordecai stayed intentionally curious. He exemplifies the opposite of an Intellect Blindspot: he practiced knowledge acquisition, deliberately gathering information from across the organization and industry so he could see around corners and make better decisions.
Many CEOs unintentionally become isolated from the truth.
Information gets filtered. People become cautious. Teams protect them from noise. Feedback becomes sanitized.
And without realizing it, leaders slip into the Blind Zone—where they stop learning, stop asking, and stop seeing what they’re missing.
Mordecai refused to lead that way.
The financial industry was shifting quickly. Fintech was eroding traditional banking layers. Customer expectations were changing. New technology was emerging faster than legacy institutions could absorb.
Mordecai understood that relying on past experience alone would leave him—and the company—behind.
So he made staying connected a core part of his leadership.
In Blindspotting: How to See What’s Holding You Back as a Leader, Martin Dubin uses Mordecai as an example of a leader who stays out of the Blind Zone through knowledge acquisition — the discipline of continuously seeking new information, perspectives, and insights, especially in areas where you’re not already confident.
This matters because CEOs must make decisions across many domains; no leader can be an expert in all of them.
Mordecai never assumed he “knew enough.” He knew he never knew enough.
Read more about the Intellect Blindspot. →
Every day, Mordecai walked the halls—not to be visible, but to learn.
He routinely stopped to speak with:
His go-to questions were simple:
People told him the truth because he asked with genuine curiosity and listened without defensiveness.
The book describes Mordecai reaching out regularly to:
He wasn’t collecting validation—he was collecting insight.
In one example from the book, Mordecai used salt shakers and glasses on a table to illustrate how fintech companies were “nibbling away” at traditional banking layers.
This wasn’t a slide deck.
It was how his mind worked: constantly gathering information and making meaning in real time.
When Dubin began coaching Mordecai’s leadership team, something became clear:
Mordecai already modeled the kind of self-awareness the organization needed.
Coaching did not aim to “fix the CEO.”
It aimed to pull the rest of the leadership team up to his level of awareness.
Through coaching, his executives learned to:
Mordecai brought coaching in not because something was broken—but because something was working, and he wanted it shared.
Because Mordecai stayed connected, curious, and continually learning:
The company didn’t just adapt to change—it positioned itself ahead of it.
Mordecai shows that intellect isn’t just what you know. It’s how intentionally you expand what you know.
Leaders fall into Intellect Blindspots when they:
Mordecai avoided all of this by treating learning as leadership—not as a luxury.
He is a model for staying out of the Blind Zone and helping an entire organization do the same.
Ask yourself:
Awareness turns uncertainty into advantage. The strongest leaders learn as fast as the world changes.
→ Explore Blindspotting Coaching for Leaders & Teams
Blindspotting → Identity → Behaviors → Traits → Intellect → Emotion → Motive →
