Ask Nicholas Mukhtar to name the single pattern he sees most often when a company is struggling, and he answers before the question finishes. “It’s just communication,” he said. He has put a number on it too: “that seems to be 90% of the problems across the board.”
The claim sounds too simple to be useful. The cost data argues otherwise. Grammarly’s workplace research estimated that poor communication drains $1.2 trillion a year from U.S. businesses. McKinsey, examining the distance between what a strategy could deliver and what an operating model actually produces, found a 30% gap even at high-performing companies. Both figures describe the same quiet leak: the space between a plan and its execution is where results are won or lost, and most of that space is filled with conversations that never happened.
Mukhtar, the Fort Lauderdale founder of Tera Strategies, watches the leak open across industries. A medical director’s office feels it as delayed care decisions and chronic friction between clinical and administrative teams. A family office feels it as an inheritance plan nobody living can fully explain. A startup feels it as a founder doing everything personally because the team was never handed enough clarity to act alone.
The breakdown runs in both directions, and Mukhtar refuses to pin it only on one side. He describes employees who quit without ever telling a manager what they wanted. “Did you, as the employee, sit down with the business owner and explain to them why you want something different and what you’re actually looking for and give them the opportunity to meet you there?” he asked. “Most of the time, the answer is no.”
Trust makes the silence worse. A 2025 Mental Health UK report found that only 56% of young workers felt comfortable raising pressure or stress with a line manager, down sharply from 75% the year before. When people stop believing a conversation will change anything, they stop starting it, and the manager loses the early warning that might have kept a good employee from leaving.
Mukhtar traces much of it to noise. “People just get pulled in so many different directions,” he said, “and a lot of it is you just need to simplify things.” His prescription is less a technique than a refusal to overcomplicate: cut the clutter, then have the direct conversation the clutter was hiding. Low-tech, unglamorous, and according to the dollar figures, worth more than almost any tool a company could buy instead.
