There’s a road near my house that was built early in the automobile era. It was built so that early adopter car owners would have something to do with their cars–a parkway that went now… | Continue reading
(Customer service is expensive) Of course it’s expensive. You’ll need to hire people inclined to be empathic and kind. You’ll need to provide systems and training and support. You… | Continue reading
There’s a road near my house that was built early in the automobile era. It was built so that early adopter car owners would have something to do with their cars–a parkway that went now… | Continue reading
Art (movies, plays, fiction, paintings, poetry…) exists to create a change. Often, that’s a change in the viewer, and sometimes, powerful art changes the culture. Art with no intent can… | Continue reading
We’d probably be better off if we could simply say, “I’m afraid.” Our culture has persistently reminded us that the only thing to fear is fear itself, that confessing fear i… | Continue reading
This might be the workplace question of the decade. Does the boss buy your time or your productivity? In the pre-industrial age, when we worked from home (“cottage industries”) workers … | Continue reading
Twenty years from now, you will have new skills. New customers. A new title and a new kind of leverage. All of this forward motion requires a less celebrated element–all the things you’… | Continue reading
The first mindset is pretty common. Take good notes. Make tiny changes. Repeat. Improve. Incrementally move along the asymptote. Test and measure. The other mindset is rare indeed. Do things that m… | Continue reading
The first mindset is pretty common. Take good notes. Make tiny changes. Repeat. Improve. Incrementally move along the asymptote. Test and measure. The other mindset is rare indeed. Do things that m… | Continue reading
That’s the report from the band on the audience’s reaction to the first live performance of Stairway to Heaven. They bombed. The audience wanted hits, not something new. Every good idea… | Continue reading
Successful small businesses often stumble when they seek to get to an entirely different scale. It’s easy to believe that things are dramatically better when there’s more. More customer… | Continue reading
Insufficient effort creates work that’s wasted. If you do a slapdash job, then the roof leaks, the food is inedible, the car doesn’t start. Insufficient effort is a shortcut that wasn&#… | Continue reading
Every day around 3 pm, my dog takes a nap. As far as dogs go, he has a ton of available options. He could hang in the backyard, chase a squirrel, whatever. But in that moment, every day, the choice… | Continue reading
If you have a million Twitter followers, that means that 99.9% of the people on Twitter are ignoring you, which, with a little rounding, means you have 0%. If you write a book and it sells a millio… | Continue reading
If you have a million Twitter followers, that means that 99.9% of the people on Twitter are ignoring you, which, with a little rounding, means you have 0%. If you write a book and it sells a millio… | Continue reading
Early adopters change the world. While one person choosing not to eat meat will have a small impact on our climate, it will have a much bigger impact on the restaurants, groceries and food supplier… | Continue reading
What do traditional retailers own or control? The buildingThe inventoryThe relationship with vendorsData about who is shopping and how they shopTrust with vendors, customers, employees and landlord… | Continue reading
Here’s a business idea for you, feel free to build it if you’re interested. Don’t waste a waiting list The waiting list has value, and it’s also a source of frustration. There are peopl… | Continue reading
Among painters, poets, writers, actors, bloggers, directors, influencers, capitalists, fundraisers, politicians and singers, you’ll find a few who want to go all the way to superfamous. They … | Continue reading
Ten years ago, if you were as good at using networks and software as you are today, most of your peers would have considered you some sort of wizard. The question isn’t whether or not each of… | Continue reading
“What evidence would you need to see to change your mind?” The honest answer to this question is usually: “I need a new story that’s more immediate, more vivid and most of a… | Continue reading
That’s not what we usually hear. To have “us” we often need “them.” To make a profit (or a commotion) in social media, the math is usually division, not addition. And … | Continue reading
No matter what it is you’re cooking, if you put too much in the pot, it’s not going to come out as well. Very few things scale forever. The hardest moment to stop scaling our work is th… | Continue reading
It has taken us by surprise, but in our current situation, when everyone has more of a voice and more impact on the public than ever before, it suddenly matters. You wouldn’t take your car to… | Continue reading
Akimbo, an independent B corp., continues to show us how cohort-based learning can change lives for the better. I hope you’ll check out what my friends at Akimbo are up to: The Early Decision… | Continue reading
Among painters, poets, writers, actors, bloggers, directors, influencers, capitalists, fundraisers, politicians and singers, you’ll find a few who want to go all the way to superfamous. They … | Continue reading
We’d rather not claim luck. Good luck feels like something was unearned. And bad luck sounds like an excuse. The false promise of meritocracy decries luck in all its forms. And yet… Amo… | Continue reading
It’s essential. Domain knowledge is a gift. It’s how we advance in our field and in society. The insights and false steps of those that came before us, laid out clearly, there to be lea… | Continue reading
For the longest time, just about all jobs were task jobs. Factory work. Inbox then outbox. The assembly line, the ticket taker, the cook… We learned how to hire for these jobs, measure them, … | Continue reading
Sometimes we assume that our competitors are far smarter than we are, better informed and harder working. And sometimes we assume that they’re clueless, lazy and hapless. Neither is true. | Continue reading
to never miss a deadline to be the last to speak up or offer help to learn something new every day to be helpless in the face of a technology to give others the benefit of the doubt to ask for help… | Continue reading
We’d like the systems we depend on to do what we expect and need them to do. A useful component of that sort of system is that there’s a bedrock set of expectations, principles and boun… | Continue reading
This is the default for allocating something that’s scarce. It’s also rarely the fairest or most efficient alternative. And it’s sort of lazy. I called a service provider yesterda… | Continue reading
It’s so much easier to see and process the world if we divide it into discrete bits. This is non-fiction, that’s fiction. This is a good restaurant, that’s a bad one. This person … | Continue reading
It’s here, right now, today. The open-source project that needs a contributor. The community charity that needs a volunteer fundraiser. The co-worker who needs coaching on a new presentation.… | Continue reading
That’s the best sort of breakthrough idea. An idea that after it is seen, can’t be unseen, an idea that changes what comes next. No need to change the world. A tiny part of the world, e… | Continue reading
It’s essential. Domain knowledge is a gift. It’s how we advance in our field and in society. The insights and false steps of those that came before us, laid out clearly, there to be lea… | Continue reading
In an expert-run industrialized economy, there’s a lot of pressure to be the one who’s sure, the person with all the answers. Far more valuable is someone who has all the questions. The… | Continue reading
One way to tell if the audience is happy is to ask a simple question: “Do you want it spicier?” (or the equivalent). If half the people want it to go in one direction and the other half… | Continue reading
One way to tell if the audience is happy is to ask a simple question: “Do you want it spicier?” (or the equivalent). If half the people want it to go in one direction and the other half… | Continue reading
My friend Amy taught me that “craven” doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. I’ve been using it to mean, “selfish in a particularly short-sighted way.” It actuall… | Continue reading
The easy argument to make is that the thing we have now is better than the new thing that’s on offer. All one has to do is take the thing we have now as a given (ignoring its real costs) and … | Continue reading
Copywriting turns words into action. But which words? And which action? Often, copywriters take a strategy for granted. They don’t take the time to think about what this sentence or that para… | Continue reading
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Marilyn Strathern expanded on Charles Goodhart’s comment about monetary policy and turned it into a useful law o… | Continue reading
Adam Smith and David Ricardo argued that all value comes from labor, and the value of something is in the amount of labor it took to produce it. But Henry George understood that this is backward. T… | Continue reading
I bought someone a digital gift card the other day. That’s generally a bad idea, since there’s so much waste and breakage, but it was the right answer to the problem in the moment. The … | Continue reading
I bought someone a digital gift card the other day. That’s generally a bad idea, since there’s so much waste and breakage, but it was the right answer to the problem in the moment. The … | Continue reading
A friend just got handed an unreasonable rejection. It came on a platter, delivered with very little in the way of kindness and no hints at all about what to do next. It is not personal. Not about … | Continue reading