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The invisible Bob and Martha
Organizations have their own humus — an invisible living layer of trust, memory, and relationships that forms slowly and can be destroyed in an afternoon. Meet the people who live there deliberately.
Richard Brisebois
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The one belief that generates all the others
Gary Hamel's question about the managerialist mindset is right—but answering it as a list misses the source. One belief generates the rest: that a person is a type of thing. Everything else follows from there.
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Working with the Grain
A cabinet maker works with the grain, not against it. Management works the same way — and the practice doesn't protect you from using it badly.
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On Any Given Day
How are they feeling today? Are they after a big win that’s taken a lot of time and energy, or a quick win from being clever and nimble? Are they after a loss, a big loss, like a major project they worked on, prepared, pitched, and got a no?
Newsletter
April 2026 - Prussia, a wine bottle, a cartel, and the fine print
The premise - Brendan McCord | Cosmos Institute Prussia, 1809. Napoleon has just walked through it. The nation wants officers and engineers. The diplomat handed the education file gives them something else. McCord traces what happened to that idea across two centuries and closes with the observation that the people using AI
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The Signal and the Sorting
Every institution broadcasts a signal through its decisions, not its declarations — and over time, that signal sorts for exactly the people it deserves. The question isn't what signal you want to send. It's what your attrition data says you're already sending.
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The Gandhi Paradox
Gandhi's followers could walk away. Yours can't afford to. This essay names the structural gap between visible engagement and genuine commitment that no open-door policy closes.
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Leadership under any name
Two high schools. Same banner. Same word. If every school is producing leaders, who exactly are they going to lead? Something has gone wrong with leadership — and it's worth saying precisely what.
Newsletter
March 2026: Speak, Compete, Organize, Think
Here’s how language works Edwin L. Battistella | Oxford University Press Blog Veni, vidi, vici. Friends, Romans, countrymen. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. You already know the rule of three. Battistella draws on S. Jay Keyser’s study of repetition in the verbal arts to
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The fourth book
In a small city, a bookseller named Javier curated a pile of books for every visit—drawn from conversations about dissertations, hockey, and a losing soccer team. This is an essay about that kind of knowing, why it rarely survives the big city, and the workaround one reader has invented: buy three,
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Whose Accounting?
Everyone in business knows the phrase: you need a fresh set of eyes. But fresh eyes almost always look through an inherited lens. This essay moves from zero-based budgeting to the examined life — and argues that scrutiny alone isn't liberation. When the criteria we use to examine our commitments wer
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Purpose Won’t Cover a $400 Emergency
A new NBER working paper forced over a million real tradeoffs across 126 dimensions of life from 3,300 respondents. When people can’t just endorse everything, when they actually have to choose, a clear hierarchy emerges. Family well-being, financial security, and health dominate. Children’s health alone carries