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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.
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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
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The day my boss said: Not one of your best performances?
My boss once addressed a serious misstep with a single question. What he chose not to say taught me more about leadership and respect than any debrief ever could.
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The question behind the question
A hostile challenge becomes a teaching moment when a facilitator shows how professional respect and self-awareness matter more than credentials.
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Abandon All Hope of Mattering
What if everything we assume about leadership and influence is backwards? True influence exists only when you completely abandon the intention to influence—a paradox that reframes management as craft rather than performance.
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Don't Be an Echo, Be a Voice
Confidence isn't the same as clarity. Real agreement requires understanding someone's reasons, reasoning, and assumptions—but only if you hold reasons of your own. Without that foundation, you're not thinking. You're echoing.
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Dear Line and Middle Managers: I'm a Big Fan
Line and middle managers are the heart of every organization. Their daily decisions—what they say and do, and what they choose not to say and do—have immediate, unmediated impact on team members, families, and communities. Like teachers in a classroom, their influence is real and life-changing. Yet
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You’re Indispensable: That Sucks for All of Us
When someone on your team becomes "indispensable," it might feel like you've found a star performer. But indispensability isn't value—it's a trap. It's organizational failure disguised as individual excellence. It means someone can't take vacation, can't disconnect, can't be fully present for their
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Performance Evaluations
When you do someone's performance evaluation, their survival in the company depends on your decision. So when they give you positive feedback, can you trust it? The structural asymmetry means you cannot know whether their praise reflects genuine experience or necessary performance. This isn't about
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Every orchestra needs a conductor. Really?
The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has operated without a conductor since 1972, winning Grammy Awards through distributed leadership and collaborative decision-making. Their model challenges fundamental assumptions about management: what if coordination doesn't require a central authority? What if the pe