Year: 2023

  The head of marketing. Its easy to be confused about this job, because its not one job, its at least three. This is why its a difficult job to fill, and why turnover is so highwere not allocating resources or setting expectations in a way that matches the work to be done. Marketing strategy: […]

  If you throw a bucket of water on a small campfire, youll succeed in putting it out. Pour a bucketful of sake into one of those little glasses and youll waste most of it and ruin the table setting. And try to use a bucket to refill a dried-out lake and not much will […]

If you want to be a poet, write poetry. Every day. Show us your work. If you want to do improv, start a troupe. Dont wait to get picked. If you want to help animals, dont wait for vet school. Volunteer at an animal shelter right now. If you want to write a screenplay, write […]

When my friend Elly taught in a middle school, he never hung out in the teacher’s room. He told me he couldn’t bear the badmouthing of students, the whining and the blaming. Of course, not all teachers are like this. In fact, most of them aren’t. And of course, trolling isn’t reserved to the teacher’s […]

Raising the bar Thats not the same as raising the average. With the advent of the high jump, the idiom raising the bar became well understood: If you cant jump over the bar that the current leader cleared, you dont win. But most of the innovations that change our culture dont actually increase the simple […]

When Marvin Gaye joined Motown, he went with his strengths. He wanted to work only in the studio. He hated touring and was sure he lacked the charisma and other gifts that made some musicians great onstage. This didnt really fit the labels strengths, and he struggled to find his footing. In 1962, Berry Gordy […]

And how soon is never? Most organizations are fundamentally incapable of planning ten years out. When a company promises to be carbon neutral by 2030, theyre actually saying that they may never be. Thats because almost all the pressures on them are short-term pressures. And it doesnt help that few people expect to be in […]

is surprisingly easy. Weve done all this work and things havent gotten better, so, apparently, we should stop trying and go back to what we were doing. Weve done all this work and things are getting better, so that means that theres no need to keep trying and we can go back to what we […]