Leadership & Culture
Values, judgment, and how people actually work together. Written 2021–2023.
- Values: Can they be Weaponized?
The stage nobody warns you about: when people twist shared values to justify the comfortable decision. What I got wrong trying to argue them out of it.
- Overcoming Challenges Between Values
Shared values don't make the right decision obvious to everyone. Stop pretending they do — and face the disagreement openly instead.
- The Tension Between Values
Values are not a roadmap, they're guideposts — and the space between them is vast. On the conflict that arises inside your values, not outside them.
- Temptations on the Road to Winning
Catharsis, pride, and ego each derail a conversation differently. Naming the feeling and pausing fifteen seconds is usually the whole technique.
- Financial Stewardship
Asking people to be frugal failed. Reframing it as "what could we do without, that would matter to our mission and our people" turned 500 small decisions a month into a lever.
- Perfect Vs. Good Enough, Opportunity Cost
Good enough is not mediocre. It's good work that accounts for everything else you gave up to get there — and for leaving at a decent hour.
- Perfect Vs. Good Enough: Diminishing Returns
Is the extra 2.5 hours worth two percentage points? Applying diminishing returns not to production, but to how leaders spend their time.
- Perfect Vs. Good Enough
Perfectionism served me well until it didn't. On why the drive for perfect is installed early, and why getting off that ride is harder than getting on.
- Achievement and Fulfillment
There is no summit to the mountain of achievement. Why the leaders who chase fulfillment first tend to find both.
- Values in Action
How valuing both honesty and stewardship led me to open my company's books to everyone — and why the question you ask determines the answer you get.
- Focusing on Your Most Important Work
Two columns on a sheet of paper: the work only you should do, and everything else. Then the hardest part — defining what failure you'll accept.
- Taking Control of Your Time
If you don't kill the meeting, the meeting will kill your time. What happened when I asked my team which meetings I needed to see my way out of.
- Leading Through Empowerment: Defining the How Behind the What
The Why supplies motivation; the How supplies a roadmap. Starting with the foundation everything else depends on — your direct reports.
- Leading With Empowerment
A coach knows the game but is never in it. Four steps for handing off work — the last of which is to get out of the way.
- Shifting Your Mindset to be an Effective Leader
The paradigm shift from top contributor to leader: you are no longer rewarded for the things that got you here, and the habits that made you successful now work against you.
- Creating a Brand Built on Virtues, Part 2
One measure of a leader is not the voice they give their expectations, but what they silently choose to tolerate. On the cost of waiting too long.
- Creating a Brand Built on Virtues
A mission-driven company cannot survive without profit, and means nothing without mission. The prerequisite for holding that line is personal values.
- Curiosity and Problem Solving
Curiosity takes humility. Getting out of my own way meant admitting my fast solutions were band-aids on symptoms, not fixes for root problems.
- Leadership Journey: What's Your Badge of Honor?
Most leaders measure their worth in hours worked. The better question is which work only you should be doing — and what you are afraid to let go of.
- Giving Feedback While Keeping Winning in Mind
Feedback is not about you. The three-minute exercise I use to separate a person from their performance before a hard conversation starts.
- Awareness & Winning: Creating Space to Achieve Your Goals
The best wins solve future problems before they happen. A real client conflict, and how conceding a minor point produced a written agreement that ended the pattern.
- What Does Winning Look Like?
Being right and winning are usually different outcomes. On why building the airtight case against someone almost never gets you what you actually wanted.
- Leading from the Front
Set sail with a crew, give them daily tasks, and never tell them where you're going. Why sharing the strategic vision takes vulnerability most leaders avoid.
- Process, not YOUR Process
The process-building skill that got you here is now the thing to stop doing. If a process touches one department, that's your cue to get out of the way.