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Running lean, being scrappy, working agile, growth hacking. All of these buzzwords have broad cultural appeal and adoption, but unfortunately that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Consider the following hypothetical scenario at a modern organization. Ask yourself if you have ever worked at a place where this happened. The company constantly forces employees to do more with less, so people get burned out. When people get burned out,…

We work in a corporate system where everyone is suffering together, and is conditioned to expect it as the norm, and that makes it hard for us to gauge the true level of burnout. Digiday, in their annual agency culture and employment report, included a chapter about firms trying to do more with less. One survey respondent made a comment that broke my heart: You feel like you’re drowning,…

Speed is a powerful source of leverage. If you’re fortunate enough to be the first one through the door, then it puts you in a position where you can achieve a goal that would otherwise be insurmountable. Hell, even if your work isn’t the best in the world, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got the first mover advantage. Everyone else is forgotten. Here’s one of my favorite case studies of…

The idea of painting yourself into a corner has traditionally been viewed as negative. Taking the idiom literally, imagine you applied paint everywhere in the room except where you were standing. That’s a difficulty from which you can’t extricate yourself. It leaves you no choice but to step on the freshly painted floor and damage it, or wait in that spot for six hours until it finally dries. But…

Working as a valet parker a luxury hotel taught me numerous life lessons. Like, don’t try to teach yourself how to drive a manual transmission on the guest’s million dollar sports car. Or, don’t go joyriding in that same sports car down a winding street that has a police station. And for sure, definitely don’t try to parallel park that same sports car in between two monster trucks while…

Monsters in children’s rooms are an issue that every parent has to deal with. Fear of imaginary creatures can result in kids and parents not sleeping very well or at all. But we have to remember, kids are stupid. Practically everything they know is based on placebos. Perhaps the secret is making the solution appear as real as the problem feels. Introducing my revolutionary new product. Monstero is a…

All of us should enter into our projects with the goal of trying to get other people to pay for our marketing for us. It’s not chintzy, it’s not cheating, it’s simply efficient. And fun. Playing leverage like a game to see how little money you can spend makes you a better business person. Gladwell’s groundbreaking book on virality, which coined the term tipping point, found that many of…

There’s a pub on my street with a sidewalk chalkboard that reads: There’s no problem a happy hour won’t fix. Now that’s some good copywriting. Hope they get lots of customers. Because they’re not completely wrong. Hanging out with friends at a bar and drinking our sorrows away has been one of humanity’s most effective coping mechanisms for thousands of years. What’s kind of spooky, though, is when this…

Most email programs have something called a delay send functionality. This allows you to write your message now, and have it sent at a later date and time, rather than going out immediately. Productivity experts say it increases your average open rate by timing an email for peak work hours. Pretty cool trick, huh? And yet, the most fascinating part of this feature is, certain employees will use it…

Gallup’s recent study of over seven thousand full time employees found about two thirds of workers experience burnout on the job. They claim organizations are facing an employee burnout crisis. Do you agree with that number? Or are you more like me, in that you question whether people understand what the term burnout really means? The official diagnosis of professional burnout, according to the international classification of diseases, is…