Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

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…