And hold it close all your life — Charlie was a bear of a man, standing well over six feet tall with a robust paunch sustained by steak, potatoes, and a fidelity to evening cocktails. He moved like a lumbering bear, juggling a basket full of tennis balls in one meaty hand, and a large Wilson tennis bag…

Why This Is an Age of Stagnation and Collapse — Right about now, our organizations are working…in all the wrong ways. They’re solving yesterday’s problems, mostly, still. But those problems have already been solved. Yet today’s and tomorrow’s haven’t. They’re just getting bigger, spinning out of control, and so the future’s unravelling — or what’s left of it. What do…

Parenting is all about discipline. It’s about being strict and firm and unrelenting. Not with your kids, to be clear. That’s being a disciplinarian. When I say parenting is all about discipline, I’m talking about the only form that matters: self-discipline. There is a story about one of those legendary…

What advice would you give your past self? — I recently caught up with a friend who’d founded a company. He was at a low point: overwhelmed, sleep deprived, stressed… I listened, nodded, and said, “I remember those days.” And I do remember them. It took years before my startup Anchor began to gain real traction. There were sleepless…

How Relationships Between People and Organizations Are Changing — And Why It Matters — No, your eyes aren’t lying to you. That’s The Bee Gees…advertising…tape cassettes. That was then. Think about now with me. If I say brand…today…can you even define it anymore? In a way that makes sense, for this age, this century, right now? Try. I bet you’ll find it harder —…

A brand playbook for behavior and perception — Brands exist in the space between how people perceive themselves and how they behave. Our self-perceptions are the building blocks of our reality, and when the way we act doesn’t measure up to who we believe we are, it feels very uncomfortable. Oftentimes it’s the kind of pain that we…

Why Mega-Scale Organizations Can’t Do Tomorrow’s Work — Bigger, bigger, bigger. Better, right? We’ve lionized big, mega, huge-scale — businesses, institutions, organizations — over medium, small, and tiny. So much so, that for example, American legal and economic thought tends to favour the hugest monopolies, the playing field tilted way, way against small-scale organizations, because the idea is…

Three Qualities of 21st Century Leadership — For Everyone — What do you see when you look around the world? Here’s what I see: a startling lack of leadership. There’s a leadership vacuum in this age — especially of the kind we need, at this crucial juncture in history, beset by crisis. …

Why you’ll get so much out of a book by a record producer… — Ever woken up in the night and gone “Ah ha!” with a solution? What seemed impenetrably in the cold light of day, or under the fluorescent lights of a beige London office, pops ready-made into your mind? Ever wondered why estimation is so hard early in the development work, and…

What Influence Is, and Why It’s Becoming an Economy All Its Own — In a World of Meltdown — In case you’ve been on Mars for the last few years, here on earth, a new thing’s emerged. The “Creator Economy,” it’s coming to be called. Every Zoomer’s heart quickens with the thought of…never having to have a “real” job…and just be a carefree creator instead. …

What Building a Brand Means in the 21st Century — You can’t escape it. Everywhere, it surrounds you. Brands, cloying, begging, shouting for attention. In a previous life, I used to help run one of the world’s largest marketing and communications groups. Today, we’re going to talk about the new rules of marketing. Before you roll your eyes — this…

Maximizing shareholder wealth by automating CEOs — Yesterday I came across a meme or quote about automating CEOs using GPT because they’re the most expensive employees of a corporation. I applaud this idea as an MBA holder because we were taught to maximize shareholder wealth. The way to maximize shareholder wealth is simple, you either cut costs…

Being busy and distracted only perpetuates the status quo — A few weeks ago, my partner collapsed unexpectedly at work. He was transported via ambulance to the nearest hospital, where a doctor surmised that the collapse was probably stress-related. But no definitive cause was determined. My partner has been dealing with a number of health challenges over the past year…

The magic of Working Backwards: a real-world case study — During my 11 years at Amazon, I saw the company grow from 3,000 engineers to 60,000 engineers, and the stock grow from $40 to $3000 (pre-split). That’s an astronomical growth by all measures. It was a wild ride. Sometimes people ask me: What’s the secret sauce? I actually don’t think…

The rock wall and the wild pitch. — A ways back, I was learning to rock climb. Or, more accurately, learning to “boulder,” since there’s a distinction. I won’t go far as to say you should try it, but it’s a helluva workout. You stare at a wall, assess oddly-shaped colored pieces jutting out, then attempt to climb…

Here’s what I learned. — It’s been one year since I quit my full-time job and started building my life according to my own rules. I’ve been in the corporate world for a while but did not notice when my mind started rebelling against conventional 9–5. One day I realized I did not want to…

Here’s what matters. — Let’s cut the shit. Life’s short. At my age, I’ve probably only got another 10 World Cups left at most before they scatter my ashes over Niagara Falls. You may not have much longer. I don’t say this to depress you — I say this to resurrect the most overpraised…

Is not AI, it’s illiteracy — “21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022. 54% of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level.” This country has shown itself to be unsurprisingly incapable of rational thought even among apparently intelligent people and I shudder to think what is going to happen as AI-generated content begins…

You’d be surprised by what kinds of unexpected things can make investors say “no” — I invited a local venture capitalist to speak with my entrepreneurship class at Duke. Once he’d finished sharing his story and discussing the industry, I opened the floor to questions. Most of the questions were typical, young-entrepreneur questions followed by typical, bland VC answers. “What kinds of things are you…

From an SEO expert, website owner, and top writer — If you ask entrepreneurs how to start an online business, chances are you’ll hear tips, such as “build a personal brand,” “build an email list,” or “grow a community of like-minded people.” As an entrepreneur, I admit these are all good tips. However, the means to achieve the desired result…