Over the last few years, I’ve done thousands of office hours: first-come-first-served blocks that mentees set the goals for. And this is the dominant model for how mentorship is viewed in the workplace today: a 1:1 meeting, set on a calendar, with an explicit agenda. I’m also the dad of a wonderful, quirky nine-year-old. He […]
Last week, someone was murdered. In reality, many people were murdered last week but someone leapt to mind the moment you read it. On social media, people argue about the validity of who you think about and why you should have thought of someone else. I have never seen these arguments at a funeral. I […]
People often seem to forget the root of compensation is compensate: a force exerted in order to counterbalance an opposing force. Think of it like a balance scale; something is loaded on one side, so we compensate by loading the other. But what exactly is it that we’re loading? There are generally two frames that […]
Recently, I was talking to a company that helps employers gather feedback from their in-the-field workforce in order to boost employee retention. And while they have a ton of customers fielding surveys, the product folks were concerned that managers don’t actually seem to be looking at the feedback dashboard. My suggestion was to use a […]
Movies will have you believe that all fights happen in bars. But to me, few places feel quite so ready to break into a spontaneous brawl as the line to get on an airplane. And sure, there is sometimes utility to boarding the plane early. When my son was young, it was helpful to have […]
A few years ago, I was talking to an entrepreneur working on an easy way to share STD test results and he said something that stuck with me: HSV is a dumb reason to break up with someone, because about 50% of the adult population in the US has it, and so it is 50/50 […]
Over the weekend, the former CFO of Oura Daniel Welch posted about the success of narrowing the product focus to a subset of women’s health. And one of the comments, from Diana Torgersen, caught my eye: “Wonderful – but still wondering how Women’s health is a “narrow focus”? By focusing on women you’re focusing on […]
There is a routine that plays out in the workplace time and time again. I ask HOW you’re doing, you tell me WHAT is happening, and then we proceed as if those two things are exactly the same. We don’t say “I’m sad because XYZ.” We just say XYZ, as if any reasonable person should […]
TLDR: Almost all economic increases come from change and so profit maximalism demands a world where everything changes, all of the time. But change has a cost for individuals and communities; be cautious, in yourself and your designs. Recently, I was introduced to the Benedictine ‘Vow of Stability’: a promise that, upon entering a monastic […]
TLDR: Learning is not a smooth curve; we frequently grow in spurts and jumps. But those rarely align with external validation like graduation or licensing. Credentialism isn’t just inequitable, it is a business and cultural liability. And there is a market opportunity in refusing to accept the bias. Recently, there has been a trend in […]