Courage vs. excuses There are more available excuses now than ever before. In just two letters, "AI" is a simple, brand-new, all-purpose excuse for laying people off, averaging things down, closing things up and generally finding an easier/quicker path. Courage, on the other hand, is the…

Consumers outnumber producers New technology often upends the careers of experienced professionals. When the Mac offered typesetting to the masses, typographers were incensed. They had grown up with lead or photo composition, they understood why it was called a 'case' and they knew how to kern.…

The banal djinni Technology changes things. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. When a powerful new technology arrives, it offers us wishes. Too often, we waste them, asking it to take on simple chores or offer us trivial conveniences. We're in the biggest moment of technical change of our…

Is it sciatica? Sometimes, back pain is felt in the thighs or even the ankles. But treating the part that hurts does nothing to address the real problem. Most business challenges have a similar pattern--it might feel like the problem is your customer's attitude or how busy a location is--but it's…

The Petrillo complications 80 years ago, the most important person in the music business was James Petrillo. It's difficult to imagine the head of the musician's union on the cover of Time magazine, but there he was. Petrillo saw how technology was changing an industry and pushed for changes in…

The book of concern "Wait a second." That's difficult advice. In a world that moves faster with each cycle, where urgencies are prioritized and last-minute saves are celebrated, it's not always welcome advice. And so we've ended up concerned. Fretting. Worried. Looking for the next thing to drop…

The second circle What do your supporters tell their friends? That's the unseen force behind every successful brand, movement or idea. Most people don't care about you. They're not listening to you, not wondering what you're up to, and certainly not taking the time to seek you out. All you have is…

The definitive study of seed oil and health That's the appeal of it, of course. There isn't a definitive study. There can't be. Even if we created a forty-year-long, double-blind twin study, there'd be room for someone to ask "what about?..." It doesn't matter that the peer-reviewed and consistent…

What do you own? What does it mean for us to own something? If we own a piece of land and the rain washes the topsoil downstream, do we go and get the topsoil back? Do we own our reputation? We have influence over it, but some of it was gifted to us without our knowledge, and other parts are…

On pricing Pricing is an exchange of value. This for that. But price is also a story. When you have competition, your story doesn't have to justify the absolute price, simply the difference between you and the next-best option. Price is based on value, not on the cost of production. Thanks to…

Avoiding the purity loop Some vegans don't eat avocados. They're concerned that the bees that are trucked in to pollinate the trees are mistreated, and so they choose to not support this practice. But we live in community, and someone running a vegan restaurant or serving a meal to vegan friends,…

Settling Sometimes it pays to accept and celebrate what we get. And sometimes, we only get something because we settled for it. It helps to be able to discern the difference between the two.

“Even” There's a difference between telling someone their work can become better and saying it can become even better. When we say even better, we lock in a foundation — we're affirming that something good already exists — at the same time we create the conditions for improvement. Ennui and…

Creating the conditions for magic If you're hoping for this meeting or this performance or this engagement to produce something extraordinary, why are you setting it up as if it's ordinary? The hard work of a brainstorming session, a pitch collaboration or a negotiation happens long before most…

Attention and effort The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn't at anyone else's door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it was a tough gig, no one doubted that something was motivating this person enough to put at…

The ecard virus Three of my friends got hacked this week. You get an ecard and click. It asks you to log in to your email. Boom, done. It hacks your email account, steals all of your contacts and then sends itself to the whole address book. And while they're at it, they could be scraping and…

The right answer Engineers, scientists, and most of all, businesses are looking for the right answer. It's such a common quest that we take it for granted, but it's new, and it continues to cause stress. The right answer is productive. It's resilient. And it's a powerful ranking tool. The right…

All the letters Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages. But no writer knows all the words. That's the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie--between the universal letters and the unlimited words. This is an analogy for arenas as diverse as sports and commerce.…

Kinder than necessary If it's just the right amount of necessary kindness, it's not really kindness. It's pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that's kinder than necessary, the expectations for what's necessary will ratchet forward, making everything more…

Plumbed If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing session. Convenience leads to consumption.

Where do bad choices come from? We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you're determined to act like the person you have assumed you are, the choices…

“There is no alternative” TINA! This is what Margaret Thatcher said about her draconian free market policies. It's an easy thing to tell ourselves about compliance to any dominant system. But it's incomplete. The complete sentence is, "There is no alternative unless we're prepared to endure…

Who sets your agenda? It's a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade--there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited. But even in these settings, we…

A persistent sense of being correctly located in time Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts. Placebos are real, they're effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there's no problem. "Placebo" isn't an insult. It's a category,…

Rehearsing possibility Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even making a comment about? Our narrative of reality often becomes our reality.

Redundancy and resilience If it's important, don't ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at the system, not the people.

Long odds and unseen differences "The odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not." This seems nonsensical at first. Obviously, there are lottery winners. Therefore, the odds aren't the same. Except we're not mathematicians doing a math problem (at least most of us).…

Systems and the default to yes Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw. After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate, professional job that cost more than $1,000. As he was finishing the…

What’s in the status bottle? It's often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much. Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

The end of the content shortage You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It's possible to be a great chef without buying a cookbook. In fact, you can probably thrive without reading…

“Too complicated for people to understand” That's a great reason to dumb things down. It's also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity. Let's break it down: People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or institutional long term investors? Every VC or just this one?…

Numbers and the human/computer interface If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I'll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without making a transcription error. When we first started using…

Follow-through How does the ball know? In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through. But the ball is long gone before that happens. So, what's the point? It turns out that the…

“Cheaper not to care” This is the slogan of so many industrial behemoths and existing bureaucracies. It's in quotation marks for a reason: it's not true. Not in the long run, not even in the medium run. One way to highlight the hollowness of this edict is to say it out loud. For a while, it might…

The hats You wear a hat, you're not a hat. State nouns are verbs that we talk about like they are nouns. Hurry, panic, frenzy, rage, funk, stupor, daze, fog, rut, bind, pickle, fix, slump, tailspin, tizzy. Notice that they're almost all negative... You're in a hurry. Really? I get that you're…

Can you make it worse? Is there something you can do right now that would impede progress, degrade quality or simply mess up the current situation? Is there a way you could shift perceptions to make people more distraught, less hopeful or even panicked? If it's so easy to accomplish worse, why do…

Freedom of focus Tonight, when you're off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read? I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek philosophy from the library or scroll your feeds. We have time (surprisingly called…

The hollow orange It's tempting but useless. The skin is unblemished and the perfect color. It's well displayed, promoted widely and on sale. But there's nothing inside. It's not worth eating and certainly not worth sharing. This is the streaming series with great lighting and talented actors,…

Green flags We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around. Don't let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags. We might need encouragement to leap forward. If you look for the green flags, you're…

A kitchen metaphor Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make? Some people don't care if it's delicious, as long as it's interesting. Some don't need it to be interesting, but it needs to start on time. Others define delicious differently than you do. One couple…

Sitting in zimbo You're at the Zoom meeting, on time, and no one is there. Are you the ghost or is everyone else? We needed a word for this existential minor dread, and now we have one. Coordination is hard. PS the Ides of March are overrated as a threat. It's the chronic conditions that really…

Visible measures When an organization is known for speed and quality, it's likely that if times get tough, quality will suffer before speed does. That's because customers notice speed right away, but it takes a while to come to a conclusion about quality. If a musician or politician is known for…

“It’s faster to just do it myself” Here's a simple rubric for outsourcing: If you're never going to need to do this again, and it's easier to do it than to instruct someone else to do it, by all means, do it yourself. If doing it yourself will give you joy or satisfaction that is greater than the…

Over the top Unreasonable commitment is unreasonable. It happens before there's a guarantee it will work. It's out of proportion to what others think is standard. Unreasonable commitment is dedication, persistence, care, energy, connection and investment that doesn't seem to make sense. You can't…

Henry Ford knew how to drive He also understood the process of organizing a plant to build a car. Scott Belsky knows how to use Photoshop and remembers what it was like to run a small business. And Sarah Jones knows exactly what is required to be on stage, alone, in a crowded theater. The world…

The Knot: My upcoming new book (and a course that’s already here) The Knot, Problems Can Be Solved, will be available in September. And this week, I'm launching a video course that covers the ideas in the book. You can find the course, and how to get it at no extra cost, here. We're surrounded by…

Small changes to big systems A hardcover book printed in 1925 is almost indistinguishable from one printed yesterday. It's easy to think not much has changed. But book publishing isn't about printing, and it's a useful metaphor for the systems changes we're seeing all around us. The book…

Considering infinity Endless, unlimited and more. These are building blocks of capitalism. Starbucks knows that they can't get you to drink three coffees every morning, but their stock price is built on the idea that they can continue to get more customers and make more money from each one. The…

Confused about donations A suite at a New York Knicks game costs more than $30,000. Is that a donation to the team? Why do we differentiate between the money spent on a Super Bowl ticket and the check we write for a worthy cause? Does calling it a "donation" make it more valuable or less valuable…

If they knew… Some organizations and marketers thrive on the uninformed consumer. They seek out people who don't know, and who aren't particularly good at decision making. Others do their best work when the customer knows what's up and is making an informed choice. Are you closing the sale or…