Serve everyone, win no one

The store that sells everything. The consultant who works with anyone. The brand that offends nobody. They share one thing in common: nobody remembers them. There is a seductive logic to the “everything and everyone” strategy. More surface area means more...

Seven secondhand sins

You can find a great deal at the vintage market. That is not what this is about. There is a category of secondhand that looks like wisdom, feels like strategy, and passes for leadership. It is none of those things. It is borrowed. And borrowed, in business, is rarely...

A tale of two merchants

In a prosperous valley nestled between two great peaks, there lived two merchants who sold the finest grain in all the land. The first merchant, Aldric, was precise and proud. His storehouse was immaculate. His weights were accurate to the last measure. Every...

The original

Someone out there is trying to copy you. Not your look. Not your product. Your edge. The thing you built through years of hard choices, failed experiments, and quiet persistence. The replica economy is not new. It is just faster now. Close enough to confuse the...

The people who save you

At the end of every honest reckoning, it is never a thing that saves you. Not the bread. Not the blue. Not the smell of red earth after rain or the weight of good leather or the particular silence of a forest at dawn. Those things restore you, yes. They return you to...

The color of enough

There is a shade of blue that does something to me. Not a specific blue I could name or point to in a Pantone chart. It is more a quality of blue. The ocean on a calm morning before anyone else has arrived. The sky in that particular hour between late afternoon and...