Not that attention

I’ve watched a few people crash in slow motion. They built their platform on a version of themselves that wasn’t quite true. A little more certain than they were. A little more successful than the numbers showed. The audience came. Fast. And then, as these...

You have all the time

Cyril Northcote Parkinson said it in 1955. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Seventy years later, we still don’t believe him. Give a task two hours, it takes two hours. Give it two days, it takes two days. Not because the work is...

Ringing the bell

I was working with a logistics company a while back. Solid team. Decent margins. Good people who showed up and did the work. But there was something flat about the place. Functional. Just not alive. I asked the operations manager when they last celebrated something....

Your moveable line

We draw our moral lines long before anyone tests them. They feel solid. Permanent. Like foundations. And then someone asks us to shift, just slightly, just this once, to accommodate a different standard. A more convenient truth. We accommodate. Because the...

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...