About…

There’s an important distinction to make when reading business books, listening to podcasts, or talking to “experts”. I’ve boiled it down to three types of advice:

  1. Effective and actionable.
  2. Useful theory.
  3. Bullshit.

Andy Grove best illustrates #1 in High Output Management: “Define the three most important objectives for your organization for the next three months. Support them with key results.” Notice how this advice tells you exactly what to do.

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker is full of great theory: “Plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.” This is valuable advise but requires you to figure out the details.

The last item is the most common. You see it all the time in click-bate blogposts that offer advice like, “Transparency is key”, “Make people feel good.”, “Those ready to assume a management role may choose words like ‘ours’, ‘we’ or ‘us'”. These are actual “tips” from several different online bloggers. These are, at best, statements of the very obvious and too vague to be useful. At worst, they can be destructive. For example, transparency is good to a point but it can be dangerous to share everything – like the personal issues of one of your employees.

This blog is meant to serve two types of people:

  1. Me. I read/listen to a ton and want a place to keep my thoughts & learnings.
  2. My employees. We’ve started to grow as a company and that’s prevented me regular face time with everyone. This is one way for me to share what I know (or think I know).

I’m hopeful this blog can impart some actionable advice along with a healthy dose of useful theory. I’ll try hard to avoid the bullshit. It will likely creep in from time-to-time and when it does, I hope those of you reading will cry foul.

Lastly, you should know there is never one, universal best way. Altruistic, patient people have built amazingly successsful organizations (Ghandi), and so have impatient assholes (Donald Trump).

This means, even if I’m not writing BS, you should stand up and disagree when you feel I’m getting it wrong. The only way to make this blog better (or the world for that matter) is for people to voice respectful and well thought out disagreements.

Want to know more about me or my business? You can check out these two pages: