Career
What I'd Tell Myself at Thirty: The Career Advice Nobody Gave Me
The advice you need at thirty is the advice nobody thinks to give you. It does not fit on a slide and it will not be the focus of any HR training.
Publisher
Career
Personal Board of Directors: Who Sits on Yours and Why You Need One
A company of one needs a board of five. Most senior people never assemble one and end up taking advice from whoever happens to be in the room.
Career
The Cost of Ambition: What You Pay to Move Up the Organization
Career ambition is sold as a matter of sacrifice and reward. The reward part is well documented. The sacrifice part is more specific than it looks.
Career
Curiosity as a Career Moat: Why Asking Better Questions Outpaces Intelligence
The smartest person in the room is rarely the most valuable one. The most curious person usually is.
Leadership
The Inner Game: Why Tim Gallwey's 1974 Tennis Book Still Changes Executives
A tennis coach wrote the best book about executive performance, and most MBA programs still haven't noticed.
Reading
The Reading List of a Boring, Profitable Life
A curated reading list is a confession of what its curator values. The books on most high-profile "recommended reading" lists these days trend toward the flashy, the trending, and the signalling. Atomic Habits. Deep Work. The 4-Hour Workweek. The books of the moment. Some are excellent. Most are
Reflection
How to Run a Personal Retrospective That Isn't Therapy
The concept of the retrospective comes from software engineering. After every sprint or project, the engineering team sits down and asks three questions: what went well, what went badly, what will we change next time. The discipline is structured and outcome-focused. The goal is to extract lessons quickly and apply
Career
Stress-Testing Your Career: A Red-Team Exercise for the Next Five Years
Most ambitious professionals spend significant time stress-testing their investment portfolios and almost no time stress-testing their careers. This is odd. A portfolio represents a financial bet; a career represents most of your economic upside and a large fraction of your identity. The failure modes of a career — becoming obsolete, being
Productivity
Why You Should Keep a Not-To-Do List (and What Goes On It)
Warren Buffett has a well-known exercise he recommends to people asking about focus. Write down 25 things you want to do in your life. Circle the top five. The remaining 20, he says, go on your "avoid at all costs" list — not because they're bad, but
Systems
The Checklist Manifesto at Work: Why Airline Pilots Make Better Managers Than MBAs
Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto (2009) popularised an insight that applies far beyond medicine: most high-stakes work involves steps that are individually simple but collectively easy to forget or skip under pressure, and the simple discipline of a written checklist dramatically reduces errors. The book is mostly about
Decision Making
Saying Yes to the Right Things: A Framework for Opportunity Triage
Most career advice, at the senior level, focuses on saying no. The research-supported importance of declining, the specific phrases that work, the discipline of protecting your time. This is all correct, and it's the lower-hanging fruit. Once you've learned to say no cleanly, a more interesting
Career
How to Handle a Bad Boss Without Quitting Your Career
Almost every senior professional has, at some point, worked for someone they considered a bad manager. The pattern shows up in surveys, in coaching engagements, in honest conversations among peers. A significant fraction of those same professionals will tell you, if they're honest, that the experience of working