Clarifying Expectations Between Clients and Service Providers
When you engage external firms, you need clarity on why. Do you need outcomes or just task completion? Do you need extra time and hands, or do you need expertise? I’ve been on both sides of this equation, and friction around these expectations is a common source of frustration. Things we should normalize: – Service […]
Liberating Yourself from Algorithmic Dependence
Time for a hard truth: most of the tips and tricks you read regarding the algorithm of a social platform are magical thinking AT BEST. More often, they are charlatanism. People take advantage of your desire to make uncontrollable forces seem predictable and manageable. Because lack of control feels precarious and scary. They are also […]
The Invisible Ink
Being a ghost can be as scary and sad as seeing a ghost. To be a ghost, you have to die first. And as the story goes, you stick around because there’s something you left unresolved. So what about being a ghostwriter? There you are, dead for at least some of the time, haunting other […]
More Than Just a Thought
In business, an idea is more than “just an idea.” The word needs redefinition. Here’s a helpful, if not somewhat dense, way to look at it: An idea is the intersection point between your prioritized strategic intents, differentiated brand theses, and demonstrated evidence of delivery. And it only counts as an idea for ideas-led growth […]
Why Social Media Solutions Aren’t FDA Approved
Scenario 1: You see a pill on the floor at the grocery store. You pick it up and take it, right? It looks official enough. It must do something for someone. If you don’t take it, you might miss out. Besides, what if you’re sick and don’t know it? Scenario 2: You see a weird […]
My Path to Seeing the Full Picture
I used to be so good at being right all the time. No matter what and no matter how. For any divergence of opinion, I had the absolutely most correct version of it. And since opinions manifest in words, I was enormously equipped to eliminate incorrect positions. But I grew out of it for the […]
GRACE in Business: How Ideas-Driven Change Spurs Growth
To grow your business, advocate for change and rally people around it. Ideas-led growth is a virtuous cycle in which ideas become the driving force for your growth: revenue growth, capabilities growth, and possibilities growth. It’s a virtuous cycle that you can learn to master with GRACE. Grace is a mindset of cultivating ease, fluidity, […]
Nurturing Excellence with Grace and Love
I’m all in on quiet luxury. And quiet success. Quiet success creates my calm approach to helping my clients and delivering work with grace, craft, and love. It’s not a formula I’m going to pretend you can replicate. You can’t. Quiet success means these cats and this beach. It comes from these hands these skills […]
How Content Sours Creativity
This “content thing” is making me into a mean monkey. The mean level of discourse about quality and creativity is making me sneer at ideas that probably deserve better. Mean aspirations beget meager outcomes that I read about and snort at. The need to say or do something, even when you mean nothing, is sharpening […]
A Plea for Purposeful Creation
Once you start thinking about “content,” it’s over. You’re already in a world of bottomless, numberless containers that need to be filled for their own sake. You’re already shouting messages no one wants to hear into holes no one wants to be in. You’re creating meaningless tokens that have no value outside of a game […]