My professional development investment for 2024 was completing the Trauma-Informed Coaching Certification program (TICC) with Thomas Hübl and Amy Elizabeth Fox, after hearing both of them multiple times on the Coaches Rising podcast. While I was familiar with many of the concepts shared in the program (Immunity to Change, Internal Family Systems (covered in chapter […]
Category: leadership
What would make “founder mode” effective?
Paul Graham’s essay on founder mode has gone viral this weekend, with people I follow sharing their takes like Shreyas Doshi and Cedric Chin and Ed Batista. I felt like chiming in as well, as it draws together several threads of thinking I’ve had over the years, and ties into my current thinking about the […]
Conversations for Action and Collected Essays, by Fernando Flores
Amazon link “Conversation is not merely a prelude to action, it is its very essence. … People don’t merely use language to communicate their desires about the future; they create the future in language together by making commitments to each other.” Reading The Unaccountability Machine reminded me of this book of essays by Fernando Flores, […]
The Unaccountability Machine, by Dan Davies
Amazon link I read an online excerpt of this book and was immediately intrigued by the idea of an “accountability sink”, which is a mechanism by which “The communication between the decision-maker and the decided-upon has been broken – they have created a handy sink into which negative feedback can be poured without any danger […]
Be a Revolution, by Ijeoma Oluo
Amazon link This book, a follow-up from the author of So You Want To Talk About Race, is exactly what the subtitle describes: “How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World – and How You Can, Too”. While the book was well-written and easy to read, Oluo challenged me with stories that showed […]
Becoming artists in a post-AI world
I have had a couple conversations about AI this week where my perspective was surprising to others, so I wanted to more broadly share my thoughts to seed more possibilities about the future impact of AI. A few articles that prompted these conversations: (Aside: In originally editing this post, I realized the articles below are […]
Announcing my new book!
I have written a book, titled You Have A Choice: Beyond Hard Work to Meaningful Impact, which is now available on Amazon and on Bookshop. You can also ask your local bookstore to order it through the Ingram catalog. I was so excited when I first held in my hands a book that I had […]
Creating Collective Intelligence
Several years ago, Google ran a study to determine what made teams effective, and later published the results, including sharing a summary in a New York Times article. While one might think that an effective team depends on having the most capable individuals, Google’s researchers discovered that the members of the team mattered far less […]
If you see something, say something
When confronted with an uncomfortable situation, we often stay silent because we don’t know what to say in the moment, or we don’t want to get involved. For instance, when we witness people making potentially racist or sexist comments, it’s easier to say nothing, because why take the risk of an uncomfortable confrontation? And yet, […]
Practicing Celebration
Celebration is really hard for me. I used to feel that celebration is only for achieving something you didn’t expect to achieve, but after I’ve done something, I was clearly expected to have done it, so what is there to celebrate? Instead, I historically have pushed on to the next challenge. Yet researchers like BJ […]
