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Writing
A year of books on incentives, institutions, narrative, and decision-making—what each one argues, why it matters, and where it’s useful The Upside of Down | Megan McArdle McArdle examines why failure is essential to success. She pulls from economics, psychology,...
Career arbitrage and the power of unfair ease If you listen to enough commencement speeches or scroll through enough Instagram quotes, the advice for young adults seems unanimous: “Follow your passion,” and “Do what you love, and you’ll never work...
A developer sees a prime opportunity to revitalize a declining urban corridor. On paper, the project is a win—it expands the tax base, prevents blight, injects life into a stagnant neighborhood. She doesn’t file the plans. Not because the plan...
“Content is king” is nonsense. While I’m hopeful marketers are working to extinguish that phrase from their vernacular, it’s a lazy cliché that sets the wrong expectation. It makes content sound like a single, monolithic thing you must produce.That mindset...
Why organizations that think like publishers—not advertisers—win trust, loyalty, and growth. For years we’ve been told that content is king. It’s catchy, but wrong. Content isn’t what you publish; it’s how you think about the experience you create. A content...
Six years in public service, media, and business taught me one thing: clarity beats volume. Here’s what I learned and what comes next. Beyond the Goal: Eliyahu Goldratt Speaks on the Theory of Constraints isn’t among my favorite listens of...
Sometimes the hard stop is the only way forward. More than a decade ago, I sat in on a meeting where 10 people—agency staff and client representatives—spent over an hour agonizing about how the color of a homepage button might...
When you wake up each morning, your to-do list is already too long. But what if, instead of doing “a little bit of everything,” you tackled your most threatening problem first? I call that eating the frog. It’s hard, unpleasant,...
TL;DR: Disconfirmation bias—the tendency to undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs—can derail executive decision-making. Leaders who actively seek and engage with opposing viewpoints make more resilient strategic choices. What is disconfirmation bias? Disconfirmation bias is the cognitive tendency to dismiss...
Proximity bias in strategy is the tendency to lose sight of the bigger picture when you’re too close to a plan, product, or candidate. This happens everywhere in business and politics, and it’s one of the most common blind spots...
