Hard-Earned Business Lessons

Most of us have been fans of things at one point in our life or another. It may have been (and probably was) a sports team or it could have been a brand. It could have been a person, celebrity, or even just a company itself. We all have our experiences with fandom and I'll own that a lot of it can be very positive. But there are a couple of very negative points to fandom, particularly in the past ten years or so, that I feel must make us reject the call of fandom. First off, have you ever heard the saying of how you should never meet your heroes? That obviously wouldn't apply to every single human (side note: for the love of god people need to stop using "not all" arguments for so many damn reasons), but I do think that it applies to a lot of people who you might have grown up idolizing. "Ignorance is bliss" is another saying that I think carries a lot of truth and I don't mean this in the "what they don't know can't hurt them sense" (b

Another hot topic worthy of an expanded guide is how to mitigate and navigate conflict that you experience as a professional or that people who work for you are experiencing. This guide will aim to cover this from a more or less holistic point of view aimed at both managers and direct reports but with an added emphasis to management because managers control a lot of how conflict may flow as you will see below. If you manage people or have managed people before, doubtless you will have noticed that your direct reports have been in conflict with parties internal and external to your organization. They don't always do the best job of navigating that and they don't always know how to best navigate it. There are myriad reasons for this but a good place to start is to examine the root of conflict and how we should handle it with that in mind, rather than dissect where people might make mistakes. Conflict, as should surprise nobody, is most often rooting in unclear expectations. This

Have you ever been frustrated by leaders or people who rank higher in your company not understanding the emotional intelligence consequences of their decisions or how they communicate to the group? Unfortunately, most of my experience and observations state that this is a pretty commonplace occurrence. I'd like to dive into the ethos of that a bit in the following. I think that it's important to understand the psyche of the people who may be bothering you with their behavior so that you might better manage how you react to and interact with those people. Let's start with entrepreneurs and executive-level folks because they have the burden of position and are therefore the easiest to target with analysis. For these people, in many cases, work is life and business is passion. It may be that you do not share their passion and that you would rather prioritize your time on family, sport, or a hobby that you really like. Probably work is just a means to an end for you. This might

General topics are all well and good but I have decided to make some posts more in the vein of management guides in an attempt to transfer some of my hard-won knowledge to anyone it may benefit. I don’t know everything and always strive to learn more so this isn’t me saying that I have all of the answers. This is me highlighting what I do know so hopefully some of you may skip these steps and get straight into good practices. I’ve made some of these mistakes before through ignorance but it doesn’t mean you have to!     I always like to say that how we start something influences how we finish with it. That is always the case be it with client relationships, practice for sports, or onboarding employees. With this thought in mind, the following aims to provide you a guide for how to onboard your employees as a manager. Presumably, you were involved in the hiring of this new employee or you had the ultimate say and approved them. Hopefully you had the chance to interview this perso

  It’s simply not a reality that everyone’s career or everyone’s work will be deeply meaningful to them. There are many reasons for this, mostly boiling down to a main aim of capitalism which is that, were it not for the monetary system, no one would perform unsavory work. There are other reasons for this too but it makes sense to focus on one prominent side effect we will likely all experience in our professional lives in one way or another: performative work. My first encounter with the word ‘performative’ was some time back in the context of social media. People have a tendency to show only their best sides on social media and that plays into this in the sense that what’s being posted on many platforms is what people think others want to see of them and is therefore performative and, in this case, not genuine. Think of all the YouTube and Streamer “apologies” (non-apologies) that you’ve seen on the internet lately. You’ve probably seen brands do this do when they did something wro

  About These Articles: These articles are based on my own learnings and experiences. The way I write them is that I draft them, edit them, and then find supporting documentation and place them in an appropriate section at the bottom of the article. If I find something that reflects something I may not have thought of on my own, I do my best to cite it in-text. Otherwise, I’ll put the links at the end. I feel that doing it this way may give you other articles to read if this caught your interest or to support my arguments. I am not willing to, nor do I have the right avenue, to engage in debate about these ideas at this time. If you disagree with what is written, that’s fine. I don’t need to know about it and I refuse at this time to engage with such discourse. The purpose of these articles is not to debate. These are more akin to blogs. Thank you for your interest in my thoughts and musings.     Being kind is not a weakness in business. Many old-school thinkers are c