Hard-Earned Business Lessons

"But I have a right to say that because we believe in free speech?" Have you ever heard a defense like that? Chances are this was when that person had just said something offensive - unwittingly or not. We hear so much about "free speech" in the media as it relates to the US specifically but I also want to recognize that this argument has been around for a long, long time now. I think there are some important, practical distinctions that we should make here which further help us understand this argument and its place in our society. First off, there is no such thing as free speech - at least not in the way that people think that "free speech" is free speech. People want and understand free speech to be a license to say whatever the hell you want with zero consequences. You won't lose your job, you won't lose any relationship you have, you'll get just as much service as you did before, and so on. But that's not practical and is not in effect...

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 t...

  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...