Author: Bud Caddell

metamodernism is exhausting

Leave a comment
essays

We live in the era of metamodernism. It consumes all art. It’s what you listen to, watch, and see. Quick refresher: Metamodernism is often depicted with a pendulum swinging back and forth between modernism and post-modernism. It compares and contrasts meaning with meaninglessness, irony with substance, pleasure with despair, etc. The comparison is the form. And it’s a fucking chore to sit through. Barbie, the film, is peak metamodernism. It needs to be feminist and […]

how i write simple

Leave a comment
essays

This is advice I give internally at NOBL when folks struggle with their writing. Trash or treasure, as we say. Not Simple Simple The ability to support individuals to truly understand the context they are working within and what that means for their personal growth is key to keeping good people.  To keep your best people, help them see how their work connects to 1) the company’s mission and 2) their personal ambitions. Write foremost […]

dylan toys with punk

Leave a comment
music

Follow me down a fun (new to me) rabbit hole. In 1984, Dylan did a rare late night appearance. Instead of bringing any of his usual collaborators on stage with him, he plucked the fellows from LA’s The Plugz to join him. It was strange and electric, and it was a performance and sound that was never repeated. Until … Daniel Romano and his Outfit (a great artist and unit in their own right), during […]

parenting AI

Leave a comment
essays

Probably not this year, likely not even this decade, possibly not this century, but sometime ahead of us lies the very real chance that our species may birth another: artificial general intelligence. And if the promise of software that can improve itself is real, we’ll just be playing god to a creature that will quickly become god-like. Before I had a child, I spent a lot of time trying to ready myself and his environment […]

The Condescension of ‘Just Farming’

Leave a comment
random

It’s very likely that I’m not going to pass these exams. And I realize that I don’t really have any other skills. And at some point, in a point of melodrama, I was like, you know, if this doesn’t work out, I think I’ll just – maybe I’ll just farm. My mom said, “It is wrong to be so condescending to think that if you don’t have any skills, you can just farm. You know, […]

Incomplete and Incoherent Reflections on Year One of Fatherhood

Leave a comment
essays

Today, our son Quinn turns one. With a woolly brain, addled from both pandemic and parenting, I have been attempting to reflect on the journey so far. Mostly my hands feel full of unintelligible puzzle pieces. There seems to be no box with a master picture I can follow or even convenient edge pieces to start hanging everything else from. But as a person who must make sense of things, I feel compelled to begin […]

TED Told Me that Only the Wealthy Can Save Us

Leave a comment
quotes

One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the […]

I quit Twitter, here’s why I think you should too if you care about leadership

Leave a comment
essays

There’s a lot being written about Elon Musk and Twitter right now, but I wanted to address his leadership, what’s happening with leadership in general right now, and my own thoughts on continuing to use the platform. In related news, looks like I’ll be publishing here a bit more frequently. ____ Organizational change, particularly in companies that have repeatedly failed to make change in the past, requires what’s known as ‘transgressive leaders.’ These leaders don’t […]

Doublethink

Leave a comment
quotes

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw […]

State of Work, 2020

Leave a comment
essays

Uncertain, unprecedented: every week in 2020 forced organizations to adapt—in many cases overnight—to a remote workforce, changing consumer demands, fluctuating government restrictions, employee struggles. At NOBL, we wanted to look beyond the headlines to help leaders navigate this unique moment in history, and assess whether responses were quick fixes to immediate problems, or more permanent shifts in how business is done. View the full post, including a direct link to the slides.

Consulting as Craft

comment 1
essays

A craftsperson is someone who practices a trade or discipline with the ultimate goal of mastery. Anyone, in any discipline, can be a craftsperson if they so choose. Each and every one of us has the capacity to do good work of some kind. I myself am a consultant by trade and the founder of a consulting company. I approach my work as a craftsperson (and it so happens I was raised by multiple generations […]

The Consulting Firm as a System

Leave a comment
random

This looks like a bowl of spaghetti, but it’s helpful for me to understand the consulting model as a system. When we ask, “How do we get more new clients?” it’s useful to know what influences that outcome. Obviously, all models are flawed, but this one is helpful to us. Can you draw your business model as a system?

Dog Bless You

Leave a comment
random

The Romans were a group of people who lived a long time ago and had a funny way of keeping count. They also had a penchant for crucifixion. Crucifixion was the best idea at the time for making people suffer and die. If you did it right, crucifixion could take four days to die from. Roman soldiers used to stab people who were already suffocating on the cross because it hurried things along. You see, […]

They’re Wrong

Leave a comment
music

When Dylan went electric, the world turned against him. I love hearing what that was like from the inside. If you’ve ever felt like you’d been pursuing a new creative path and the world was ignoring you or against you, this is a must watch.

Anthony Bourdain Travels to the Unknown

Leave a comment
random

Anthony Bourdain purportedly died today. A suicide. He was a man of vices and demons, worn proudly and used (mostly) productively. I don’t believe there’s anything after death, but Bourdain took his last epic voyage into that unknown space today. If there is a place beyond, he’s soaking it in, listening to the locals, and following his stomach to its lesser trod corners. It’s quaint to call him an inspiration. He was a fantasy. At […]

How Do We Decide?

Leave a comment
orgdesign

Teams make lots of decisions. Important decisions. Trivial decisions. Urgent decisions. Wide-ranging decisions. But teams very rarely ever think about HOW they decide. Startups generally start with consensus and either keep relying on it as they scale which slows them down OR they fall back on a single leader who, as the company grows, becomes less and less equipped to see all aspects of the business. We made this team decision making tool to help […]