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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
But we don’t come together to perform what we already know how to do. We come together to be unlovely and take ourselves apart, in order to mutually construct even more difficult ideas. It’s not supposed to be easy. The labor is what makes it beautiful. — Kyla Wazana Tompkins
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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?
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, […]
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 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 […]
Writing is taking an enormous bowl of cooked spaghetti, untangling the noodles one at a time, meticulously placing them end to end, and returning them to their uncooked state so the reader can do that for themselves. Me.
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 […]
I am an immortal soul tied to the body of a dying animal. Philip K. Dick, paraphrasing W.B. Yeats.
