Everyone has a plan until the second domino falls
September 30, 2026
No org stays moderately overloaded for a decade.
World's Best Newsletter Archive
Nothing about this is temporary
February 5, 2025
The thing you can’t do, even when the entire world is upside down, is freeze.
The workplace fight worth having
April 3, 2024
Policy can be a tool for that care when it’s built thoughtfully, and when it evolves with the needs of your people.
I’ll call you from the car
November 29, 2023
The important decisions you’ll make as a boss — or a human — need to be made in the midst of very loud and poorly-timed chaos.
Day-to-day management in a polycrisis
October 18, 2023
Yours can be a team where people’s humanity has space to coexist with, and even outrank, their productivity. It’s worth building that. We’re all going to need it.
You don’t want to drink that
August 10, 2022
Threats. Dismissiveness. Burnout. Micromanagement. Yelling. Every bad boss behaviour is going to come out of the woodwork in the next few months.
Hello from the basement
July 27, 2022
One of us has COVID and so far, thanks in large part to the basement (and boosters! and masking! and updated rapid test procedures!), no one else in the house does.
But we’re being really careful
November 18, 2020
This week in particular we need you using your sway in the organization to make structural change. We need you managing up and across. Whatever’s on that list is going to need action, if your people and your organization are going to make it through winter in one piece.
Read this first
November 4, 2020
This is a week to reach for empathy before accountability. Not because accountability doesn’t matter. But because you’re at risk of mistaking hurt humans for bad employees. That’s a mistake we don’t want you to make.
The waiting is the hardest part
July 29, 2020
To run the tapes is to review past performance – yours or someone else’s – to see what you can learn from it. To run, and re-run, the metaphorical or literal video tape.
Checkmate in five moves
July 15, 2020
For those of you who see yourself in the 40% and falling camp, though, it’s time to see it for what it is. If it’s genuinely changeable and you have the energy and the commitment to change it, we’re rooting for you. If it’s not changeable, though. Well.
You’d know the answer for sidewalk chalk
July 1, 2020
What is the choice you can make that feeds your community? Of the available options, even if they’ll never hear about it either way, which is the one you’d be proud for your community to know about? Do that one.
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