Expanding upon Ben Horowitz’s viral article, Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO, to highlight how top Go-To-Market leaders operate/lead differently in wartime.

Exploring how randomness manifests across disciplines, along with ways to harness it for greater knowledge, creativity, and productivity.

Renowned pianist André Watts passed away July 12, 2023—his obituary can be found in The Economist. In many ways, Watts’ life celebrates triumph over adversity via mastery of his craft. “Be so good they can’t ignore you,” as Steve Martin suggests, certainly applies to André Watts. His life and work offer valuable lessons in achieving mastery—and worldwide fame—despite numerous obstacles.

Is Customer Success just a bandaid for bad software? Answer: Sometimes. Customer Success can be an expensive solution to endemic product problems. It can also be an incredibly lucrative function (and career), but make no mistake: it can be built badly. To build Customer Success right, a sober appraisal of your company, your software, and your customers is critical. Otherwise, you risk throwing (expensive) bodies at the problem.

Exploring the psychology of “busy” to decrease distraction and get 2-3 hours back per day.

What can the iconic disco ball teach us about diversity? Get down and boogie with a style of leadership that respects myriad people and perspectives. May the best team win!

In an era polluted by fake news, rhetoric and divisive judgement, it has become increasingly hard to maintain productive, rational discourse. 60% of adults get their news from social media. The majority of content we consume each day is selected by algorithms designed to capitalize on our brains’ cravings for novelty by way of hijacking—in polarizing fashion—our emotional response. As a result, rational discourse is becoming a lost art. In the very least, we can save time by figuring out who we’re dealing with—be it a spouse, coworker, friend or Twitterati— by asking: What would make you change your mind?

The only positive-sum, apolitical way out of the current US government-fueled, inflationary, debt-laden debacle is to increase productivity. The other ways are increasing taxes and reducing government spending. However, “productivity” is a government statistic that is: laggy, often misunderstood, very complex, and archaic. Nascent AI applications, e.g. chatGPT, autoGPT et al, hold tremendous potential, but their connection to the US productivity is opaque at best.

The business case for offering employees paid family leave is strong. For founders offering their employees 12 weeks family leave, we estimate the ROI at 160% based on reduced attrition alone. Confidence in assertions is modest due to publicly-available data quality.

The VC-fueled startup bubble will pop in the next 6-12 months. Once the froth has been purged, expect Series A-E round valuations to come down 30-50%. The 2021-2022 VC vintage may go down as the worst-performing in the history of venture capital.

Unpopular opinion: Slack reduces employee productivity due to incessant distraction and its assault on ‘Deep Work.’

Interested in doing an Ironman or getting your pilot license? Here is an overview of the 1) financial cost, 2) time required, 3) reward, and 4) my (many) mistakes/learnings along the way.

Top takeaways from Jim Rohn’s short-yet-insightful book, The Seasons of Life. “Life and business are like the changing seasons. You cannot change the seasons, but you can change yourself. Therein lies the opportunity to live an extraordinary life, the opportunity to change yourself.”

The #1 mistake we’ve seen startups make is they try to solve software problems with people, and people problems with software. Are startups hiring too fast and buying too much software? Our contention: Yes.

Tip of the cap to Affinity cofounders Ray & Shubby for raising $80 million dollars to accelerate their growth.

As one of the smartest and most successful humans alive, Charlie Munger employs mental models to improve his decision making. This article focuses on his 25 psychological tendencies, along with ways to put them into practice.

Top takeaways from an episode of Mike Maples’ (excellent) podcast Starting Greatness about the 3 types of waves founders can catch: 1) Technology, 2) Adoption, and 3) Regulatory.

What habits do you have today? Morning coffee, checking email, exercise, thumbing through Instagram, watching TV? Habits have a profound compounding effect, so its critical to pause and reflect on our habits—are they helping or hurting us?

With help from Shakespeare, we explore how intellectual honesty yields better decision-making, and the teams that make the best decisions win. Therefore, leaders would be well-served to define what “intellectual honesty” means in practice, and treat it as an operating principle or cultural value.

Analysis, insights and a “Prep & Screen” tool for evaluating “advisors” in their many shapes and forms.

According to writing master Bill Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, good writing is about humanity and warmth, expressed with clarity and strength. Business writing is often the opposite of this. Try these 4 tips for more effective business writing.

“It is nothing short of a miracle the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom.” —Albert Einstein

In this article we propose the S.A.T. Method—”Share, Act, Teach”—to improve your ability to learn and apply new skills. Shape those synapses!

In our most popular article of 2020 with 150k+ page views, we explore how the anatomy of a hurricane might offer some clues on how to handle the hard stuff.