Tag: Leadership
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Building Aria: Part 4 – The Alignment Mirror
Photo by Avery Evans on Unsplash Over the previous three entries, Project Aria has crossed three clear thresholds, though none of them felt clear while I was in the middle of them. In Part 1, she found her voice: more than a demo, she became a partner in conversation that carried beyond a single reply.…
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Your Infrastructure Is Lying to You
Photo by Brian Kelly on Unsplash Every company that grows quickly builds roads to connect where they are with where they want to go. At first, those roads are simple: gravel tracks carved out of necessity, meant to get people and goods moving with minimal delay. They’re not elegant, but they’re fast. They serve their…
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Trading Applause for Alignment
Photo by Headway on Unsplash Author’s Note This piece explores a subtle but important distinction: the difference between applause and alignment. It’s not written as a critique of any one leader or culture, but as a reflection on a pattern many of us have observed and, at times, participated in—the slow drift from substance to…
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The Cost of Ownership
Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash Author’s Note This piece may come across sharper than most. Perhaps that’s intentional—but the intent is not unkind. The goal here is not to condemn managers, critique peers, or cast blame on systems that evolved in the absence of reflection. Rather, it’s to illuminate a pattern that often remains invisible until it’s…
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Inside the Lines, Outside the Truth
Photo by Joyce Romero on Unsplash Author’s Note The opening story in this piece is fictional—but it’s not invented. It draws from publicly available reporting, court documents, and personal accounts related to the Purdue Pharma case and the wider opioid crisis. The names, moments, and characters have been fictionalized, but the architecture of the story—how…
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Bridges, Not Walls: The Strategic Value of Operational Transparency
Photo by Denis Panfilov on Unsplash Title note: This piece is about organizational transparency and cross‑functional translation. The title comes from an internal tool I built (“Bridges, Not Barriers”), not from any current political event or protest. Lighting the Valley—How Transparency Built a Revolution The first lightbulb flickered to life in a Tennessee farmhouse in…
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Beyond Shareholder Value
Photo by Alexey Marchenko on Unsplash Re‑centering Fiduciary Duty on People, Planet, and Sustainable Profit Quick take: Companies that view fiduciary duty only through a shareholder‑value lens are leaving growth, trust, and resilience on the table. When leaders widen the aperture to include employees, customers, communities, and the environment, they unlock durable advantage and deliver…
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The Problems with Unicorns
Author’s Note Yes, “unicorn” is a ridiculous word. So are “guru,” “ninja,” and “wizard”—and we’re not here to glorify them. These labels get tossed around too casually in tech and corporate slang, usually as buzzword shorthand for undefined brilliance or vaguely heroic productivity. We’re using “unicorn” here not because it’s the most accurate, but because…
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Clearing the Rubble: The Pre-Work of Real Culture
Dawn spills across the studio’s worn floorboards, dust motes drifting like slow sparks in the angled light. At the easel stands a painter—sleeves rolled, palette forgotten—taking stock of a canvas already heavy with other beginnings. Cracked pigments buckle in ridges; clots of color sit where inspiration once outran intention. He raises a palette knife and,…
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Designing for Trust: A Blueprint for the Organizations Worth Building
Designing for Trust: A Blueprint for the Organizations Worth Building Author’s Note If trust were visible, most org charts would look like seismic reports—fissures everywhere. That’s what the last five articles have made plain. We started by tracking where teams falter—authority hoarded instead of shared, incentives that reward performance theater over progress, systems that bury…
Abstract Foundations 