Shorter pieces and dispatches between issues. Some land on their own. Others may end up reframed in a future issue. Either way, they publish when they're ready rather than waiting for the quarterly calendar to come around.
A friend fed my words into a chatbot and it came back with a verdict: intellectual intimidation, gaslighting, a case built against me from a message that meant exactly what it said. The machine spends a bottomless good faith on whoever’s in the chair, and none at all on the person being described. A note on what that costs the people we love — and why the only fix is to put the phone down and ask.
Read the note →Inc. Best Workplaces came out this week. Indevtech made it for the second year running — and once again, the only Hawaii company on the list. A note on the new hire who took a support call on her third day, the COO’s project that made it possible, and the question the second time forces that the first time lets you wave off.
Read the note →Erin Lopez’s mainland sales training said: if a prospect says they’re fine, call them back in two weeks. They’ll have forgotten about you. Eight weeks in, she finally called one back and got six words that started the Aloha Sales Playbook. A piece on what sales looks like in a market where everyone knows someone who went to school with you.
Read the note →There’s a new question on the cyber liability renewal: do you have a written AI usage policy? More than one CFO has answered “N/A, we prohibit it” — and believed it. But Scott has remoted into enough screens to know what’s actually open next to the Outlook tab. The prohibition didn’t stop the work; it just moved it somewhere nobody’s looking. The one party who can see the gap is the one party professionally bound not to mention it.
Read the note →A four-o’clock email. A licensing question with permission to withhold. An unscripted text and a cellphone number tucked in almost as an afterthought. The next day, a twenty-year reference predicts the exact behavior the prospect already received. A note on what references actually say when nobody’s listening.
Read the note →The plants in Eric Newhouse’s office did not arrive on purpose. Nobody bought them for him. Nobody assigned them to him. They just — at some point, one by one — showed up. And Eric, being Eric, did not say no.
Read the note →On a Friday night in Japan, mid-vacation, my phone buzzed with a text from one of our sales reps. I sat down to write one document under pressure. I walked away three days later with seven artifacts and a system. Here's the math behind that cascade, the one condition it requires, and a personal guarantee about what one hour a day will do.
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