For most of human history, work has been about one thing: extracting human attention and energy and converting it into services and products. Management was the discipline of directing those finite human capacities toward what the organization required. Pressure came from inside and outside, and when pressure exceeded capacity, the humans suffered. That wasn’t a
Recorded as I walked along the beach at sunset. Excuse the seagulls. The end of middle management is closer than most leaders realize — and what comes next is more interesting than the headlines suggest. In January 2020, just when COVID became a thing and a year before anyone outside a research lab was talking
Why the modern flow narrative doesn’t go far enough — and what flow without direction is really costing us, personally and collectively. For most of my career, I was a true believer in flow. I trained thousands of people in the Golden Zone model — match your skills to the challenge, notice anxiety if the
A scientist spends years designing a study, running trials, and analyzing data — only to discover that a Greek philosopher figured out the same result 2,400 years ago and wrote it down in a diary. It’s funny. It’s also a little humbling. We live in an era that worships novelty. The latest study, the breakthrough
Here is something almost nobody talks about. The person with the scarcity mindset and the person with the abundance mindset can both end up in exactly the same place: stuck. One builds a fortune and can’t enjoy it. The other visualizes a fortune and never builds it. One hoards. The other hopes. And neither is
Right now, as you read this, there are more than 50 active armed conflicts burning across the globe. The war in Ukraine grinds into its fifth year. The Middle East remains engulfed in violence that has reshaped the region. Sudan’s civil war has displaced over 10 million people in what the UN calls the world’s