Here’s a new article where, seemingly, some Australian consultant gets a bunch of top dogs (execs) in a room and asks: “What is your broader strategy?” They go off and write it down. And — drum roll — here are the results:

The results are always astonishing to me and them. Here are some of the responses from the list I received at my most recent session: actions (“launch a new service”; “review our suitability to the retirement business”); activities (“marketing our products through the right channels”); objectives (“achieve $100m net revenue”) and broad descriptions of what goes on (“planning…

From here:

Culture has been a real focus for many years. I think organizations are realizing that, while we describe culture a lot of different ways, it really boils down to the nature of the relationships between the people in the organization.

Let’s dive deep on this for a second or two.

Breaking down that quote

The idea that “culture has been a real focus for many years” is largely a joke. Culture is cared about by these people:

• HR departments
• Thought leaders
• People who write for Forbes and regurgitate the same shit every week
• A few semi-intelligent millennials

Here’s who DOESN’T care about…

Over the weekend, 60 Minutes did a profile on west coast U.S. homelessness, specifically in the Seattle area. Here’s that link. Homelessness is a big problem, and, regardless of how you feel about the quality of 60 Minutes journalism, the fact is that most of their pieces are 14 minutes or so. It’s very hard to unpack an issue that big in 14 minutes, but damn if Anderson Cooper wasn’t going to try. In the context of Seattle, these “big three” reasons emerged →

• Developers are greedy and we need more affordable housing.
• Wages are stagnated and we need better-paying…

We all know the joke about the gym on January 2nd (full) vs. the gym on March 2nd (every machine is available).

You know the same joke but applied to religion?

Easter Sunday is usually the busiest day of the year for many churches — something like 6/7 in 10 Americans go to church.

The literal next Sunday is usually one of the least-attended church days of the year.

The pessimistic way to view that stat is families saying “OK, we did our duty, see ya maybe once over the summer and then into next holiday season.”

But damn (Daniel)…

There are a lot of different types of bad bosses in the world — here’s one list and here’s another — but we spend a lot of our time and attention on either (a) the bullying kind or (b) the micromanaging kind. In reality we should be talking about all of these idiots more, because 82% of managers end up being the wrong hire, which is an astronomical fucking failure rate that would never be tolerated in other parts of the business, and because bad management is legitimately leading people to earlier deaths. These are important discussions.

It’s always interested…

Nice little pull quote from here:

Last but not least, gathering the data takes time and energy away from the activities that are supposed to get measured — just ask doctors and nurses, or the chairs of academic departments. For all these reasons and more, metric fixation often leads to demoralization.

I mostly agree with this quote. There are analytic programs — including big ones like Google Analytics, but tons of startups — that are supposed to make data collection and analysis either. Not all these “solutions” actually deliver on their promise, unfortunately, and that’s probably truer in “Big Data”…

I think we all know this about humanity, but there are oftentimes “the real reason” for something happening and then there’s the corresponding “reason we claim.” This is all because we want to reconcile sense of self. Let me give you a horrible example.

Reason we claim for infidelity: “I’m so horrible, I strayed, it’s because of issues with my mom…”

Real reason: “I wanted to have sex with another person who made me feel hot/good and felt limited by the idea of only continuing to have sex with one for 40 years since that’s not how our biology is…

Back on October 1, 2014 I wrote a post called “Can you make friends after 30?” If I’m doing some basic math correctly, I would have been 33 when I wrote that. I’m now 37. Here’s what happened in the intervening time:

• Most of my friends changed
• I got divorced
• Getting divorced teaches you a ton about who’s really there for you vs. who’s not, so my friends shifted again
• Now — and this took a hot minute — I feel more comfortable in my own skin

People that I probably would have texted or called regularly on 10/1/14? They…