Leadership

The Science of Conversation for people who hate small talk

One morning, I watched a data engineer struggle with using AI for thirty minutes, trying to debug a DBT job. The problem wasn’t the LLM’s capabilities—it was how the engineer framed the question. No context about what they’d already tried. No explanation of the expected versus actual output. Just “fix this code” followed by a massive code dump. This same engineer had similar struggles with stakeholders. Presentations that assumed too much context. Emails that buried the ask. Meetings where they answered questions nobody asked.

Sunday, January 4, 2026 Read

The Invisible PR You're Building Right Now

The Email That Changed Everything I received a meeting invite labeled “Check In” and it was to discuss news about the restructure. In a few months, my role would be gone. I was still processing it, sitting with that particular brand of numbness that comes when your career gets upended. In the following weeks, my inbox started filling up. LinkedIn messages. Texts. Emails from people I’d worked with years ago.

Monday, December 8, 2025 Read

When Pirates Offered Better Service

The Day Music Changed Forever On June 1, 1999, an eighteen-year-old kid in a Northeastern University dorm room launched something that would bring the music industry to its knees. Shawn Fanning called it Napster, and within two years, 80 million people were using it to download 14,000 songs every minute.1 The technology was simple: a central server indexed which songs each user had, then let computers talk directly to each other. No complicated setup. No technical expertise required. Just type in “Metallica” and boom—there it was.

Sunday, November 16, 2025 Read

Rolling for Initiative: How Dungeons & Dragons Taught Me Everything About Team Leadership

The Unexpected Training Ground I never thought a game about pretending to be elves and wizards would teach me more about leadership than any management training I’ve ever attended. But here we are. Growing up, Dungeons & Dragons was this weird thing you did if you had friends—which, honestly, I didn’t have a lot of. My best friend and I played these sort of solo-person adventures, just the two of us hunched over character sheets and dice on pumped up inflatable air beds in the living room. It wasn’t exactly the epic party campaigns you see on Critical Role, but it was still magic. Years passed. We got older. Eventually, we managed to rope in some other friends, and now? Now we’ve got a whole group that gets together yearly, and those weekends have become something we all look forward to more than just about anything else.

Sunday, October 26, 2025 Read

From Compliance to Commitment: What Decades of Research Reveals About Moral Courage

The Question That Launched a Six-Year Study A twelve-year-old boy watched from a rooftop as soldiers spent 18 hours eliminating a thousand people. He was the only survivor from his entire family. When he finally escaped and stumbled barefoot across the countryside, a peasant woman opened her door, took one look at him, and without hesitation pulled him inside—despite knowing she’d face execution if discovered. Four decades later, that boy—now sociology professor Samuel Oliner—launched a six-year study interviewing 700 Europeans to answer the question that haunted him: Why did she risk everything when so many others didn’t?

Saturday, October 25, 2025 Read

The Superpower of Clear Communication: Mastering Volume, Melody, Tonality, and Pause

The Meeting That Changed Everything Picture this: It’s the quarterly business review, and your team’s project is on the chopping block. Budget cuts are looming, and you have fifteen minutes to convince the leadership team that your data initiative deserves continued funding. You’ve prepared extensively. Your slides are perfect. Your data is compelling. But as you begin presenting, you notice glazed expressions around the table. One person is checking her phone. Another is drumming his fingers impatiently.

Saturday, September 20, 2025 Read