Tag: leadership
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happy birthday
My birthday starts in ten minutes. I grew up in the cold war ten miles from a SAC base, so we didn’t bother with duck and cover or fallout shelters — we were dead if the nukes flew. So not knowing if we’d make it another year isn’t a new feeling. But it has been…
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send an email…
I think that seeing idiots try to use the tools you use all the time (and take for granted) is maybe more depressing than seeing them try to use tools that you don’t know about. “take 15 minutes at the end of the week to write me an email that I can read in 5…
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occupying the space of opposition
It has been 31 days since Donald Trump took office and began to keep his promises to systematically destroy the United States for the benefit of those who need no help amassing power and riches, and in that time there has not even been token resistance from the Democratic Party. Instead of wielding the same…
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everything is a side-hustle
In the back half of the 1990s when the dot com bubble was inflating, there was a sense among the watchers that the energy and limitlessness of the times represented a “New Economy” and a “New Way of Working”. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn’t. By 2008 that optimism was gone, and the prevailing ethos…
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A different approach
As the twice-impeached felon in the White House goes about his work, he has decided upon a number of policies that are crass, blunt, cruel, and of questionable legality because he and the people he surrounds himself with are impatient, ignorant, and immoral. But the thing is, buried deep within them, some of the policies…
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Triaging your principles
Some people can’t be saved, save the ones who can. That is the idea behind triage, the practice of sorting wounded or injured people to order them for treatment, but also to order them for non-treatment because in a crisis, when time and doctors and supplies are in short supply, trying in vain to save…
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Discretionary power without accountability
Convicted felon Donald. J. Trump was in a New York City courtroom today where he was sentenced to bear no burden and suffer no penalty for cooking the books during his 2016 presidential campaign to hide from regulators and voters how he paid off a porn star to hide from voters that he’d had an…
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Tariffs only work if …
Tariffs only work if they raise prices of imported goods above the cost of domestic goods because the purpose of a tariff is to create space in the competitive landscape for domestic producers to grow and prosper by raising the cost of the imported good so that domestic goods can undercut them on price in…
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Leave me alone (but keep doing things for me)
This is the sentiment of the people who aren’t zealots, ideologues, or assholes that will vote against a Democrat at the next poll. This isn’t an ideology. This is just people who are fine, who want to stay fine. For them the world isn’t broken, it isn’t in need of overhaul, it isn’t a disaster…
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Rank, Role, Pay
Rank is where you sit in a hierarchy. You get positional authority from it. Role is what your responsibilities and operational authority are. Pay is how you are compensated. Some places try to keep these three tightly coupled — “Only people of this Rank can hold this Role, and Pay is bound to Rank.” Only…