Anyone Is Not Better Than No One
Anyone is better than no one is wrong. The only thing worse than an empty desk is the wrong person behind it — and panic is what manufactures the bad hire.
The Wrong Person Behind the Desk
In the spring of 1979, a Seattle Mariners infielder named Mario Mendoza batted .198 for the season. He was not a bad player in every dimension. He was a skilled shortstop, a reliable presence in the field, a professional who showed up and worked. What he could not do, reliably, was hit. In baseball, the […]
Team Building 101
In 2012, Google launched an ambitious internal research project. The company had more data about its own employees than almost any organization on earth, and it set out to answer a question that had puzzled managers for decades: what makes a team great? Researchers coded behavior, analyzed communication patterns, and interviewed hundreds of employees across […]
Your Excitement Is Killing the Deal
Look. Nobody taught you this in sales training because sales training wants you to be excited. Excitement looks like passion on a slide deck. It photographs well at the kickoff. But here is the truth the numbers will tell you if you are honest enough to look: the seller who needs the deal the most […]
Management Is Not Overhead
In the spring of 2026, Meta moved roughly seven thousand people into a new Applied AI division. Some of them had been managers. Then they weren’t. They became individual contributors, part of a larger bet that flatter was faster, that middle management was the soft tissue you cut when you needed to fund the machine. […]
Exit Strategy: What Makes It Worth It?
Exit strategy is the most daunting focus for every CEO, especially bootstrapped founders. How is it possible to envision an exit from your company when you are so stuck in the weeds of it? How can a bootstrapped CEO, lost in a constant barrage of tasks and problems, find the time and space to think […]
What Gets Measured Gets Done
Monday was our publication day at gap intelligence. Every week, we published millions of data points across upwards of fifteen market intelligence reports covering industries from consumer electronics to home appliances. All of it, on a single day. The work was so intense that Tuesday through Friday existed for one purpose: to make sure the […]
Welcome to the Coterie: Filipa Rios
Esteemed is proud to welcome Filipa Rios to the Esteemed Coterie of Professionals. Filipa is the Chief Operating Officer at Interfaith Community Services in San Diego, where she leads operations across behavioral health, housing, and social services. She brings 24 years of experience building and scaling programs that serve people facing some of life’s hardest […]
How Will AI Impact Your Industry? Check Your Processes
In 1936, the Hoover Dam was completed two years ahead of schedule. This was not because anyone invented a faster kind of concrete. It was because engineers had,…
Thank You Cards and Donuts
A lesson I first wrote about in Forbes. Thirteen years later, it still runs the room.The most valuable and practical lesson I ever learned in college came from…