The power of high standards

Elevate your leadership by instilling high standards in your team, fostering accountability even in unseen moments for greater success.
“Another reason why high standards matters: As a leader, you can’t see everything every person does every day. Managers, by definition, have less visibility into what each direct report is working on than the direct report does. You need your team to hold themselves to a high standard in the moments when no one is looking” —Are your standards too low? In defense of raising the bar
The agent-shaped org chart
Every real org has the same topology: principal, role-holder, specialists. Staff AI maps onto it, node for node, and the cost collapse shows up in the deliverables that were always just human-handoff overhead.
AI as staff, not software
Two frames for what AI is doing to work. The tool frame makes tools smarter. The staff frame makes roles unnecessary. Those aren't the same product, the same company, or the same industry.
Knowledge work was never work
Knowledge work was always coordination between humans who couldn't share state directly. The artifacts were never the work. They were the overhead — and AI just made the overhead optional.
The work of being available now
A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.
The practice of work in progress
Practical essays on how work actually gets done.
The file I almost made twice
A small operational footgun that runs everywhere — building a parallel system when the one you have is fine.
The actor doesn't get to be the verifier
The worker isn't lying. The worker is reporting what it thought it did, which is always one step removed from what the world actually shows. The fix isn't more self-honesty. The fix is a different pair of eyes.
Shopping is the last mile
Every meal planning app treats cooking as the hard problem and shopping as a logistics detail. They have it backwards. Cooking is mostly solved. Shopping is the last mile.
Are you settling for less?
Stop settling for less and discover how raising your standards can lead to greater success and fulfillment in life.
Stop making all the decisions
Overcome decision fatigue by empowering others to share the load and elevate your standards for better outcomes. Discover how today!
The future of American jobs
Explore how AI and e-commerce will reshape American jobs by 2030, and discover the opportunities for workers in evolving industries.