Category: Leadership

Leadership Moment: Asymmetric Communication Checking into hotels has become increasingly automated. For a recent hotel stay, I received a WhatsApp message from the hotel asking me to provide some pre-checkin information, to smooth the check-in process (reading between the lines: reduce the cost to the hotel to check me in with a human). After a…

Leadership Moment: Product-Led Growth Via SwiftonSecurity (who else), we’re reminded of Bloomberg’s fascinating “get fired” perk: paying customers who lose their job can request a free Bloomberg terminal to bridge them over and maintain currency in the trading network while they seek a new job. In addition to the brilliance of this move (ensuring brand…

Leadership Moment: Firing At the Student Last week, police in Burlington, VT surprised students in a forensic class with a mock mass-shooting simulation. Unsurprisingly, students and parents were decidedly unamused with this event, which was poorly thought through (although the pedagogical goals are interesting: an aim to demonstrate to the students after the event how…

Leadership Moment: D-Day As we observe and celebrate the 80th anniversary of D-Day this week, there’s also a solemnity: this may be the final “interesting” (numerically) anniversary in which living veterans of D-Day participate. As usual, France has rolled out the red carpet for the heroes who through themselves into harm’s way, by sea and…

Leadership Moment: Constraining Authority The Daf Yomi is the practice of studying the Talmud, in a page a day. This last week, the daily page included Bava Metzia 59, one of the key moments in legal leadership in the history of humankind. It starts out really boringly: an argument between the rabbis about whether an…

Leadership Moment: The Perfect is the Enemy of the Now It’s been a crazy month here, and despite some great plans for the newsletter, I kept failing to execute on them – and there’s a leadership lesson right there: sometimes, you build up your own requirements for success so high that, in failing to meet…

Leadership Moment: Begging Forgiveness, or Planning Harm? Two weeks ago, I wrote about the entertaining experience of watching a hotel clerk completely ignore me for ten minutes. To be clear, at any point I could have advocated for myself. I could have written my checkout note on a piece of paper, and then called my…

Leadership Moment: Performance vs Practice Kymberlee Price led off her post for International Women’s day with “I hate International Women’s Day.” It’s actually not that provocative of a post: Kymberlee objects to the one-day marketing campaigns that aren’t backed up by actual work. I agree with her points, and go one step further: what I…

Leadership Moment: Customer Acknowledgement I was recently in Tel Aviv. If there’s one thing that Israelis of all stripes seem to be universally proud of, it’s the bad customer service you’ll get in Israel. It’s an odd badge of honor. I was checking out of my hotel. I got in “line” behind a couple who…

Leadership Moment: Snowmageddon? Or is that NOmageddon? While I’m now enjoying the lovely weather in Tel Aviv, last week I was home outside Boston, prepping to leave, when I was joined by my whole family, since school was closed for the impending snow storm. The storm was a dud, however. rain, wintry mix, and a…