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How to design your own demise + midyear book recs

Even if you don't care about Elon, Tesla, or X, Ms. Yaccarino's exit from X is a Rorschach test for all of our leadership. Anyone who is trying to build in this post-trust system will find something of themselves in this story, and some of it might not feel so good.

First Date Marriage Proposals

Most firms are so accustomed to getting married out of the gate that they're still shocked when customers aren't interested in the proposal. You have to fundamentally alter the sales process if you want to make it to the altar.

How to Escape a Venomous Web

Everything you're spending time, energy, attention, or money on on the Internet should be driven by specific boundaries. It's to stop being Silicon Valley's lunch.

Stop Educating Your Prospects

The initial dream of the internet was a sharing of information. Too bad that's over. This essay is about eating my own cooking, serving it to you, and doing what's necessary now.

We make zombies here.

We’ve built a system that rewards surface-level performance and punishes depth, propping up dead companies with borrowed time and fake metrics. If you want to make something alive, you have to risk being real.

Less Marketing, Less Tech

Marketing as we know it is collapsing—platforms like Google and Meta have outgrown their need for us, their bots ending the game of traffic. We must shift our focus, resist algorithm-driven inauthenticity by showing up as our real, human selves.

The New Leadership School

Edition 122: The requirements for turning leaders into more leaders Not much keeps me up at night. Other than chronic pain, that is. Living with chronic illness is a really fun time, but that's a newsletter for a different day. One of the side benefits of living with

How Founders Beat Uncertainty

Right now, a lot of businesses are operating from a place of contraction. Taking what they can from a shrinking pie. But the winners? The ones who will make it through this moment and thrive? They’re not focused on getting a bigger slice—they’re focused on making a bigger pie

The only two things I require of a leader

All growth is change, and that starts with the leader, but it's gonna require more of you than ever before. Before we start a growth project, I test leaders on two things, and literally nothing else really matters after that.

It's not you. It's the *gestures broadly* this 👉

This polarization and degradation of trust at scale is incontrovertible and organizations that ignore its effects on how buyers buy and clients trust do so at their peril. Leaders say, "We don't know what happened. We used to have no problem getting new clients, now... if we're honest..."

You have to choose

Leaders imagine deep impact while running a business on "wide" actions. Margins are consumed. Prospects are confused. You can't be both broad and deep without spending ungodly amounts of usually someone else's money. It's time to decide.

Gratitude is magic

2025 Week 5: Headlines, Hubris, and Happy Places 💡Upcoming Opportunity: If there is one place where firms need to check their ties to the status quo its in content strategy. I'm laying out my rules for content and answering all your related questions in our second online forum

What's the best advice you gave this week?

Most founders/CEOs convince themselves that if not for them, the entire growth enterprise would collapse into itself, but the truth is, the executive suite is the primary reason why content operations fail and why brands underperform. Good news is, they can fix it.

Finding your client in a house of mirrors

The Internet is shattered, leaving nearly every adult human dangerously dependent on accessing what to buy, where to buy it, what to think, and who to trust, through portals with no allegiance to truth or value, only to the highest bidder.