How to do a turnaround for a company with < $1M Revenue
Congratulations! You’ve taken over (or started) a small company that’s stuck, stalled, or sliding backward. Maybe revenue growth flatlined, customer churn increased, or you’re just buried under operational noise. Here’s the brutally practical playbook for turning things around in the AI era. Step 1: Get real (with yourself and the team) Companies under USD 1M […]
If you hate Mondays, something’s broken
Mondays are not the enemy. They’re just a mirror. A brutal, honest reflection of the life you’ve built…or tolerated. If Sunday night feels like dread and Monday morning hits like a punch, maybe the problem isn’t the day. Maybe it’s the project, the team, the job, or the dream that was never really yours. […]
on teaching 👩🏻🏫🧑🏻🏫
There’s a persistent myth in academia (and, let’s be honest, in a lot of industries) that the best people to learn from are the ones who are best at doing the thing. Students chase professors with the longest publication lists, the fanciest journal placements, and the keynote speaker energy. And then they sit through 80-minute […]
[Book review] Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company
I just finished reading Patrick McGee’s book on Apple and here are my insights: 1. Vulnerability by Design – Apple made itself vulnerable by design. By instructing Chinese suppliers how to manufacture world‑class iPhones (from micrometer tolerances to assembly-line choreography) Apple inadvertently built also China’s industrial power. McGee quotes internal docs revealing Apple spent ~$275 billion […]
Strategy in mud, not stone
In a world that moves like a river, why build your strategy out of stone? Leaders love certainty. Investors crave confidence. And powerpoint loves a five-year plan with bulletproof logic. But the best strategies? They’re sketched in pencil. Etched in mud. Solid enough to hold shape. Soft enough to reshape. So, yes, strategy is an […]
Toy story: How great companies get disrupted by seemingly insignificant innovations
In 1997, Clayton Christensen introduced the world to a concept called the Innovator’s Dilemma, a phenomenal book explaining why well-managed companies often falter when faced with disruptive innovation. Christensen illustrated how incumbents, despite having abundant resources and expert management, get disrupted precisely because they’re great at serving their existing customers and, I would add, making […]
Apple, Perplexity, and the Mirage of Moats
The Bloomberg reports that Apple is exploring an acquisition of Perplexity AI is unsurprising in one sense and deeply revealing in another. On the surface, Apple’s acquisition of a buzzy AI startup fits the recent pattern: Microsoft acquires (sort of) OpenAI, Google leans into DeepMind and Gemini, and Amazon throws money at Anthropic… and Apple? […]
You don’t need a secretary
“You don’t need a secretary,” said Nassim Nicholas Taleb. And he was right. You don’t need someone to manage your chaos. You need to eliminate the chaos. In the old world (before 2020), a secretary was a status symbol. Proof that your life was too big, too busy, too important to manage alone. In […]
Speed up as you age
Photo: Chris Liverani / Unsplash.com There’s a myth that life has a natural slope: up in your 20s and 30s, plateau in your 40s, then a slow descent into “maturity,” “comfort,” or worse, “relevance loss.” But what if that’s all backwards? What if aging was your license to speed up? You’ve already done the hard […]
The compounding curve of consistency (Tripple C)
Source: plus.onstrategy.eu (last 365 days of monthly subscribers) This is what compounding looks like: boring, until suddenly it isn’t. It’s the slow, steady grind of doing the work, shipping the product, hitting publish, making the call. Nothing spectacular. Just forward. All the little unremarkable steps added up into something that, in retrospect, looks inevitable. Everyone […]