I lived in Japan for eighteen months, teaching English, and one of the first things that quietly wrecked me was how much got communicated without ever being said. Silence wasn’t nothing — it was information, if you knew how to read it. I didn’t, not at first. I’d ask a question, get a pause and…
A few weeks into a role at Amazon, I watched a customer complaint sit untouched for three days. Nobody was ignoring it — the one person who had authority to approve the fix was on annual leave, and there was no backup, no delegation, no plan B. The team could see the problem. They just…
This week’s been about time — protecting space to think, and noticing how often a meeting is standing in for a decision you could just make. Today’s the practical part. Block one hour this week. No calls booked over it, no email open, phone in another room if that’s what it takes. Better still —…
At Amazon, if something felt hard or unclear, the reflex was always the same: get people in a room. It felt responsible. It felt collaborative. Looking back, a fair number of those meetings weren’t either of those things — they were avoidance, just dressed up with an agenda and a calendar invite. A meeting about…
When I got made redundant from Amazon after nearly a decade, the first thing that hit me wasn’t panic. It was quiet. For years my calendar had been solid blocks of back-to-back meetings — program reviews, team huddles, one-to-ones, engagement sessions. Suddenly all of that was gone, and in the space it left behind, I…
