The first process I ever wrote down properly wasn’t for a client. It was for myself, in the first few months of running YVO, after I caught myself doing the same client onboarding steps slightly differently every single time and hoping I’d remember what worked. I sat down one afternoon and just wrote out what…
A client told me straight out last week: I know I should hand this over. I just don’t want to. She wasn’t being stubborn. She was being honest, which is rarer, and more useful. It wasn’t about trust. She knew I was capable — she’d already handed over harder things without a second thought. This…
My first year managing a team at Amazon, I made the same mistake most people make when they start delegating. I picked people I trusted and figured that was the job done. Hire well, hand things over, everything’s fine. It wasn’t fine. Things got done, but not the way I’d have done them, and I…
When I got made redundant from Amazon, I had, for the first time in years, an empty calendar and no meetings to run to. So I did something I’d never made time for while I was in the job: I sat down and mapped out exactly where communication had broken down over the previous year….
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…
