Productivity
Inbox Zero, as a concept, was invented by Merlin Mann in 2006. By 2009, Merlin Mann was publicly arguing that Inbox Zero was a lie — or, more precisely, that the cultural version of Inbox Zero had become the exact opposite of what he'd intended. The original idea was
Meetings
The most productive meeting I have ever been in lasted seven minutes. It was a Tuesday morning at a mid-sized logistics company in Rotterdam, the weekly operations review for the Benelux region. Seven people. One agenda item at a time. Each person had exactly 45 seconds to flag a specific
Leadership
A COO I coached in Hamburg last year had 17 direct reports and was working 75 hours a week. He was convinced that the problem was his team — they weren't as senior as they needed to be, they couldn't be trusted with the harder decisions, and
Negotiation
The best negotiator I've ever worked with was a middle-aged procurement director in the Netherlands named Piet. Quiet, bookish, rarely spoke first in meetings, never raised his voice. He routinely extracted terms from suppliers that more experienced, more forceful negotiators had failed to get from the same vendors
Communication
A director I know at a large consumer goods company has a Post-it note on the side of his monitor that reads, in black Sharpie, "No is the new yes." He put it there in 2021 after a year in which he said yes to everything — every cross-functional
Time Management
The CEO of a 200-person SaaS company in Dublin shared his calendar with me in March. It was, by any objective measure, a disaster. Sixty-three meetings in the week, average length 38 minutes, gaps between them rarely exceeding 15 minutes. He had recently read Cal Newport's Deep Work,
Productivity
Francesco Cirillo invented the Pomodoro Technique in 1987 using a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. The method — 25 minutes of focused work, 5 minutes of break, repeat — was designed for a specific person: Cirillo himself, a university student trying to study for exams with a short attention span. It worked for him.
Learning
The number 30 is arbitrary. I didn't choose it by research — I chose it because it was the highest number I could sustain without my marriage or my work suffering, and it turned out to be achievable with about 35 minutes of reading per day. Most people overestimate
Mental Models
A PE firm I know well once passed on an acquisition because the numbers were too good. The target company was a European distributor of industrial components with 18% EBITDA margins in a sector where the average was 9%, a five-year growth rate of 22%, and a clean balance sheet.
Decision Making
In 2019 I watched a senior executive I respected make a bad decision in about eleven minutes. It was a hiring decision — a Head of Sales for a 40-person software company. The candidate was charismatic, well-connected, coming off a strong run at a larger competitor. The interview was warm, the
Productivity
You know the pattern. A big report is due Friday. It's Tuesday, and you've got the time, the brief, the data. You sit down, open a blank document, and immediately feel a vague dread — not panic, not boredom, something closer to a low-grade nausea. You check
Mental Models
In 2008, SpaceX had lost three rockets in a row. Elon Musk was down to the last reserves of his eBay payout, Tesla was burning cash, and the consensus view in aerospace was that launch costs were fixed — $65 million minimum, maybe $100 million, and that was just the physics