My Path to Seeing the Full Picture

I used to be so good at being right all the time. No matter what and no matter how. For any divergence of opinion, I had the absolutely most correct version of it. And since opinions manifest in words, I was enormously equipped to eliminate incorrect positions. But I grew out of it for the […]

GRACE in Business: How Ideas-Driven Change Spurs Growth

To grow your business, advocate for change and rally people around it. Ideas-led growth is a virtuous cycle in which ideas become the driving force for your growth: revenue growth, capabilities growth, and possibilities growth. It’s a virtuous cycle that you can learn to master with GRACE. Grace is a mindset of cultivating ease, fluidity, […]

Nurturing Excellence with Grace and Love

I’m all in on quiet luxury. And quiet success. Quiet success creates my calm approach to helping my clients and delivering work with grace, craft, and love. It’s not a formula I’m going to pretend you can replicate. You can’t. Quiet success means these cats and this beach. It comes from these hands these skills […]

How Content Sours Creativity

This “content thing” is making me into a mean monkey. The mean level of discourse about quality and creativity is making me sneer at ideas that probably deserve better. Mean aspirations beget meager outcomes that I read about and snort at. The need to say or do something, even when you mean nothing, is sharpening […]

A Plea for Purposeful Creation

Once you start thinking about “content,” it’s over. You’re already in a world of bottomless, numberless containers that need to be filled for their own sake. You’re already shouting messages no one wants to hear into holes no one wants to be in. You’re creating meaningless tokens that have no value outside of a game […]

Living the Diamond Rule

You have a responsibility to yourself to treat other people well. You have a responsibility to other people to treat yourself well. You = yourself, your family, your team, your organization, and your local and national governments. It’s kind of a variation on the Golden Rule but with more facets. Maybe it should be called […]

Nine Personas for Thought Leaders

Who are you as a thought leader? Choosing a persona can be a useful technique for creating consistency in your work. Adopting them can shape both individual pieces of thought leadership and an overarching brand. In this week’s issue of The Graceful Thought Leader, I wrote about nine archetypal personas for how to approach a […]

The New Metric of Influence

Are you bold enough to rethink the way you measure thought leadership outcomes? You can do it! Stop chasing numbers. Say no to metrics like views, clicks, likes, and leads.

Conversations Over Clicks

Are you bold enough to rethink the way you measure thought leadership outcomes? You can do it! Stop chasing numbers. Say no to metrics like views, clicks, likes, and leads. Stop worrying about SEO. Instead, start having conversations. Ask your sales team, “Did you use this in a meeting? How did it help you? What […]

What Emerging Companies Need to Know

US approval of ETFs will have big downstream implications for marketing and thought leadership in crypto. Many emerging companies won’t be ready. Here’s why. Crypto becoming institutional in such a large investment market will open up space for more crypto service providers with institutional-class offerings. But the question is, do they know what an institutional […]

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