Working with the Grain

Once you learn to read organizational dynamics, you can’t stop reading them. This is what happens when you take the practice seriously. Waste becomes obvious. The gap between stated values and actual practice becomes glaring. Sensing these undercurrents means feeling them.

This doesn’t make you noble. It makes you tired in specific ways that are hard to explain to people who don’t work this way.

The Practice Itself

A cabinet maker works with the grain, not against it. Not because it’s spiritual or beautiful, but because the material responds differently depending on how you approach it. The wood tells you something if you’re paying attention.

Management works the same way.

This means developing heightened awareness: how information actually flows versus how the org chart says it should. Where energy clusters and where it gets dammed up. The person who stops speaking in meetings after a particular decision. The shift in tone between front-stage and back-stage conversations. Subtle signals: a hesitation, a quick breath, the way someone’s hands move when they’re deciding whether to say what they actually think. You feel it physically: your chest tightens when something shifts, attention snaps to a pause that signals more than words convey. Over time you learn what that tightness means. Usually something important is about to happen or has just been avoided.

You learn through your hands, not books. The resistance when you push too hard. The smooth flow when your approach fits. The subtle feedback that tells you when to press forward and when to step back. This is craft knowledge: embodied and situational. Impossible to fully articulate.

What Gets Complicated Immediately

Each team, each situation has its own grain. What worked before may not work now. But here’s where it breaks: determining what the material “is” involves judgment that’s never purely objective. How much of what you see is actual pattern, and how much is your projection? The question matters more than the answer.

You will spend years learning to distinguish between reading what’s actually there and reading your own preferences into it. Some of what you’re seeing is real. Some is you. The line between perception and projection is thinner than most methods acknowledge.

There’s also this: people have agency.

Unlike wood, the grain responds to your touch, and your presence alters what you’re trying to read. You’re not just reading material. You’re in relationship with it, and the material is reading you back. This changes what craft means.

The Dangers

The practice doesn’t protect you from using it badly. You will meet people who use the language of craft to excuse slowness, who mistake their discomfort with metrics for depth, and who perform thoughtfulness while avoiding accountability.

Sometimes you are that person.

I spent six months convinced I was being patient with a person who needed time. It looked like craft. It felt like presence. What it actually was: avoidance. I didn’t want to have the hard conversation, so I called my hesitation “honoring their process.” They left the organization confused about what I thought, and the work suffered. Calling it craft made the avoidance feel noble.

Craft can become a way of not being accountable. “I see things others don’t” stops being an acknowledgment of cost and becomes a reason to stop being questioned and to stop engaging with people who don’t see it. The loneliness of the practice gets mistaken for evidence that you’re right.

There is a difference between working with the grain and just being slow, and calling it craft. Between being patient and avoiding decisions, and calling it patience. The danger is mistaking slowness for wisdom.

The central question is whether you can practice craft in systems designed for something else entirely: staying curious when the organization demands certainty or working with care when speed is rewarded.

What Happens Over Time

Early on, you begin noticing what others miss: tension, hesitation, a pause. Your attention snaps to subtle signals. This heightened perception is both a gift and a burden. You can’t unsee what you’ve learned to see.

Perception without wisdom about intervention makes things worse. Early on, I walked into a meeting reading silence as resistance. Something needed to be said, I thought. I broke the silence. Three hours later I learned that person had spent the whole meeting trying to find courage to speak, and my stepping in made them disappear further back into the room.

That was fifteen years ago. I still feel it.

Now when I see silence, I wait longer. Sometimes I wait too long. That’s another kind of harm. You learn—mostly through getting it wrong—when your seeing calls for action and when it calls for staying still.

Over time, something unexpected happens. Responsibility deepens while grandiosity falls away. You stop trying to fix things that aren’t yours to fix. A person resists a change you believe in and you watch yourself wanting to persuade them, but instead you say nothing. You notice the relief in your shoulders. That’s the lightness of releasing what you cannot carry.

This is the daily tension between caring deeply and accepting that your caring doesn’t control outcomes. Last week someone important to the organization resigned because of a decision you supported. You were right about the decision. They were right to leave. Both things are true. The tension doesn’t resolve. You learn to work within it.

Failures accumulate. Some reveal patterns you’d missed: you misread a person’s motivation and your intervention made things worse. Some show a mismatch that no intervention could fix: you did everything right and the person had already decided to leave. Learning to distinguish between these takes time and leaves marks.

Something shifts in how you hold difficulty. In a crisis last year, the room was fractured: two factions, impossible positions, language breaking down. You felt the panic just below the surface of everyone’s voice. You didn’t fix it. Instead, you asked questions no one wanted asked. And the resolution came from somewhere else. The room stopped fracturing while you were there. You felt that.

But other times nothing resolves. The conflict stays messy. The decision causes harm despite your care. You learn to value the attempt even when the result falls short.

What Has Changed

What has fallen away is the need to control everything. You used to feel responsible for how others received what you said, for whether they made the right decision. Ten years in, you stopped. The clarity of knowing what’s actually mine to do came slowly: I cannot control whether they believe me or whether it lands.

What has intensified is the sensitivity to unnecessary harm. A person is being set up to fail and no one sees it. A decision is being made on incomplete information and the person making it doesn’t know it. The organization says it values connection and the structure prevents it. These things become impossible to ignore. You feel them. The intolerance for it is almost physical.

What remains uncertain is whether any of this makes the difference you hope it makes.

You lose certain illusions: that you can control outcomes, that the system will reward integrity, that doing good work is enough, that organizations are fundamentally rational. These illusions make work easier to bear. Losing them clarifies. It also costs.

The Loneliness and the Aliveness

Decades in, the practice doesn’t stabilize. Unexpected.

You’re still discovering new ways to sense a room. Last month you noticed something: the way people arrange themselves has changed. Tighter. More defended. No one said this was happening. But the geometry of the room tells you something about the organization’s nervous system. You mention it to someone who’s been here twenty years. They haven’t seen it. You wonder if you’re right or if you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there.

The master craftsperson isn’t someone who has arrived. They’re still tinkering, still playful with the fundamentals. They know the craft deeply enough to question it, to try combinations that might be wrong. There’s aliveness in this.

You notice your own perception more precisely. But the more you understand, the more you see you don’t understand. Mastery means holding permanently that you could be completely wrong about what you’re reading.

Sometimes you’re alone in sensing undercurrents. Not everyone works this way. Most think you’re too slow, too concerned with things that don’t show up in quarterly reviews. You’re in a meeting, you see something—a shift in someone’s tone, a decision being made sideways, the moment trust breaks—and no one else seems to notice. You can’t unsee it. But naming it would sound strange. So you carry it alone. And the carrying is real weight.

Occasionally you encounter another practitioner: a nod, a glance. Understanding without explanation. These moments are rare. They remind you the craft exists independent of whether this particular organization values it.

The Cost Is Real

This practice demands things if you take it seriously. It also assumes conditions—enough credibility to be slow, enough standing to value what doesn’t show up in metrics—that aren’t equally distributed.

You will see things you cannot unsee. And you will feel them in your body.

You will keep experimenting. Not because you’re dissatisfied, but because you’re alive to possibility. The craft keeps revealing new questions and new ways of seeing. This continues as long as you practice.

The curiosity doesn’t diminish. It deepens.

Some people find they cannot work any other way because once you see the grain, you cannot pretend it isn’t there.

What Remains

Management as craft doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. Careful attention doesn’t ensure success. Working with the grain doesn’t mean the organization will flourish. Sometimes you do everything right and it still fails. Sometimes the system is too broken for craft to matter. Sometimes caring deeply just means feeling the harm more acutely.

Your hands learn to read the grain more precisely even as you become less certain about what the reading means. The practice continues.

This is what long practice looks like: not mastery as completion, but mastery as sustained attention, ongoing curiosity, the capacity to keep working thoughtfully with material that never fully reveals itself.

The craft is the work. Humanity is what prevents it from becoming manipulation. Whether any of it matters depends on questions you cannot fully answer, working in conditions you rarely control, with people who may or may not recognize what you’re trying to do.

The practice continues. That’s the whole thing. The practice continues.

==

 

photo by Ted Balmer

On Any Given Day

The Signal and the Sorting

What you project is what you attract. Not what you say you are. Not what your website claims. Not the values posted in the lobby or the purpose statement ratified by the board. What you project: the signal that emanates from every decision, every tolerated behavior, every crisis handled and mishandled. That signal is always on. It is never neutral.

The institution you lead attracts people who read it correctly. Not because people conspire to find each other, but because the signal reaches them first. And the people with options read it and move on.

A university that has stopped believing it can change anything will, over time, fill itself with faculty who have also stopped believing that. No one plans it. No one sees it happening. The institution projected something. The right people for that projection showed up.

This is not a metaphor. The mechanism doesn’t require your awareness or your cooperation. It runs regardless.

Organizations emit through what they reward quietly and what they punish quietly, through who gets promoted and who stalls, through how they treat someone on the way out. All of that is signal. It reaches people who are deciding whether this is a place where someone like them belongs.

And what you actually are is, uncomfortably, a function of what you have been willing to risk (or not risk) over time. Institutions that play it safe long enough become genuinely safe: safe to enter, safe to stay in, safe to give a mediocre decade to without consequence. They attract people for whom that is enough. Which then makes them safer still.

The reverse is also true. A genuine act of institutional courage changes the projection. It tells a different story to people who had written you off, who were waiting for exactly that signal before deciding to bet on you. You don’t have to announce the change. You have to make it. The announcement follows by itself, carried by the people who noticed.

This is why culture change is so difficult and why so many attempts at it fail. They work on the surface: the messaging, the workshops, the new leadership competencies. None of it touches the underlying projection. And the underlying projection is made of decisions, not declarations. Decisions about what you will defend when it costs something. What you will refuse when refusal is inconvenient. What you will acknowledge when acknowledgment is humiliating. The surface work is a choice, which means something else is being protected.

Every institution signals. The question worth sitting with is not “what signal do we want to send?” That question is too easy. The question is: what signal are we actually sending, as evidenced by who keeps showing up?

And who keeps leaving. Over time, not case by case. The pattern, not the story any individual departure comes with.

The exit interview is almost beside the point. You are in that data. Not the institution you intend. The one you have been building, one unframed decision at a time.

==

 

photo by Markus Spiske

The Gandhi Paradox

You are not Gandhi.

Gandhi was a private citizen when he began. No title, no formal authority. People followed him because they chose to. They could walk away, and some did, and that was their right, and the movement survived anyway. The commitment of those who stayed was real precisely because it was voluntary. You could see it because leaving was an option.

Your direct reports operate inside a legal framework of employment. Their income depends on meeting your expectations. Their career depends on your assessment of them. The question this creates is one most managers never ask: how much of what I read as engagement is engagement, and how much of it is the entirely rational behavior of people who have learned that agreement is safer than dissent?

I watched this once in a team meeting. A new initiative was presented. Everyone engaged: questions, notes, apparent buy-in. Weeks later, in a casual conversation, I learned that several people in that room had serious reservations. Reservations they took home with them. They had done everything right. Their compliance had been indistinguishable from commitment.

It was not commitment. And the room never knew.

The manager who recognizes this pattern has usually decided it doesn’t apply to them. The open door is real. The invitation to candor is sincere. And none of it changes what people will risk saying to someone who controls their livelihood. The effort was genuine. The structure doesn’t register it.

This is not a culture problem. It is not a communication problem. It is not a psychological safety problem, though it will be diagnosed as all three. The power differential does not disappear because you have made yourself approachable. It shapes what people will risk saying in every conversation you have with them. It shaped what they said to you this morning.

What you are reading as engagement is real. It is also insufficient evidence. The question worth pondering is not how to fix the structure. You can’t. It is what kind of attention you owe people you cannot fully read.

==

photo by 愚木混株 Yumu

Leadership under any name

I drove past two high schools last week, each with a large banner stretched across the front of the building. I didn’t catch the school names. I caught the word.

LEADERSHIP

Both of them. Same word, different zip code, same promise. We are growing leaders here. Your children will emerge from these doors ready to lead. Send them to us ordinary and we will return them consequential.

I drove on. But the question followed me.

If both schools are producing leaders, and presumably every other school with a banner is doing the same, who exactly are these leaders going to lead? There are only so many positions at the front of the room. The math doesn’t work. And yet the banners multiply, the mission statements accumulate, the word appears in every graduation speech, every LinkedIn profile, every performance review, until it is everywhere and therefore, quietly, nowhere.

Something has gone wrong with this word. You probably already sense it. You’ve used it, and felt somewhere underneath the using that it wasn’t quite landing on anything solid. Not recently. Slowly, the way words go wrong. Through overuse, through flattery, through the very human tendency to take something that matters and market it until the meaning drains out and only the prestige remains.

I want to try to say what went wrong. Not because the word is beyond rescue, but because the thing it points to, when it points to something real, is worth rescuing. Here is my suspicion, stated plainly before I try to earn it: leadership is not something you become. It is something others decide you are. Everything else follows from that.

The first thing that went wrong is that leader became a synonym for person we are proud of. A high-achieving student, someone who will go out into the world and do something that reflects well on the institution that formed them. That’s a reasonable aspiration. It’s just not leadership. It’s consequence. Impact. All of which are real things, but they don’t require anyone to follow you. You can matter enormously in a room by yourself.

When we substituted leader for all of those things, we smuggled in an assumption so quietly that almost nobody noticed: that consequence requires hierarchy. That the only way to count is to be in front. The researcher who spends a decade on a problem nobody else thought worth solving, the teacher who changes the frame for a generation of students, the craftsman who does the thing at a level nobody can quite explain. These people matter. The word leader doesn’t fit them, and when we try to force it, something is lost. Not just precision. The particular dignity of their way of being in the world.

The second thing that went wrong is harder to say politely. The banner told every student they could be a leader. But leader is a word with a long memory, and its memory is aristocratic. For most of human history it described the person at the top, by birth, by force, by divine appointment. We democratized the aspiration while leaving the structure intact. Everyone can aspire. Not everyone will arrive. And the ones who don’t will be measured, forever, against a standard they didn’t choose, by a word that was never really theirs to claim.

There is a student behind one of those banners who goes home every afternoon and makes dinner for younger siblings while her parents work. She holds a family together and carries weight that would buckle most adults. The banner does not see her. Or rather, it sees her as someone who has not yet become what she could be. Which is precisely backward.

But here is the thing that stopped me most, somewhere on the drive home.

Leadership is not something you become. It is something others decide you are.

In every domain where leadership actually exists, there is a mechanism external to the wanting. An electorate. A hiring committee. A congregation that decides, for its own reasons, to trust someone with its direction. A team in crisis that turns, without quite deciding to, toward one particular person. The wanting is neither necessary nor sufficient. History is full of people who desperately wanted to lead and never did. It is equally full of people who led without ever particularly choosing to, pushed forward by circumstance, by others’ confidence, by the specific gravity of a moment that needed someone and found them available.

You cannot will yourself into being a leader any more than you can will yourself into being beloved. The relationship has to happen. The others have to manifest. And they manifest, or don’t, for reasons that have very little to do with whether you took the right courses or attended a school with the right banner.

None of this is an argument against preparation. Churchill prepared obsessively for decades: the reading, the writing, the years of political failure that sharpened rather than broke him. The preparation was real and necessary. What he could not do was manufacture 1940. That is the distinction the banners collapse. Preparation for capability is yours to do. Preparation for leadership is a category error, because whether leadership comes is not yours to decide.

And this, I think, is where the whole project goes quietly wrong. It seems to treat leadership as an internal achievement, something you become through the right formation or the right school. As if wanting hard enough, and preparing well enough, closes the gap. But leadership is a role, not a character type. It exists in a specific context, with specific people, toward a specific end. Remove those and you don’t have a leader. You have someone standing in an empty room, waiting to be followed.

Which means the schools are not, in fact, producing leaders. They cannot. What they might produce, what the good ones do produce, is people with enough judgment, enough craft, enough genuine care for others that when the right moment arrives, in the right circumstances, with the right community around them, something we might honestly call leadership becomes possible. But that is a much quieter promise. It doesn’t fit on a banner.

Here is what I think leadership actually is, when it is something real.

It is a vision for a specific group of people, in a specific set of circumstances, at a specific moment in time. Not transferable. Not a credential you carry from room to room. Churchill in 1940 is a leader. Churchill in 1945 loses the election. Same man. Different moment. The moment had needed something he had, and then the moment passed, and what it needed next was something else, and someone else.

In that frame, the people around the leader are not generic followers, waiting to be animated by someone more consequential than themselves. They are the condition of possibility. Their readiness, their willingness to move: these are what call leadership into existence. The community does not follow the leader. In some deep sense, the community produces the leader. The causality runs the other way.

Which means the competent professional is not a failed leader. The responsible citizen is not someone who didn’t quite make it. The nurse who has no interest in administration, who simply wants to be excellent at the thing she does, who shows up and carries the load and does not need to be in front. She is not the consolation prize. She may be the whole point.

I drove home thinking about what we lose when we tell young people that leadership is the aspiration. We give them a word that has been stretched until it covers everything, sorted until it flatters only some of them, and pointed in a direction that isn’t quite theirs to walk. We ask them to want something that will only come, if it comes, as a consequence of everything else, not as the goal itself. And we leave them without language for the things that might actually guide them: craft, judgment, accountability, the willingness to be responsible for something that matters without needing an audience for it.

The banners mean well. They always do.

==

 

Last week I mentioned something new was coming. Here it is.

On April 17th I am launching The-No-Need-to-Read-the-Book Workshop: five Friday mornings, every other Friday through June 12th, from 8:30 to 9:15am Eastern.

I have read the books. You bring the thinking.

Fifteen books across five sessions, none of the titles announced in advance.

One flat fee of $100.

First 12 to register. That’s it. (And no, I will not be telling you to act now while supplies last.)

If that’s you, the details and registration link are here.

The fourth book

Javier would have a pile of books waiting for me whenever I showed up at his bookshop. His selection was based on our conversations, during which he had discovered my dissertation topic, my previous studies, my professional experience, my broad interest in music, as well as the purchases I had made. Naturally, he would ask about my hockey team back home and also bitch about the local soccer team losing, again, and possibly dropping to a lower division.

Javier lived in a relatively small city. A provincial capital, for sure, but relatively small. I haven’t found a Javier in the big cities I came home to. But I try: I go to a local bookstore, find three books I want to buy, and then take them to one of the employees and ask them to pick me a fourth.

==

photo by Olya P

Whose Accounting?

What we carry without knowing we’re carrying it

Everyone in business knows the phrase: “you’ve been too close to it, you need a fresh set of eyes.” Bring someone in who hasn’t seen it before. The assumption is that familiarity is the problem and distance is the cure.

It’s not wrong. Familiarity does blind. But the phrase quietly assumes that the eyes are neutral, that seeing freshly means seeing without the residue of how things are usually measured, what success is supposed to look like.

I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where fresh eyes were brought in. What I’ve noticed is that they almost always see through the same lens as the people who were already looking. They see the content clearly, sometimes more clearly than those who’d stopped noticing it. But the frame they use to see it is the same frame. The same definition of performance. The same theory of what organizations are for. The same accounting.

Fresh eyes. Inherited lens.

This is what makes zero-based budgeting more interesting to me than it first appears. And also more troubling.

The appeal is obvious. Rather than assuming that what was spent last year deserves to be spent again this year, you start from zero. Every line item has to justify its existence. The burden of proof shifts from the new to the existing. Rational on its face. Rigorous, even.

But zero-based budgeting isn’t actually rigorous. It feels rigorous because it’s effortful. What it actually does is substitute the assumptions of the present for the assumptions of the past. You are not eliminating the bet. You are placing a new one: using today’s criteria and today’s sense of what matters against a future you cannot see. The examination is real. The certainty it produces is not.

Organizations almost never say this out loud. They call it rigor because rigor implies arrival. But what they are really doing is hypothesis testing, and they would rather not know that.

I was mulling this over on a walk in my new surroundings when the question turned inward.

If I zero-based my life (examined every commitment and chose consciously rather than merely inherited), what would I actually have done? The same thing. I would be using the criteria I hold today and the sense of what matters that I have assembled over time. Against a future I cannot see, for a self I don’t yet know.

The examined life is not the life of better choices. It is the life of more conscious bets.

That’s already a less comfortable claim than the one usually made for examination: that the unexamined life is the problem and looking closely is the answer. But scrutiny only relocates the uncertainty. The person who drifts inherits assumptions they never inspected. The person who examines owns assumptions they chose. Neither knows what the future needed them to carry.

And there is a harder problem underneath this one.

When you zero-base your commitment to success, the shape of a career, or what contribution looks like: what criteria are you applying? If they are the institution’s criteria, absorbed across years of moving through structures that assumed them without ever stating them, then the examination isn’t liberation. It’s ratification. The instrument is made of the same material as what it’s trying to measure.

Which means the person who examines their life using the institution’s definition of success, concludes that yes, this matters, and now owns it consciously. They may be more captured than the person who never looked. They now defend the framework as chosen rather than inherited. The examination reproduced the lens. They just signed for the delivery.

You cannot zero-base the categories using the categories.

I don’t have an exit from this. I’m not sure there is one. What I have is the distinction between two kinds of examined life: the one that achieves conscious ownership of its commitments, and the one that keeps asking whose commitments these are and by whose accounting. The first is more rigorous than drifting. The second is more uncomfortable than the first.

It is also, I think, the only version that earns the name.

==

photo by Graham Covington

Purpose Won’t Cover a $400 Emergency

A new NBER working paper forced over a million real tradeoffs across 126 dimensions of life from 3,300 respondents. When people can’t just endorse everything, when they actually have to choose, a clear hierarchy emerges. Family well-being, financial security, and health dominate. Children’s health alone carries marginal utility 67 times the average dimension. Happiness and life satisfaction, the twin pillars of modern well-being science, rank 35th and 36th. Status, prosocial virtues, meaning-at-work, the things people readily cite in surveys, collapse toward the bottom when they have to be traded against something real.

The paper is careful about what this means. High marginal utility for something could reflect how deeply you value it, or how little of it you have. Deprivation drives up the value of each additional unit. The paper distinguishes between these interpretations carefully, and for financial security and health specifically, the data points toward deprivation. People aren’t ranking these things because of what they believe. They’re ranking them because of what they lack.

Pause there for a moment.

What that means, precisely, is that the workers in the organizations these managers lead are ranking financial security, alongside things like children’s health, which carries 67 times the average marginal utility, not as an expression of their values but as a direct measure of how much of it they don’t have. The survey isn’t capturing preferences. It’s capturing the shape of a gap. And the gap has an address.

The Federal Reserve has been confirming this for years. More than a third of American adults cannot cover a $400 emergency using cash or its equivalent. Between 1979 and 2024, US productivity rose 80.9% while hourly pay for workers grew only 29.4%. Upper-income households now hold 48% of total US household income, up from 29% in 1970. In 2024 alone, S&P 500 companies returned $942.5 billion in share buybacks, a new annual record, plus $657 billion in dividends. Over the last five years, buybacks alone are $4.1 trillion.1

The national food budget shortfall (the actual dollar gap between what food-insecure Americans have and what they need) is $32 billion a year. Closing it entirely, for all five of those years, would have cost $160 billion. The five-year buyback total is more than 25 times that figure.

Buybacks are not irrational. Capital returned to investors moves somewhere. The question the arithmetic raises isn’t whether the mechanism is efficient. It’s whether the aggregate pattern of those decisions, sustained across decades, has produced consequences that the mechanism itself doesn’t account for, and whether calling it efficient settles anything about those consequences.

Buybacks were not always a defining feature of American corporate finance. The SEC’s adoption of Rule 10b-18 in 1982 created a legal safe harbor for share repurchases. What followed was not inevitable. It was a specific revisable decision about where surplus goes. No single firm can step outside its competitive labor market unilaterally. However, the pattern that no single firm produced alone is nonetheless the pattern all of them are operating inside. Individual constraint and collective consequence are both real. Acknowledging one doesn’t dissolve the other.

The management writing industry has spent this same period building an elaborate architecture of purpose, meaning, and psychological safety. Most of the people who built it, and most of the people who bought it, are not cynics. They were trying to do something real. But there is a particular kind of self-deception available to people who are genuinely trying, the kind that lets you attend the psychological safety workshop in the afternoon without connecting it to the capital allocation meeting in the morning. The kind that lets you hold both realities in the same week without feeling their weight against each other.

This is not an argument about tax policy or labor law, though both matter. It’s an argument addressed to managers: people whose decisions about compensation, staffing, and resource allocation are neither purely personal nor purely systemic. They are something in between, which is precisely where agency lives. The question of what falls within that space is not answered by pointing to what falls outside it.

The research doesn’t adjudicate between purpose and pay. It sequences them. When people must choose, the material floor comes first, not as a preference but as a need. Everything else is built on top of it. An organization that has not secured that floor for its people, while demonstrably holding the resources to do so, is not facing an engagement problem.

It is facing the question it has been avoiding.

1 Annual S&P 500 buyback totals: 2020— $519.8B; 2021— $881.7B; 2022— $922.7B; 2023— $795.2B; 2024— $942.5B. Total: $4.06 trillion. For context, Germany’s nominal GDP in 2024 was approximately $4.66 trillion. The five-year buyback total represents roughly 88% of that figure.

Sources

NBER Working Paper

Benjamin, D.J., Cooper, K., Heffetz, O., Kimball, M.S., & Kundu, T. (2025). What Do People Want? NBER Working Paper No. 33846. nber.org/papers/w33846

Federal Reserve — $400 Emergency Expense

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2025). Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2024. federalreserve.gov

Wage Growth vs. Productivity

Mishel, L., and Kandra, J. (2026). The Productivity-Pay Gap. Economic Policy Institute. epi.org/productivity-pay-gap

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Productivity and Costs, Nonfarm Business Sector. bls.gov/lpc

Pew Research Center. (2018). For most US workers, real wages have barely budged for decades. pewresearch.org

Distribution of Economic Gains

Pew Research Center. (2015). The American Middle Class is Losing Ground. pewresearch.org

Stock Buybacks

S&P Dow Jones Indices. (March 2025). S&P 500 Q4 2024 Buybacks Increase 7.4% and 2024 Expenditure Sets New Record. prnewswire.com

S&P Dow Jones Indices. (March 2022). S&P 500 Buybacks Set Quarterly and Annual Record. prnewswire.com

Rule 10b-18

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (1982). Rule 10b-18. 17 CFR § 240.10b-18. sec.gov

Food Budget Shortfall

Feeding America. (2025). Map the Meal Gap 2025. feedingamerica.org

Two-Income Households

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (April 2025). Employment Characteristics of Families — 2024. bls.gov

Child Food Insecurity

USDA Economic Research Service. (December 2025). Household Food Security in the United States in 2024. ers.usda.gov

Germany GDP

World Bank National Accounts Data. GDP (current US$) — Germany, 2024. data.worldbank.org

==

photo by Joss Woodhead 

The day my boss said: Not one of your best performances?

My boss called me in after a significant misstep. He asked one question: “Not one of your best performances?”

I didn’t need to answer. He knew I knew.

That question (which wasn’t really a question) did something the explicit never could. It said: You’re intelligent. You have agency. You know exactly what happened here. We don’t need this conversation.

If he’d catalogued what went wrong and walked me through what I should have done differently, he would have said something else entirely: You lack the judgment to assess your own work. You need me to explain it to you.

The implicit respected my intelligence. The explicit would have insulted it.

This matters especially with perfectionists. They already know. Making it explicit forces them to experience their failure twice.

The implicit can be mercy. The explicit can be cruelty, even when delivered with kindness.

Of course, the implicit can also abandon. The same restraint that respects can also withhold what someone needs to hear.

My boss could have walked me through what went wrong. He could have been thorough.

He asked one question instead.

I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten what it said about what he thought of me.

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photo by Tobias Keller

The question behind the question

The program had barely begun (just past introductions) when one of the participants interrupted the facilitator. Not with a question, exactly. More of a challenge.

“What could you possibly bring to this room, never having been a C-level executive yourself? Why are you worthy of my time?”

The room went quiet.

The facilitator took a moment. Then she said:

Off the bat, I can tell you two things I bring to this room.

First, I am a professional who deals with other professionals with respect. You can expect that from me at all times. And what that means, among other things, is that I will never interrupt others.

Second, before this program is over, you will have insights into what it is about yourself that led you to ask this question, at this moment, in this manner, and what impact that might have on your management practice.

Then the program continued.

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photo by Tim Mossholder