A Series of Sorts

Patterns emerge in retrospect. Looking back over these past pieces, I see a thread I never planned—each idea flowing naturally into the next, forming an unintended sequence.

It began with seeing management as craft—not a science to master, but a practice to hone. This view led organically to understanding leadership as poetry, shaped more by rhythm and flow than rigid structure. From there, I explored chaos, both external and internal, not as a force to control but as waters to navigate. And then I questioned movement itself—what truly propels people forward? Not external motivation, but the intricate web of motives already at play within us.

And then came time.

Perhaps time was always the underlying current. Clock Time versus Craft Time wasn’t just about scheduling—it was about how we inhabit time itself. Do we push against its flow, or work within its rhythms? Does quality emerge through control, or through finding our natural cadence?

But these explorations reveal something deeper—they haven’t just been about work, leadership, or time. They’ve been about learning to work with my own mind.

Two worlds shaped my thinking, each pulling in its own direction. Business and finance taught me to extract value swiftly, to cut to the essence without hesitation. Academia taught me another way—to build ideas methodically, to ground every insight in what came before, to let understanding unfold at its own pace. For years, I felt torn between these approaches, as if my writing had to choose: be swift and incisive, or thorough and precise. As if clarity could only come through efficiency or exhaustiveness, but never both.

Only recently have I understood that my mind charts its own course. My writing, always an attempt to clarify thought, is more art than method. I show up, engage with ideas, and hope inspiration joins me. Above all, I seek to connect, to offer something meaningful to others.

These days, I find myself in a fertile middle ground. I want my writing to be friendly, open, welcoming—to feel like an invitation into a conversation. And yet, it still feels linear, formal, maybe even too academic. I don’t think that tension will disappear overnight, but I wonder if this—pausing now, pulling back the curtain, sharing the process itself—might be the way forward. Maybe by weaving moments of reflection into the fabric of ideas, I can make room for deeper connection while honoring the complexity of thought.

My mind doesn’t follow linear outlines or neat frameworks. Instead, ideas coalesce as connections form, each emerging as another settles into place. At their best, they build upon each other, creating depth—I hope—rather than mere accumulation. Often, the pattern only becomes clear in retrospect—when I pause to see what has been forming all along.

If there’s a unifying thread here, it’s about working with rather than against—with craft, with chaos, with human nature, with time itself. This realization opens new questions:

If time shapes craft, what shapes mastery?

If experience alone isn’t enough, what transforms doing into knowing?

The answer, I suspect, lies in the spaces between action—in what we discover when we pause.

In reflection.

And that’s where I go next.

So, I invite you to pause here with me. To step back, trace the thread, and see where it leads you. Because perhaps, in reflection, we find not just clarity—but connection.

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Clock Time or Craft Time? How Quality Finds Its Own Pace

With each step, this has become a series of sorts. Our journey through management has revealed it as craft rather than science, poetry rather than prose. We’ve explored how true leadership means working with rather than against natural forces, how chaos holds creative potential, and how understanding others’ motives is more powerful than trying to motivate them. Now, we turn to another dimension of this organic approach—our relationship with time. Perhaps here too, mastery lies not in control, but in attuning ourselves to deeper rhythms.

The meeting is moving fast—updates ticked off, tasks assigned, deadlines locked in. The team is ahead of schedule. A success. And yet, someone hesitates. A half-formed thought, an insight not yet articulated. The clock says move on. The work itself suggests otherwise.

In an age obsessed with optimization, we face a paradox: Our drive for efficiency often undermines the very quality we seek to create.

Yet beneath this mechanical parceling of time, something essential stirs. The same manager who speaks of efficiency feels a quiet unease when work comes back too quickly, sensing something has been left behind in the rush. Team members celebrate completing tasks ahead of schedule while wondering why their best work often emerges in those rare moments when time seems to flow differently.

This tension reveals a deeper truth about our relationship with time – one that connects directly to our understanding of motivation and human nature. We’ve discovered that true motivation springs not from external pressures but from the complex interplay of personal, professional, and transcendent motives. Perhaps time itself requires a similar shift in perspective.

Kipling wrote of filling “the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.” But what exactly constitutes “distance run”? Is it the ground we cover, or the depth we reach? Like our earlier exploration of prose versus poetry in leadership, this question invites us to examine whether we’ve been measuring the wrong things, optimizing for speed when we should be making room for quality to emerge.

The sailor understands something about time that the engine operator may miss. Where the engine pushes against time in steady, mechanical increments, the sailor works with time’s currents, recognizing that the shortest distance between two points isn’t always the straightest line. In this distinction lies a crucial insight about the nature of quality itself – one that challenges our fundamental assumptions about how time shapes our work.

Clock Time vs. Craft Time: Two Ways of Being with Work

Time shapes not only when we work, but how we work – perhaps even who we are as we work. In exploring human motivation, we discovered that what moves us forward isn’t simple mechanics but complex currents of personal meaning and shared purpose. Now we encounter a similar truth: our relationship with time reveals our deeper relationship with work itself.

Consider two moments:

In the first, a team races to complete tasks before their deadline, checking items off a list, measuring progress in minutes saved. Their primary relationship is with the clock, their attention split between the work and the passing of time.

In the second, researchers gather around early findings from a study, their scheduled hour forgotten as they follow threads of insight, letting understanding emerge through unhurried exploration. Their relationship is primarily with the work, time becoming not a constraint but a medium through which understanding develops. Same sixty minutes. Entirely different ways of being with the work.

This distinction reveals itself everywhere once we learn to see it. I’ve come to call these different qualities “Clock Time” and “Craft Time.” Not just techniques for managing time, but fundamentally different ways of relating to both time and work itself.

Clock Time embodies our mechanical approach—measuring, dividing, controlling. It assumes work can be contained within precise boundaries, that faster completion always means greater efficiency. Under Clock Time, we experience moments as resources to be spent or saved, measured always against the ticking hand of the clock.

Like an engine pushing against ocean waves, Clock Time powers through resistance. It serves us well when the path is clear and speed itself creates value. But it can blind us to other possibilities, other qualities of time that might better serve the work at hand.

Craft Time flows differently. Like water finding its course, it follows the natural rhythm of the work itself. Not boundless or unstructured, but attentive to what each moment might reveal. Under Craft Time, we experience duration not as a constraint but as a dimension of the work, each moment holding potential for deeper understanding or unexpected discovery.

This isn’t about working slowly. Sometimes Craft Time moves with swift precision, other times with patient attention. The difference lies not in speed but in relationship—whether we’re pushing against time or working within it, whether we’re measuring progress by minutes saved or by understanding gained.

What changes when we view time not as a resource to control but as a medium through which quality emerges? What becomes possible when we learn to recognize which quality of time might best serve the work at hand?

When Time Takes Different Shapes

Consider three moments from a typical organization:

In a product development meeting, Elena presents wireframes for a new feature. She’s proud of completing the work a day ahead of schedule. The screens are clean, functional, following all standard patterns. Yet something nags at her colleague David. He’s noticed that users struggle with similar interfaces in other parts of the product, but raising this now feels like questioning Elena’s efficiency. The team moves on, celebrating quick delivery. Three months later, they’ll spend weeks redesigning the same feature.

Across the building, Marcus sits with a complex customer analysis. The report is due tomorrow, and he has a serviceable draft. But he senses patterns in the data he hasn’t quite grasped, connections hovering just beyond reach. His calendar shows two open hours. Should he submit what he has, or stay with the discomfort of partial understanding? In this moment, he faces not a time management decision but a question of how quality emerges.

Meanwhile, Lee’s team is working through a strategic challenge. They’ve spent forty minutes of their one-hour meeting efficiently covering agenda items. As they approach what seems like a natural conclusion, someone asks a question that shifts the perspective entirely. The energy in the room changes. Do they honor the scheduled end time, or stay with this emerging understanding? The clock on the wall suggests one answer. The potential in the room suggests another.

These moments reveal something subtle about our relationship with time. Notice how Clock Time presents itself as the responsible choice, the professional approach. Meeting deadlines, delivering early, honoring schedules – these feel like unquestionable virtues. Craft Time often appears as doubt, delay, or inefficiency.

Yet look closer at what each approach serves. Clock Time and Craft Time aren’t enemies. They’re different ways of relating to work—and knowing when to use each is an essential skill. Clock Time gives us structure, ensuring coordination and efficiency. But without Craft Time, we risk mistaking speed for progress, output for insight. The art isn’t choosing one over the other; it’s knowing when to shift between them.

A software team recently experimented with removing time estimates from certain complex tasks. Instead of asking “How long will this take?” they began asking “What needs to emerge from this?” The shift felt uncomfortable, even irresponsible. Yet they noticed their solutions became more robust, requiring fewer revisions. They weren’t working more hours; they were working differently within the hours they had.

Or consider two architects discussing a design challenge. Under Clock Time, the conversation moves efficiently through options toward a decision. Under Craft Time, they might sketch as they talk, let ideas incubate, challenge assumptions. The first approach produces a quicker answer. The second might produce an insight that transforms the entire project.

These aren’t just different ways of working – they reveal different relationships with quality itself. Clock Time assumes quality can be planned and executed. Craft Time suggests quality sometimes needs to be discovered, allowed to emerge through engagement with the work.

A senior designer put it this way: “Sometimes I know exactly what needs to be done, and speed serves the work. Other times, I can feel something trying to emerge. Rushing then isn’t efficiency – it’s avoidance. The art is learning to tell the difference.”

What would change if we viewed these not as competing approaches but as different qualities of time itself? What becomes possible when we learn to read which quality serves the moment at hand?

Perhaps the best way to explore these questions is to turn from observing others to examining our own experience with time. How do these different qualities of time show up in our own work? What do they reveal about our deeper assumptions about quality, efficiency, and the nature of work itself?

Living in the Tension

Consider a moment you might have experienced: A colleague returns from a thirty-minute task after just fifteen minutes, proud of their efficiency. What stirs in you when you witness this? Perhaps a quiet unease, a sense that something has been left behind in that saved time. Or maybe admiration for their speed, their ability to compress work into smaller spaces.

What if both responses reveal something about our relationship with time?

You might recall that my response to “Is this your best work?”: “It’s my best work in the time you gave me.” But those words raise a question: What does it mean to give our best within a timeframe versus giving work the time it needs?

We speak of “time management” as if time were a resource to control, to bend to our will. Yet sailors know something different about working with forces larger than ourselves. They understand that speed and progress aren’t always the same thing. A skilled sailor might tack away from their destination to catch a favorable wind. To an observer, they appear to be going the wrong way. To the sailor, they’re working with forces that will ultimately carry them further.

What if we held our relationship with time more like that sailor? Not seeking to master it, but to understand its currents?

Here’s an unsettling thought: What if our drive for efficiency sometimes masks a deeper fear – the fear of fully engaging with our work? When we rush through tasks, are we truly being efficient, or are we avoiding the discomfort of dwelling in uncertainty? Of letting work reveal its true complexity?

A team recently shared with me their experiment with time. They began asking each other: “What’s trying to emerge here?” Sometimes this question led to deeper work. Sometimes it revealed that speed was exactly what the moment required. The interesting part wasn’t the answers – it was how the question itself changed their relationship with time.

Think about the last significant piece of work you rushed to complete. Now imagine you had twice as much time. What makes you uncomfortable about that thought? What possibilities does it open?

Or consider this: When was the last time you felt fully present with your work, where time seemed to take on a different quality? What were the conditions that allowed for that experience? What prevented you from staying there?

These questions don’t resolve neatly into best practices or implementation steps. They’re invitations to examine our assumptions about time, efficiency, and quality. They’re provocations to consider whether our relationship with time serves our deepest intentions for our work.

What might change if we viewed time not as a resource to be managed, but as a medium through which quality emerges? What if we treated time less like a constraint to push against and more like a dimension to work within?

Perhaps the art lies not in finding the right answers, but in learning to live in the questions. In becoming comfortable with the tension between Clock Time’s push for completion and Craft Time’s pull toward depth. In developing the wisdom to know when to move swiftly and when to allow work to unfold at its own pace.

The invitation isn’t to abandon Clock Time – urgency and deadlines have their place. Rather, it’s to expand our relationship with time itself. To question whether efficiency always serves quality. To explore what becomes possible when we allow for work to reveal its true nature.

Try this: The next time you feel the urge to push through a task for the sake of efficiency, pause. Ask yourself—not just “How long will this take?” but “What needs to emerge here?” See what shifts. See what time reveals when you listen differently.

Perhaps the art isn’t in controlling time, but in learning to recognize how it wants to move through our work.

Go HERE for more Essays.

The Craft of Management: Beyond Metrics and Methods

In an age of data and algorithms, we face a surprising truth: the fundamental act of managing people remains more craft than science. Consider a scene that plays out in organizations daily: A manager notices subtle shifts in team dynamics during a meeting, reads growing tension in body language and tone, and must decide—in the moment—whether to address it directly, have private conversations later, or let the team work it out. No algorithm can make this decision. No dashboard can tell you the right moment to intervene.

This reality challenges our contemporary desire to reduce management to metrics and best practices. While tools and frameworks multiply, the essential challenge remains unchanged: understanding people and helping them collaborate effectively. It’s not that data and methods don’t matter—they do—but they serve the craft rather than define it.

The Nature of Craft Management

At its core, craft involves working with materials that have their own nature—wood, metal, clay, or in management’s case, human nature. The craftsperson must understand this nature deeply, work with it rather than against it, and respond to how it presents itself in each unique situation.

Think of jazz musicians; they know music theory, understand harmony and rhythm, but what creates excellence isn’t their theoretical knowledge—it’s their ability to listen, respond, and work together in real time. Theory provides structure, but the music happens in the moment, in the interplay between musicians.

So too with management. Frameworks and theories provide valuable structure, but effective management happens in the spaces between—in reading situations, sensing moments, and responding to what emerges. Like jazz, it requires both deep knowledge and the ability to act based on dynamic circumstances.

The Journey from Novice to Master

The path to management mastery follows patterns familiar to all crafts. It begins with apprenticeship—learning through observation, starting with basic techniques, and making mistakes in a supported environment. The novice manager seeks certainty, clear guidelines, and “best practices.”

The first crucial transition comes when we realize that rules alone aren’t enough. This often emerges as a crisis—when our carefully learned approaches fall short in a complex situation. Some retreat from this challenge, clinging more tightly to formulas. But those who grow learn to embrace the uncertainty and understand that management happens in the gaps between the rules.

With experience comes pattern recognition—not just seeing situations clearly, but understanding their dynamics. The developing manager learns to sense what’s brewing beneath the surface of interactions and to feel the currents of organizational life.

Finding Your Voice

The ultimate paradox of management craft is that mastery leads not to standardization but to individuation. Just as Miles Davis didn’t sound like John Coltrane, effective managers develop distinct voices while working within the same fundamental principles. Your effectiveness comes not from imitating others but from finding your own way of embodying the craft.

This journey often begins with imitation—learning from mentors and trying approaches we’ve seen work for others. But true development means moving beyond imitation. An introvert won’t manage like an extrovert and a natural analyst won’t lead like an intuitive. The key is not to fight these differences but to work with them, just as we work with human nature itself.

The Living Practice

Management craft survives and evolves through practice and transmission. While books and theories have their place, the deepest learning happens through direct experience and reflection. Modern organizations often overlook this essential truth in favor of standardized training programs. But true craft learning requires something more organic: the kind of apprenticeship where a developing manager can observe masters at work, seeing not just what they do but how they think, how they read situations, and how they make decisions in real time.

Like a master craftsperson’s tools, frameworks and models amplify capability but don’t create it. The art lies in knowing when and how to use them—and when to set them aside entirely.

I’ll be writing more about the craft of management in the coming weeks.

Go HERE for more Essays.

Notes on Craft from a Montreal Winter

And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands;

and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter to his wife Clara Rilke-Westhoff, January 1, 1907 (h/t)

Happy new year and welcome to my first essay of 2025!

It was 15°F in Montreal when I stepped into a neighborhood flower shop. What I encountered there wasn’t just a business transaction – it was a masterclass in the difference between doing a job and practicing a craft.

The shop itself was unassuming: a local establishment that had served the community for 57 years, its walls adorned with family photos suggesting a business passed down through generations. I was just another customer, likely a one-time visitor, picking up flowers for a friend’s birthday before heading back to Miami.

What unfolded next revealed something profound about the nature of work itself.

The florist’s approach was methodical, but not in the rigid way of corporate protocols. She asked about the occasion, my budget, and – most intriguingly – how long it would be before I delivered the flowers. This last question caught my attention. When I mentioned it would be less than five minutes, she nodded, already calculating what this meant for how she would prepare the bouquet.

Had the delivery time been longer, she explained, she would have used a salt sponge to maintain freshness. For my situation, she orchestrated a different type of protection: first, a transparent plastic cover, then thick drafting paper, and finally, an outer plastic bag. Each layer was a defense against the brutal Montreal winter, ensuring the flowers would arrive as vibrant as they were in her shop.

What struck me wasn’t just what she did, but what she didn’t have to do.

In our age of optimization and efficiency, there was a much simpler path available: wrap the flowers in basic plastic, hand them over, complete the transaction. After all, I wasn’t a regular customer. I wasn’t going to become one. There would be no Yelp review, no repeat business to cultivate. The bare minimum would have been perfectly acceptable.

But that’s not what happened in that shop on that cold Montreal afternoon.

Instead, I witnessed someone practicing their craft – someone for whom selling flowers wasn’t just a transaction but an expression of identity. The florist’s actions weren’t driven by customer retention metrics or service protocols. They emerged from a deeper place: the space where work transcends necessity and becomes craft.

This distinction – between the transactional and the craftsperson’s approach – draws a line through nearly every field of work. There’s a spectrum of engagement:

At one end, there’s the minimum viable effort – the bare essentials required to complete the task.
A step above that lies the professionally competent – doing the job well, meeting all expectations.
But beyond these lies the realm of craft – where the work becomes an expression of who we are.

The florist’s attention to detail wasn’t in her job description. No customer would have complained about receiving flowers in a simple plastic wrapper. But she chose to operate at the level of craft, where each interaction becomes an opportunity to express expertise, care, and personal standards that transcend the immediate transaction.

This elevation from task to craft is a choice: to imbue work with something uniquely human, to approach each task not just as something to complete but as a reflection of oneself.

And this mindset isn’t limited to flower shops. It could just as easily surface in an interaction at a coffee shop, the way a teacher designs a lesson, or the care someone takes with a handwritten note. Craft invites us to see beyond the immediate task to its deeper possibilities.

In an era in which efficiency often trumps excellence, this florist’s approach offers a quiet reminder: there will always be value in doing something not just adequately, but beautifully.

Perhaps that’s the true beauty of craft: it transforms the ordinary into something remarkable, leaving behind a trace of care, expertise, and identity.

Go HERE for more Essays.

Photo by Etienne Delorieux on Unsplash

On paid employment, work, craft, and spare time

Even if a man’s whole day be spent as a servant of an industrial concern, in his spare time he will make something, if only a window box flower garden. ((Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, 2nd paragraph, via laudator temporis acti, accessed 200915))

A job is not the only work you do. Equating paid employment with work is at the root of the “work-life balance” discussion going nowhere.

What is your craft? What is the thing you do in your spare time? And if the answer is “what is spare time?”, therein lies the rub.

We might need to revisit our view of “time is money”, keep and eye on the family-to-work spillover effect, and wonder what is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?.