Ideas
Ideas I'm working through about leadership, organizations, judgment, and the places where the apparent problem isn't always the actual one.
The Near Enemies of Organizational Life
Organizations have Near Enemies too. A strength, story, norm, or reputation can acquire authority over questions it was never meant to answer, creating a collective blind spot that is remarkably hard to see from inside the system.
Everything I Do Is the Same Move
Teaching, advisory work, Near Enemies, and even real estate finance looked like separate workstreams for a long time. They weren’t. They were the same diagnostic move in different rooms.
How to Find the Hidden Obstacle That Is Actually Preventing Progress
A project that looked like a construction-cost problem turned out to be a parking assumption nobody had thought to revisit. Sometimes the fastest way forward is to treat the given as a variable.
Why Smart Organizations Solve the Wrong Problem
Leadership teams can work very hard on alignment, communication, or execution and still get nowhere because the stated problem is only where the consequences are showing up. The actual problem is often one level underneath.
What Is the Near Enemies Framework?
Near Enemies is a framework for understanding how real strengths can distort, overreach, or take on jobs they were never meant to do, and why those patterns are so hard to see from the inside.