Archive

A Mysterious Complex System

EARLY-JULY. Happy America! Sorry, we’re a total disaster of a democracy, but we’re working on it. This Week in Rands We are approaching the endgame for the next book. The topic for this book is Senior Leadership. Hard to define, but differentiated in my head. I keep

50% Bored

LATE-JUNE. We're in the foggy part of the year, which means the redwoods are happy. If the redwoods are happy, I'm happy. This Week in Rands There are parts of writing the next book that are quite easy. I am documenting a habit, practice, or

It's Lonely at the Top

MID-JUNE. Hello from a bus heading to a plane which will take me to the Amazon. There will be many trees. This Week in Rands In writing the last third of the new book, I can clearly see what I believe to be the most important aspects of the

That's Ridiculous

LATE-MAY. Speaking in LDX3 next week – there's a Leadership meeting up in London too. Do come: https://rsvp.randsinrepose.com/june-2026-meetup This Week in Rands Mostly, leadership is a puzzle. You look at your calendar in the morning and wonder, "Hmmm... what kind of

Schrödinger’s Decision

MID-MAY. Need to finish a talk for LDX3 and finish a book. I can summon the Zone at will now. This Week in Rands As I attempt to write durable leadership lessons, I need to tell stories you can relate to, which means talking about humans I’ve worked

"I’m the One Telling You How It Is"

LATE APRIL. We had 3x normal rain here in NorCal. The green says thank you. This Week in Rands We’re in the end game for Book #4, which, weirdly, is already available on Amazon.  There is a mental state late in book writing where you get deeply tired of

Cognitive Offload

EARLY APRIL. Yes, it’s raining again. We needed it. This Week in Rands "Cognitive offload" is a phrase I keep hearing relative to AI. The idea is this. By asking the robots to do the work, you are offloading the important work of doing the work or

Are You Playing Along?

LATE MARCH. We just had Summer in March here on the West Coast. That sucked. These Weeks in Rands Any random tool, script, or workflow that I want to build or improve is ready for help thanks to Claude Code. It feels like the early days of the internet, where

Squint and You Can See It

EARLY MARCH. Welcome to March. The New Year is a distant memory, and you can see summer vacation if you squint your eyes. Let’s use that motivation, but first: This Week in Rands I fall in out and out love with my penchant for defining people labels. The articles

A Straight Line in Whole Foods

LATE-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took action. That project, concern, or issue, you took action on. Did you? DO THIS. RIGHT NOW. This is week six of this experiment, and this step — if you done the rest — is the most important. Give yourself an honest grade on the process to

Endless Robot Thoughts

MID-TO-LATE-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took the concern, worry, or obstruction and you shared it with an important someone else. How’d that go? What did you expect to learn? What did you unexpectedly learn? DO THIS. RIGHT NOW. We’ve been noodling this situation for a bit,

The Knife

MID-FEBRUARY. Last week, you took the first step toward solving a significant concern, worry, or obstruction in your mind about yourself or your team. The goal was to choose a direction, not a solution. How'd it go? You realize that I'm making these tasks so

Satisfying Problem Solving

Good morning, it's February 2nd. EARLY FEBRUARY. In your toolkit, you now have two short documents. A quick assessment of the team and a quick assessment of yourself. Go re-read those if you did them, and if you didn’t, here are the instructions for both. It’

A Very Rough Self Review

Good morning, it’s January 26th. LATE JANUARY. The calm of the holidays is becoming a distant memory. Last week, we did a super-fast assessment of your team. Not a performance review, nothing formal, just a temperature check. The practice I’m encouraging is a cache refresh. I want

The Seasons of Leadership

Good morning, it’s January 19th. JANUARY. Most performance reviews have a strong recency bias. You remember the successes and failures from the last three months and use that as the foundation for the report card. This is unfair. Your team members have likely forgotten or rebranded their failures, but,

Happy New Year plus Reddit

December has always been a quiet month for writing for me. It’s partly because of all the other holiday distractions, but also because if you squint your eyes, you can see the new year coming… It’s almost… right here. Better prepare.  I wrote the newsletter a draft of

The Pyramid

I vividly remember where I was standing when someone explained the knowledge pyramid to me. It’s called the DIKW (data, information, knowledge, wisdom) pyramid over here on Wikipedia, but when Laurie the PM scribbled it on the white board, I thought she was thinking out loud, and IT BLEW

Ahead

I’m writing a draft of this piece just for the newsletter this morning. Happy Thanksgiving. Try the Pinot — it’s excellent. Sorry about the typos. January 1st is a reset. What was late in the year — cold and dark December — transforms into a fresh new beginning in January. Resolutions,

State of the Art

The above image was generated from this article by robots. You will notice extreme misspellings and odd layout choices. This is Google's oddly named Nano Banana Pro, and they've been going out of their way to highlight that this particular model is excellent at infographics. It

Nothing Compelling Was Created...

Pretty proud of this one. It was written at a time of great stress and was a therapy piece. It was a rare circumstance when the words just showed up. As a writer, this is your goal state. It’s why you spend all that time writing garbage. You’re