Charles Blain

Leadership

Comfortable Lies

Netflix asks managers one question: "Would you fight to keep this person?" If no, they're gone. Good severance. But gone. Cold? Maybe. Clear? Absolutely. Everyone knows where they stand. No guessing. No politics. No wasted energy trying to change minds. (Sometimes harsh truth is kinder than

Leadership

Managing Physics

Andy Grove ran Intel. He had one rule: "Disagree and commit." Say your piece. Make your case. Then fully support the decision. Or leave. Harsh? No. Honest. (Most advice pretends power doesn't exist. Grove just said it out loud.) When you stop trying to change your

Leadership

Invisible Ladder

Valve says they have no managers. Also, Gabe Newell runs Valve. They have "cabals" instead—groups that form around projects. No titles. No hierarchy. Total freedom. Until Gabe walks in. (Funny how everyone suddenly knows who's in charge.) Every flat company has invisible power. The founder&

Leadership

Equal Illusion

"But shouldn't it be 50/50?" No. Ray Dalio built Bridgewater on total honesty. Anyone can challenge anyone. Best idea wins. Beautiful story. Except when two ideas are equally good. Then Ray's wins. Because it's Ray's company. (Even "radical

Leadership

Breaking In

We all try to change our managers. We think we can break them in like new shoes. Here's what happened at Xerox. They invented the mouse. The screen you click on. The internet connection. Everything computers would become. The engineers knew they had gold. Management wanted better copy

Marketing

Poetry Doesn't Pay

You have 3 seconds. That's how long your prospect gives your message before their brain decides: stay or scroll. In those 3 seconds, poetry loses to clarity. Every. Single. Time. Gillette spent decades perfecting sophisticated campaigns. "The Best a Man Can Get." Beautiful. Poetic. Dead. Then

Clarity Without Chains

Most managers give their teams GPS coordinates, detailed playbooks, and somehow… paralysis. Then I learned about Commander's Intent—the US Marine Corps doctrine that transformed how they fight. While other forces waited for perfect orders from headquarters, Marines learned to operate with one clear outcome and freedom to

Marketing

Selling Air Time

Picture this: It's 1962, and someone at Rolls-Royce is about to propose the stupidest idea in aerospace history. Rolls-Royce has a great business model. Sell jet engines. Sell maintenance contracts. Sell spare parts. The math is perfect: the worse their engines perform, the more money they make fixing

Mindset

The Gorilla Blindness

Multitasking is a lie we tell ourselves. Harvard radiologists were asked to spot lung cancer in CT scans. They're experts—this is their daily work. But researchers snuck a gorilla into the images. It was 48 times larger than the tumors. 83% missed it. Right now, your brain

Strategy

The cure became the disease.

Slack was supposed to save us from email. Instead, it broke our focus. Email had boundaries—you checked it, then left. Slack has none—it pings every 6 minutes. That's 80+ interruptions a day. It takes 23 minutes to refocus after each one. Do the math: deep work

Marketing

Check Your Tower

Every tower that fell started with smart people being right in different directions. Three questions reveal everything... 1. Can your newest hire explain what each channel does for customers? (Not for marketing—for customers.) 2. When you say "growth," does everyone picture the same customer moment? 3. When

Marketing

Too Simple?

Here's what happens when you introduce customer language to a marketing team... The junior folks immediately get it. The seniors start explaining why their metrics are customer metrics. (They're not.) Why? Because speaking customer means admitting you've been speaking something else. Twenty years of

Marketing

One True North

Plot twist... The Rosetta Stone didn't contain new information. It had the same message in three languages. Everyone suddenly understood everything. Your customer journey? That's your Rosetta Stone. (But your CMO's using it as a slide template.) Watch this translation happen... * Performance says, "

Marketing

Five Right Answers

At Babel, God's intervention was instant and obvious. Nobody pretended to understand each other. The project died immediately. Modern marketing teams? We nod through meetings, update the same dashboards, say "aligned" constantly... then build five different towers in the same office. The divine confusion of Babel

Marketing

The Tower Nobody Finished

Here's what they don't tell you about Babel... Nobody woke up speaking Mandarin. They had the same words. "Brick" meant structure to builders, speed to taskmasters, and burden to laborers. Same vocabulary. Different conversations. (Sound like your last team standup?) Ancient Babylon's

Leadership

Making Safety Visible

You can't measure psychological safety directly. Ask "How safe do you feel?" and you've weaponized the metric, making people less safe. But Google found the proxy signals. Teams with psychological safety showed: * 12% higher productivity * 47% more likely to generate innovations * 27% lower turnover

Leadership

The Resistance Paradox

When teams fight psychological safety practices, celebrate. The resistance reveals exactly where dysfunction lives. Toyota learned this implementing the andon cord. Middle managers revolted. "We'll lose productivity!" "Workers aren't qualified!" "This undermines authority!" Translation: "This threatens my identity as

Leadership

The 10% Solution

Toyota discovered something that sounds impossible: Teams spending 10% of time improving HOW they work consistently outperform teams spending 100% on deliverables. They called it kaizen. Any assembly line worker could pull the andon cord, stopping production to fix problems or suggest improvements. American manufacturers thought this was insane. "

Leadership

The Compound Cost of Silence

Problems have expiration dates for cheap solutions. The O-ring concern surfaced in 1979. Cost to fix: A design modification worth $50,000. By 1985, fixing it meant halting the shuttle program—politically impossible. By January 28, 1986, seven people paid with their lives. Here's the brutal math: Every

Leadership

The Meeting That Never Happens

Picture a meeting where someone knows exactly why the project will fail. They see the flaw, understand the consequences, stay silent. You've been in that meeting. Google spent millions studying 180 teams to understand why. They assumed the best teams had the best people—the rockstars, the A-players.

Leadership

The Purpose Switch

"Changing the system's purpose changes it immensely, even if all of the elements and interconnections remain unchanged." —Steven Schuster Here's what he means. You've got a marketing team. Same five people, same tools, same stale donuts in that Tuesday meeting room. But

Marketing

The Survivor Lens

During WWII, bombers returned riddled with bullet holes… wings, fuselage, tail. Military brass wanted to reinforce those spots. Then, statistician Abraham Wald noticed something. (I think about this way too often.) "You're looking at the wrong data," he said. "These planes survived. The ones that

Marketing

The Messy Middle

Consider this: 95% of your marketing "leads" will never buy from you. Not because you failed. Because they were never shopping—they were learning. Or killing time. Or avoiding their boss. Or playing a complex game of "what if I had money." Google calls it the

Innovation

What's Your Chocolate?

That client who keeps complaining about the same thing? The miscommunication that happens every Tuesday? The "glitch" in your process that everyone works around? You might be walking past your biggest breakthrough. Percy Spencer discovered microwave cooking because his chocolate bar kept melting at work. But nobody mentions

Innovation

The User Conspiracy

In 1953, Rocket Chemical Company aimed to create a rust-prevention solvent for nuclear missiles. The plan was simple. The execution... wasn't. It took 40 attempts. They failed thirty-nine times before they cracked it. They named it WD-40—Water Displacement, 40th formula. The brand became the failure count. But