I'm rereading Richard Koch's The 80/20 Principle again. I have no idea how many times I've read it, but in the age of AI and the speed of life these days it seems more relevant than ever. And every time I come back to it, I find something I missed, forgot, and have failed to implement in some way. If you're not familiar with the book, the core idea is this: roughly 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts....
I was on a video call with a prospective client - two healthcare executives navigating some real complexity in their organization, and somewhere in the first few minutes, one of the guy's eyes drifted off screen. Then a slight smile. "Is that Andy Frisella's book on your shelf?" It was. Right next to a few others that wouldn't mean much to most people, but meant everything to the right ones. What happened next wasn't a mere sales conversation, but a recognition. We...
Pip's Parable — Pip and the Word That Spread After a particularly good fishing season, Pip noticed something. Three of the younger penguins — ones who'd had exceptional experiences finding fish that year — had started telling their stories at the evening gathering. Not because Pip asked them to. Because the stories were worth telling. By the third week, penguins from two neighboring colonies had made their way to Expio Point. Not because Pip had gone looking for them. Because they'd heard...
Pip's Parable — Pip and the Glacier Wall For years, the eastern colony posted a lookout on the high glacier to signal when fish were near. The signal worked perfectly. The problem was the path down. It was icy, unclear, and required three turns that weren't marked. Experienced colony members knew the route. New members kept getting lost halfway down and turning back. The lookout was excellent. The signal was clear. But dozens of fish were missed every season because the path...
I have run profitable businesses for years. I am just now learning how to actually scale one. The difference between building a business around yourself and building one that grows beyond you requires a different kind of work. For most of my business career, I have been an owner-operator. I have a solid, profitable core business and a few others where I have partial ownership. I'm proud of them. They pay well and provide a good degree of freedom. But they were also...
Let me tell you a story. It was the early 2000s, and I was hustling, running a leadership program at USC. I knew Warren Bennis from his books. He was the guy the popular leadership authors I read quoted, the "Dean of Leadership Gurus," and honestly, meeting him felt like trying to get an audience with a rock star. But I had an idea, and sometimes, you just gotta go for it. Turns out, one of my students was also in...
On New Year's Eve, 1999, a man (who you've probably never heard of) named John Koskinen boarded a plane from Washington, D.C. to New York City. He brought a handful of reporters with him, but here's the crazy detail: He timed the flight to cross midnight at 30,000 feet. This was the man President Clinton had appointed as the country's Y2K "czar" — the person responsible for making sure that when the calendar flipped to January 1, 2000, the world's computer systems...
Pip's Parable Pip and the Tide Pools For years, the colony at Expio Point relied on random fish sightings. When someone spotted a school, they'd shout across the glacier, but by the time others arrived, the fish had moved on. Information traveled too slowly to be useful. One winter, Pip noticed that certain penguins always seemed to know where the fish were before anyone else. He watched them carefully. They weren't luckier. They were systematic. They'd built relationships with the seabirds who fed...
Pip's Parable Pip's Ledger Every spring, Pip watched colony members argue about whether the long swim to the eastern fishing grounds was worth it. Some said yes—they always came back full. Others said no—it was exhausting and dangerous. The debate continued for years because no one had actually measured it. They tracked effort, not outcome. One season, Pip kept a careful ledger. Calories burned on the journey. Calories caught at the destination. Calories lost to predators along the route. When he shared his...
This a simple observation but important reminder on healthy team dynamics in business and personal life: Teams or couples that never argue aren't highly functional. They're disconnected. Let that sit for a second... The leadership team where everyone nods and agrees in the meeting, only to complain in the parking lot? Not functional. The project group that rushes to consensus just to get the call over with? Not functional. The family business or marriage where nobody brings up the elephant in the room because "we...
