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I LOVE my Izusu Trooper. It was my dad's - he bought it off ebay and flew to NY to drive it back after it was in a flood. It's the car I learned to drive in ( a manual transmission, I would like to brag ). This car has been to every corner of the country and finally hit 3000k+ miles when I sold it to a new family for their Colorado adventuring and camping vehicle. Izusu is owned by Toyota. And I asked my dad why our family consistently bought Toyota cars. My mom upgraded to

A few years ago, I was introduced to Japanese Cherry Blossoms. They are a very big deal in Japan and even Washington, DC, has an annual Cherry Blossom Festival. One of the most striking things about the blossoms was when an older gentlemen in Takayama was explaining to me the concept of mono no aware (物の哀れ) - the gentle sadness at the passing of beautiful things. or Mujō (無常): the Buddhist idea that nothing is permanent. I now think of this every time I see the aspen leaves i

Obviously every single speaker at Denver Startup Week was legally required to mention AI at least once in their message (joke). However, this is my thought process around the consistent AI vs Creatives clash. We were already in a Creativity Crisis A 2010 Newsweek cover story, "The Creativity Crisis." drew on research by psychologist Kyung Hee Kim, who analyzed about 300,000 scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, the most widely used creativity measure since the 19

This is what you missed out on if you weren't there. People are solving phenomenal problems in the world. And we don't always get to hear about them - but there is just something about being in a room full people trying. People who care. People experimenting and failing and trying again. It is SO INSPIRING. It's really tempting to get sucked into AI world. You feel like a superhero solving problems and building things and it's all happening so fast and makes you feel so brill

I've been in KC for the World Cup for the last few weeks. Honestly, the only reason I love Ted Lasso is because of Roy Kent and the character development / storyline. Definitely not because of the football. Live Football / Soccer / Futbol? Less than interesting. But the World Cup? I am SOLD OUT. I am watching every. single. match. I am camped out at fan fest for 9pm matches and in downtown Power and Light for the Dutch Onsoranje walk to the stadium. Insert my current ringtone

This is deeply delayed, but I want to share one of my favorite reflections of Christoper Nolan's version of The Odyssey by Ezra Klein of the NYT. You can also watch a visual version here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/opinion/christopher-nolan-odyssey-elon-musk.html I’ll admit I’m a little late weighing in on “The Odyssey.” Chalk it up to having young kids. I don’t make it to the movies much. But what a trick its director, Christopher Nolan, has pulled off. Elon Musk did

If you live in the US and have European colleagues - you know that we are doing it wrong. Come June, every European colleague starts mentioning they'll be out of office. Don't bother emailing or calling, they aren't checking. They'll let you know when they are back in office, probably in July, maybe August. And they come back and they are tan and well-rested and energized and full of ideas and hit the ground running. While the US teams are just as weary, despite taking 2 very

I am a sucker for a good local bookstore and Livraria Lello is absolutely one of the most beautiful bookstores I’ve ever been to. Even when packed with tourists, it’s magical and inspiring and makes you buy a Spanish copy of Don Quixote even though it’s roughly 25 pounds and your Spanish reading level is more “Dr. Seuss”. It’s now even more spectacular, thanks to Dua Lipa, because it contains the Manifesto Library. A library featuring books that have been banned or challenged

so many boxes I'm moving again. For the zillionth time. You'd think I'd be good at it by now. You'd think that in 2026 I'd have finally downsized my library instead of hauling boxes of books across the country and the planet. Maybe invest in a Kindle. But no. The books stay. They're full of notes and stickies and the passages I want to come back to, and copies I want to be able to lend to friends. The move itself? I actually chose this one. I'm excited about it. And I'm still

The Million-Dollar Mistake C-Suites Keep Making with AI Rollouts Stop treating your AI initiative like a technology project. Stop treating it like an internal communications project. Stop treating it like a training project. It's a change management project. And until your C-suite understands that, you're going to keep burning budget on tools nobody uses, announcements nobody reads, and "transformations" that quietly stall six months in. Is this your company? A company decide

Someone asked me yesterday about how I transitioned from Marketing into Internal Communications. And honestly, I’ve never ever thought about it because I think that Internal Communications IS Marketing - just internally. Every all-hands, every Slack announcement, every “quick update from leadership” email - it’s all marketing. The audience just all happens to have a badge. I didn’t even know internal communications was a thing until I started working at bigger companies. An

Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. - Frederick Buechner Mural in Lisbon by Shepard Fairey the OG turning despair into beauty A friend lost her 2 month old baby this week. Another friend just accepted her dream job. It is so hard existing in the world and holding both of these experiences. Being with both of these peo

Space Force ( Netflix) Your workforce is your biggest competitive advantage. Not AI. I sit in a weird spot. Some weeks I'm in a conference room with executives - sharp, brilliant humans with 20+ years of industry experience and a vision. They see where AI could reshape operations, make processes leaner, let their teams do more with less. Good ideas. Big ideas. Other weeks I'm sitting next to someone on the front lines who's been doing the work manually for 20 years. She's lo

The companies that will win the talent war over the next decade are not necessarily the ones paying the highest salaries or offering the most exotic perks. And they will not be the ones who have the latest or greatest tech. They are the ones that have figured out something fundamental about what the emerging workforce actually wants from work and they have built systems to deliver it. Integrating a structured social impact program into the core of how your company operates -

RSM is the fifth largest public accounting and professional services firm in the United States - behind only the Big Four (Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG) - and the leading provider of assurance, tax, and consulting services specifically focused on the middle market. The firm hit $4 billion in US revenue in fiscal year 2024, up nearly 8% from the prior year. It employs more than 16,000 professionals across 81 cities in the US and Canada, with additional offices in India and El S

On priorities, people, and what it really means to put first things first There is a classic image that I'm sure you've seen - a jar filled with rocks, pebbles, and sand. Stephen Covey popularized it in First Things First , and the lesson is deceptively simple: fill the jar with sand first, and there's no room left for the rocks. Put the rocks in first, and everything else finds its way around them. If the big rocks don't go in first, they aren't going to fit in later.

I LOVE spring. The hardest thing about living in Colorado is the absence of a true spring. flowers in NY I want buds blooming on trees and daffodils and sprigs of green grass popping up. I want to see the forsythia bursting out of the ground and rain to nourish the grass. So I go to where spring is happening and soak it all in. This spring feels different. It feels like everything is a bit upside down and everything is changing and everything on a global scale is complex and

There is someone reading this right now who has a dream. Maybe it's been sitting quietly in the back of your mind for years. A program you want to build. A community you want to serve. A problem you've watched go unsolved for so long that you've started to wonder if you're naive for thinking one person could do anything about it. Maybe you've even started something - a nonprofit, a movement, a side project driven by pure conviction - and you've felt the gap between the scale

I teach an ESL class every week. Last night, I sat in a room with ten people from Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Syria, Nepal, and Afghanistan. Ten different languages, ten different backgrounds, ten wildly different life experiences, and yet, we found common ground on something surprisingly simple: the joy of being known by the person who sells you your groceries. Every week for the last year we dive into the english language and grammer. Personally, I'm pretty sure that I was the

Yay! You made it through 5 very tough and humbling challenges. If you're 24 months into an AI integration and everything is going sideways. That's okay. If it's month 3 and you've already done everything wrong, that's okay too. Because we are all building the plane as we learn to fly it (as they say). If you've read the previous five posts in this series, you have a reasonably complete picture of what's actually wrong with most enterprise AI programs. The technology isn't the