What we're seeing.

Field notes from companies quietly coming apart. Short, present-tense pieces about the patterns we keep running into — and the things founders don't see until someone names them out loud.

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Whiteboard diagram: How Culture Evolves
Culture March 2026

Nothing is broken. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Most founders blame people when the culture starts cracking. They shouldn't. The culture is a system, and it's producing exactly the outcomes it was built to produce. The problem is that nobody built it on purpose.

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Calendar packed with back-to-back meetings
Ceremonies Feb 2026

Meetings are where energy goes to die

There's a reason your team dreads the calendar. Most meetings exist because nobody designed them. Ceremonies are the fix — structured rituals where real work gets done.

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Leadership Mar 2026

Promotion as Punishment

Your best salesman got promoted. Now he's miserable. He closed deals nobody else could — so you made him a sales manager. You lost your top closer. You gained a struggling manager.

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Scaling Jul 2026

The thing that worked at 15 people breaks at 50

Every founder hits this wall. The informal culture that made the early days magic becomes the thing that's slowing you down. It's not a people problem — it's a systems problem.

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Culture Jul 2026

Culture isn't what you say. It's what the system rewards.

You can put your values on the wall. You can print them on mugs. But if the system rewards the opposite behavior, that's your real culture. The wall is just decoration.

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Leadership Jul 2026

Healthy disrespect: why your team should stop being polite

Brown-nosing kills culture faster than conflict does. One founder built a practice called "healthy disrespect" — and it became the foundation of a company so good, someone bought it for the team.

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Ceremonies Jul 2026

How the CDC used ceremony to beat Ebola

When every misstep in putting on protective equipment could mean death, the CDC turned a routine task into a life-saving social ceremony. The same principle applies to your daily standup.

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