Leadership

The Observation David Senra asked Brad Jacobs how he differentiates A, B, and C players. Jacobs runs a mental exercise: picture the person in your office saying they’re done. Not a counteroffer conversation. Already moved. Orderly transition only because they respect you. Then feel the reaction. He walks the scale C to B to A. Restated in rank order: C (Jacobs): You shouldn’t smile. Nobody likes firing people. You postponed it. Now you don’t have to pay severance. Problem solved. Replace them. Get the courage to take them off the team right away next time. ...

The Observation Touch it once. When something lands, finish it or triage it on the first touch. Do not pick it up, set it down half-handled, and pay the full re-entry cost later. Touching without deciding is how piles become careers. I learned that young. At sixteen, through business class and Business Professionals of America, I interviewed for an On the Job Training slot and got hired as a teller at Norwest Bank, the company that became Wells Fargo. Stillwater in May 1993. Through March 1998 I moved from that floor to the Norwest Center downtown Minneapolis (now Wells Fargo Center), then across the street to IDS as lead teller, then to sales and service supervisor with a second drive-up branch on Portland Avenue while they found a new supervisor. Somewhere in that stretch, leadership training put the line in my mouth: touch it once. ...

The Observation Paul Ampe would dictate letters. I didn’t know shorthand. So I’d catch the sense, then put the words back in his mouth. Paraphrase first. Then write like him. That was only the start of the drill. Sometimes I had to research. I’d dig, report back, and he’d dictate again from what we’d learned. Shared thinking. His knowledge and my research mixed into one letter. The page left the building as his voice, for his practice, for the client. Not as a memo that announced I had synthesized something clever in the back room. ...

How I became someone who could teach is not why I still do. The origin story is real. It just isn’t the ignition. I can still see sixth grade like it was this morning. Small town. Upsala, Minnesota. Grade of about thirty kids. I was not very good at math. I can see the room. The desk at the front. Me bending over it. My teacher telling me it’s okay. Some people are just not good at math, she said, and never will be. ...

The Observation I rolled off as Board Chair of the National Auction Association. The gavel moves. The calendar clears a little. Then the letters arrive. I expected thanks. I expected kindness. What I did not fully expect was the mirror. A few people quoted phrases I say without thinking. Most people did not quote me at all. They described the same few things: showing up when the path was muddled, teaching when the easier move was to protect my time, making room for people who were still figuring out whether they belonged, and caring more about getting a hard call right than about winning the room that day. ...

The Observation I spent a long day scoring auctioneers. Prelims first. Then finals: interview, then selling again. Prelims decide who keeps competing. They ask a hard question: can you call bids under pressure, in front of people who do this for a living? That skill is real. It’s not the whole title. The final score is not the prelim run again. You sit and answer for the trade. Then you sell again on the block. Only people who advance face that second test. ...

The spark I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk on The GaryVee Audio Experience, an October 2025 episode about wasting time on people who will never buy from you. He made a comment about bonus structures that stuck with me. His framing was intentionally sharp, but the useful part was underneath the rhetoric: employees often factor the maximum possible bonus into their lives. Once they do, the bonus is no longer experienced as upside. It becomes expected compensation. ...

If you choose convenience, you decline. That’s a human law. In business, commentary is the ultimate convenience. It is easy to write a forecast, spin a narrative, or make a decision because “it makes sense at the time.” But commentary naturally drifts and flatters us, and human memory decays too quickly to defend the truth. A typo can sit wrong by $1.2M for eleven months because nobody was forced to check the record. ...

I was listening to a podcast episode of No Priors recently where Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said something that stopped me. Customer support, he argued, exists because we build bad products. If we build great products, why would we have to have customer support? It’s too complicated, it’s hard to onboard, it’s got too many dials. That’s why it takes so much time to make, and eventually it’s not efficient. ...

I’ve been wrestling with how easily we slide into convenience. When AI makes writing effortless, our natural gravity is to accept the first thing the machine spits out. This default drift is a human law of decline. If you choose convenience, you’ll gain weight, you’ll stop reading, your brain will go soft. You’ll decline. The only way to survive this is active resistance. For myself, I’ve built custom agentic tools to force Socratic friction into my writing. But as a leader, the question is broader. I can’t build custom vaults and code-level friction for everyone in the company. Most people just want the frictionless path to get the task off their plate. ...