The Letter
A weekly letter on trust, behaviour and what holds under pressure, now in its second year.
Read the letter: a weekly argument on trust, behaviour and what actually holds under pressure.
Subscribe on LinkedInA weekly letter, roughly 1,000 words, on trust and behaviour.
Past letters
- The Best Waiter I Ever Let Go... He was the best salesperson on the floor, and I let him go anyway. The decision was the easy part, but how I did it is the reason I believe we parted with respect.
- The Numbers Were Wrong. The Readers Were Not... For two weeks this month, my numbers told me almost nobody was reading this letter anymore. I rebuilt my writing around them. Then I discovered the numbers were the thing that had broken.
- Our Best Isn’t Our Most Expensive... I learned to talk customers out of the expensive option when I was at the beginning of my career, and I did it to make the bill bigger as well as my tips. It took me years to understand what I had actually learned.
- What They Say When You Are Not In The Room... The most valuable sentence ever spoken about your business was probably said when you were not there to hear it.
- Where Did You Learn To Look? We are quietly removing the ordinary work where people used to learn how to care, and then asking them to arrive already knowing how.
- The Bottle Cap Under The Bed... Last week I wrote about what a storage room reveals about your business. This week, whether anyone in charge is actually looking.
- Show Me Your Storage Room... Why I can predict what your customers are saying about you without meeting a single one of them.
- The Box I Moved On A Sunday... Why the most competent person in your company is often the reason nothing ever gets fixed.
- The Job I Turned Down... Why I said no to a title, a salary, and a department that should not exist.
- Discipline Is Not the Thing That Failed... A lost website, a difficult summer, and what actually determines whether something survives a bad month.
- The Kiss at the Door... Why the same five words can mean everything or nothing at all, and what that has to do with every promise your business has ever made.
- The Work That Nobody Claps For... Recently I finished a trilogy and almost nobody noticed. That silence turned out to be the most useful thing that happened to me this month.
- A True Story - "The Question Mark"... This week the third and final book of the Trilogy is being released.