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The post ECM blues are real. We chat about our highlights and discuss our hot takes.Links:Do You Want To See Something Funny? https://bsky.app/profile/laveradio.bsky.social/post/3muzpwdim3k25“Elite Dangerous: Successful Trading” by The High Wake – https://youtu.be/JOWuIJEOVRY“Typical Beluga Pilots” by The High Wake – https://youtu.be/2KXvlf9QA_Y“I played the most OVERWHELMING space game ever made – Elite Dangerous” by Attake – https://youtu.be/Z-qoYF0Af6A“How Is This Even a Video Game?” by MT Major – https://youtu.be/9sffrf1FRmY“Rhino planetary mining — practical tips after a full evening of prospecting and testing” by erichards2222 – https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1w67sz7/rhino_planetary_mining_practical_tips_after_a/And the subsequent Google Docs living guide: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wfvkE73ZEhlvdhVZMjIpyzr5cAsceY4xPWTGdG2yEmo/edit?usp=sharing“Rota Latina Buckyball” latest results – https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/the-buckyball-racing-club-present-rota-latina-4th-14th-september-3312.649360/page-4#post-10885647
Voices of Search // A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Content Marketing Podcast
Content teams lose brand voice consistency across collaborative drafts. Tasia Custode, founder and CEO of Brio Media, breaks down an underused capability inside Google Workspace for enterprise content teams. She details Gemini's Refine feature in Google Docs, showing how to highlight a collaborator's edit and match it to brand voice or personal style with one click. She also outlines using the same feature to rewrite underperforming copy on demand, streamlining editorial consistency across team-authored content.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
C'est un séisme discret mais historique dans l'écosystème Google : pour la première fois, la firme acte publiquement l'abandon d'une catégorie matérielle complète sous ChromeOS au profit d'Android. Alors que les projecteurs se braquent sur les rendez-vous de la rentrée, Mountain View amorce une bascule radicale : arrivée des futurs « Google Books », refonte complète de ses outils de création et accélération du rythme de Chrome, quitte à laisser son propre système sur la touche.Dans ce 189ᵉ épisode du CKB Show, Nicolas et Olivier décortiquent les coulisses de cette transition stratégique et analysent toutes les annonces de la semaine :Le grand virage ChromeOS vers Android : l'arrêt programmé du matériel Google Meet pour 2027 et la fin de l'ADN d'origine.Google Books en approche : fuite massive chez Acer avec le Spin 714 (Moonstone) sous Intel Core Ultra, et la flopée de machines partenaires en embuscade.Google Pics entre dans l'arène : le nouveau concurrent dopé à l'IA prêt à bousculer Canva dans Google Docs et Google Slides.Chrome passe la seconde : un cycle de mise à jour toutes les deux semaines dès la version 153… mais sans ChromeOS.Les nouveautés Android de rentrée : la fonction Motion Assist contre le mal des transports, la localisation des objets avec Gemini et les listes partagées dans Google Keep.Gemini NotebookLM monte en puissance : comment vos livres achetés sur Google Play Livres transforment l'IA en tuteur d'étude sur-mesure.Procès antitrust : la justice américaine rejette le démantèlement forcé de Google Ads.Retrouvez les notes complètes, les liens des sujets évoqués et l'accès au salon privé Discord sur mychromebook.fr. Pour soutenir notre média 100 % indépendant, rendez-vous sur patreon.com/mychromebook.
Today Mike is joined by Dan Head of AMZ Elite, a full-service Amazon consultancy with 20 years of experience, to talk about the thing every AI-curious seller keeps circling: how to stop asking generic AI generic questions.The premise is simple. AI knows a lot about things you don't, but the best operators in any field will laugh at its default advice. The fix is a "second brain" a private, company-specific store of your SOPs, your data, and your hard-won corrections that AI can actually read and act on.Dan walks through what he's built: a news digest that reads his inboxes and YouTube transcripts and boils the week down to two or three pages, an Obsidian vault of markdown SOPs, and a Command Center wired to Amazon that produces a daily triage report the one that caught a campaign spending 4x overnight and flagged the portfolios to drop to a $1 budget after a stock-out. Mike covers how Ad Badger vectorizes its own Google Docs so any team member can query an SOP in plain English from Claude, Google Chat, or ClickUp.You'll also hear the single most useful prompt Dan has ever learned, why summaries alone will cost you the details that matter, and the trap to avoid: don't use AI to invent new work, use it to put work someone is already doing into warp speed.We'll see you in The PPC Den!
On today's episode of the podcast I chat with online business owner Dama Jue about her revenue, her offer structure, and why one funnel and offer structure is not for everyone. About Dama Dama is the owner of DamaJue.com and ThrivecartTemplateShop.com. She got her start as an accountant. After moving to Central America with her husband for a year, she invested in a Pinterest management course, pivoted to Pinterest management, and that transitioned into helping online business owners with their funnels, strategy, and implementation, and got deep into Thrivecart which led to also creating Thrivecart templates. What to Know About Creating Funnels Dama describes funnels in your business like going to Ikea. You come to your website and it's less poke and browse and more of a direct route you want people to take to create desire and demand. A funnel is basically a website that has one goal. Dama built traditional funnels for many clients where you get people to sign up for your webinar to get their emails and promote your course or offer. But it didn't bring her joy to create them for herself so she moved to an experimentation model for her own business. With a traditional funnel, Dama found that if you didn't want what was being sold right now, you wouldn't necessarily see it again once the funnel was over. Dama's business model is the opposite. How Dama Runs Her Business Dama has a multi-offer business model that she calls The Snackable Offer Ecosystem. She knew that with her ADHD she was not someone who would watch a multi-module course or sit down for several lessons so she wanted to create offers for other business owners who felt the same. Her offers are succinct to get the results you want, for example her training on Onbrand Fillable Workbooks that help you make your Google Docs look more visually appealing and professional. The training is 54 minutes and something you can implement while you watch. Dama's number one channel is email marketing. Her goal if you are on your website is to get on her email list. She has freebies and $9 offers, both of which are ways to get people on her email list. She also has $77+ offers, but doesn't expect that people will buy those the first time they land on her site. Her best fit customers buy her $9 Google Doc or got on her list through a summit or hearing her on a podcast. Ads haven't worked well for her. She's currently trying buying ad sponsorships on other entrepreneurs' email lists. She also runs a group program called Your Next 100 to help you get the next 100 sales of your digital products. Every four to six weeks she runs a live workshop and sells a corresponding offer. She then connects it to other offers she has and sells it in the background through backlinks, upsells, etc. She also sells them in an evergreen email funnel that is made up of her best performing sales emails. The Numbers Behind Dama's Most Recent Launch Dama recently launched her group program, Your Next 100, which she opens twice a year. She did a webinar about it in April and sent 55 emails about it (which she called an audacious amount, though she gave the option to opt out of the promo emails). She promo-ed for three weeks, had cart open for two weeks, and during this past launch, in the first 48 hours if you joined the $2,000 program she offered a custom-designed Thrivecart sales page for free (which on its own is a $2,000 offer). The launch made over $90k. Today, Dama's income breakdown is about ⅓ group program, 40% digital products and 20$ affiliate income. Previously, it was ⅓ affiliate income and ⅔ digital products. Get in Touch with Dama Jue To get the resources mentioned on today's episode, head to DamaJue.com/bdufp
The Invite, Olivia Wilde's comedy for A24, plays out almost entirely inside one San Francisco apartment, where a couple played by Wilde and Seth Rogen host an evening that goes sideways with visitors played by Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton. Adam Newport-Berra, ASC photographed it on 35mm, in story order, on a Los Angeles soundstage with a single day of exteriors in San Francisco. The brief he set himself was that one enclosed space should feel, in his words, like a landscape, and never like a set.The first plan was to light it practically, in the spirit of Husbands and Wives, and let the actors move in and out of shadow. A test with the cast said otherwise. Nobody liked the dailies, and Newport-Berra got some phone calls afterward. What replaced it was hard ceilings, because an open set lit from above reads as a set, with the light built into the ceilings. Key grip Adam Kolegas fabricated low-profile softboxes, tube fixtures wrapped in muslin and skirted, light enough to hang from putty knives slid into the stretch-canvas ceiling and quick enough to pop off in ten minutes when the camera needed to tilt up. Gaffer Len Levine ran them by remote. Doorway moldings that dropped a foot below the ceiling hid the boxes behind them, and six to eight more lights sat on the floor for nearly every setup. With production designer Jade Healy and costume designer Arianne Phillips, the walls, the wood, and the hosts' clothes were kept dark so the faces would carry the light; the visitors' wardrobe was made to stand apart from the room. Every shot in the film, he says, is very lit.There was no shot list on set. Newport-Berra wrote one for the whole film, in a Google Doc, and says he never looked at it once. Prep was a wall of two hundred reference frames, and each morning he walked the set before anyone else arrived, photographing angles on his iPhone with his crew standing in for the cast. Wilde, who stepped into the role of Angela after an actor dropped out, ran each scene with the cast, then handed it to a stand-in and watched from outside while she and Newport-Berra picked frames. The camera stayed on the dolly and mostly locked off; there is no handheld in the film. The tools were lens, height, and eyeline. Norton is held slightly low on a 35mm, almost heroic. Cruz moves on Steadicam on a longer lens. Rogen and Wilde are pinned flat against a wall with too much headroom. For the couple's first argument the rule was cat and mouse: never on the same level, never in the same frame, together only in mirrors and window glass, until the scene lands on a head-on two-shot. The last shot of the film, a move through the building's shaftway that Healy had designed the set around, went at four in the morning on the final night on stage.CREDITSAdam Newport-Berra, ASCInstagram · Website · IMDbJared Levy, hostInstagram · Website · IMDbDavid Kruta, producerInstagram · Website · IMDbTopher Hammond, producerInstagramMUSICOriginal music by One Wave.THE SALONEpisode page and full gallery: https://cinematographysalon.com/podcast/adam-newport-berra-asc-the-inviteNewsletter and events: cinematographysalon.comInstagram: @cinematographysalonPRESENTING SPONSORThis episode is made possible by Fujifilm — home of GFX ETERNA 55, the large format, IMAX®-Certified digital camera, and FUJINON cinema lenses. https://fujifilm-x.comSUPPORT THE SALONThe podcast, the writing, and both Resources tools are free. No paywall, no membership, no login. That is on purpose: learning to light a scene should not depend on what you can afford. Sponsors cover part of it and readers cover the rest. If you want to chip in, it starts at the price of a coffee a month at https://cinematographysalon.com/support. If your company wants to reach working cinematographers, get in touch at https://cinematographysalon.com/sponsors.
Send us Fan MailThanks to Dell Romance and Author Laura Piper Lee for talking to me about her newest release, Doomsdate. Support Laura:Read DoomsdateRead Pot ShotFollow her on InstagramWebsiteMark on GoodreadsBooks Mentioned:Grim Tidings by B.K. BorisonGood Spirits by B.K. BorisonLeft of Forever by Tara DewittIn Every Possible Way by Alicia ThompsonHorror Movie by Paul TremblayOther Mentions:Dust Jacket art by @ArtimakingFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
In this episode, Jodi breaks down five tools you're probably already using in your business — Google Docs, your calendar, dictation, transcription, and your content library — and shows you exactly how to put them to work so you get your book written sooner. Time Stamps: 00:00 – Welcome and episode intro 01:30 – Why "it all counts," even 15 minutes a day 02:30 – Tool #1: Google Docs vs. Microsoft Word vs. Scrivener 04:30 – Tool #2: Your calendar (and why writing retreats don't always work) 08:00 – Coffee + Commas newsletter mention 08:45 – Tool #3: Dictation and your notes app 10:00 – Tool #4: Transcription tools (Otter, Rev, Zoom, Google Meet) 12:30 – Tool #5: Your content library 15:30 – Recap and closing thoughts Keywords: book writing tools, business book writing, write a book faster, book marketing asset, book planning intensive, Google Docs for authors, Scrivener vs Google Docs, writing schedule for business owners, calendar for writers, writing retreat alternatives, dictation for writers, notes app writing, transcription for book writing, Otter.ai, Rev transcription, content repurposing for authors, content library, nonfiction book writing, business owner author, book manuscript first draft, table of contents planning, book production timeline, writing without AI, book publishing strategist, entrepreneur book writing, manuscript editing tips Resources Mentioned: Coffee + Commas signup: https://bit.ly/coffeeandcommassignup Write Publish Market Episode 152: The Role of Capacity for Business Owners Writing Books LINK TO FULL EPISODE (RAW) TRANSCRIPT: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1As4RrQOLirCBWmyTQq3M0wFuDSRRKxX6M0LPJkd1_u8/edit?usp=sharing
Hello! I know I just kicked off the 3 Misconceptions About Building Your A+ Career and Life series, and I promise I will get back to it soon!But I also have so many exciting things that I am working on for you guys, that I need a bit of time to focus on that.So for the next few weeks, we'll be revisiting this series. I hope you enjoy!——— The biggest mistake high achievers make that inadvertently caps their performance (part 3)Where is your brain right now?
Niche 2 Nations, Package Your Overcome Story, Publish, Build, Steward Biz & Launch!
What if the story sitting in your journals, Google Docs, voice notes, and Notes app isn't just something you lived through—but something God is asking you to steward?In this episode of The Peaceful CEO Podcast, Angelica Stanley introduces The Blueprint: Identity → Story → Branding → Positioning → Strategy → Structure → Stewardship → Impact.We're talking about what it looks like to build a faith-based business from the inside out instead of chasing someone else's marketing strategy, business model, or definition of success.Before you create the logo, launch the offer, build the funnel, or figure out what to post on social media, there are deeper questions to answer:Who are you?What has God entrusted to you?What have your experiences taught you?Who can your story serve?And how can you turn what you're carrying into something tangible—like a book, resource, workshop, product, service, or business—without allowing the business to become your identity?You'll also hear how Angelica is applying this process through Prep to Published, where aspiring authors develop their message, position their book, prepare for self-publishing, and think beyond simply getting a book onto Amazon.Ready to turn your message into a book?Explore Prep to Published:Prep to Published — Well Valley www.wellvalley.org/p2p In Albuquerque? Come build with us.Well Valley's Made to Market workshops are free, hands-on business-building workshops at Westgate Community Center designed to help aspiring and existing entrepreneurs move from an idea to something they can confidently bring to market. The roadmap covers idea, story, customer, offer, branding, marketing, systems and selling, with Digital Basics 101 offered on the last Wednesday of each month. Well ValleyFree Albuquerque Business Workshops — www.wellvalley.org/workshops The workshops are also building toward the Made to Market Expo on December 5, 2026, where participants can work toward becoming vendor-ready and bringing what they've built into the marketplace. In this episode: Christian entrepreneurship • faith-based business • writing your first book • self-publishing • personal branding • business positioning • storytelling • business strategy• systems • biblical stewardship • purpose-driven business • women in businessScripture referenced: Revelation 12:11 • Matthew 11:28–30 • Exodus 4:2 • Proverbs 16:9The Peaceful CEO is about building what God gave you without sacrificing the peace He gave you to build it.Build with peace.
A deep dive into the technical workflow of DocsAutomator, demonstrating how to map Airtable fields and related line items to Google Doc placeholders. Rupert explains how the built-in AI agent can reverse the traditional workflow by generating templates directly from your existing Airtable data structure. The discussion covers post-generation actions, such as saving PDFs back to Airtable, merging existing PDFs, and sending documents via Gmail or Outlook. It also explores the technical complexities of working with the Google Docs API and a breakdown of supported platforms including Notion, ClickUp, SmartSuite, and more. ⏱ In this cut: 00:22 — Mapping Airtable data to Google Doc placeholders 00:42 — Using AI to generate templates from data structures 01:35 — Mapping line items and related tables 06:06 — Post-generation actions and webhooks 09:56 — Challenges of the Google Docs API 13:21 — Supported platforms and formats
Send us Fan MailTeacher burnout isn't a failure of resilience. What happens when teacher workload simply exceeds the time, energy, and capacity available to do the job?This week on Teachers in Transition, Vanessa kicks off a new four-part series on the Four Horsemen of Education with the first Horseman: Capacity, also known as Realistic Expectations. We look at how decades of "it'll only take five minutes" have steadily expanded teacher workload—and why continually asking teachers to do more with less eventually means getting less with less.We also get practical about reclaiming some of that capacity. In the Teacher Hack, learn how to create a simple response bank for the emails, explanations, policies, and other messages you find yourself writing repeatedly. The rule is simple: if you're typing it for the second time, put it in the bank. Using reusable chunks, headings in Google Docs or Word, voice-to-text, and AI for basic cleanup can save both time and mental energy.Then, in our Career Transition and Job Search segment, we're talking networking and informational interviews. Networking doesn't have to mean awkwardly asking strangers for jobs. Instead, borrow a lesson from Ted Lasso: Be curious. A 10–15 minute conversation with someone doing work you're interested in can help you explore careers beyond teaching, learn how people entered their fields, identify skills or certifications you may need, and grow your professional network before you ever submit an application.Also in this episodeWhy teacher capacity is about the total workload, not whether each individual request seems reasonableHow EdTech can save administrative time while quietly consuming teacher timeWhy "just five minutes" becomes a serious problem when nothing ever comes off the plateHow to build a mix-and-match response bank without creating another giant project for yourselfQuestions to ask during an informational interviewWhy teachers already have many of the relationship-building skills needed for effective networkingThe one rule to remember when someone gives you 15 minutes of their timeHelp Publish a book that can help all teachers recognize their excellence!Invisible Excellence: The Hidden Value of Teachers Beyond Teachingis about bringing the extraordinary skills, expertise, and value of teachers into the light—and helping teachers recognize what they bring to the table.The Visibility Project is currently crowdfunding publication of Invisible Excellence, with several ways to participate beginning at $50. The campaign closes September 18 at midnight Eastern.Support Invisible Excellence and explore The Visibility Project: https://books.manuscripts.com/product/invisible-excellence-the-hidden-value-of-teachers-beyond-teaching/Teachers in Transition ResourcesWhether you're wondering if it's time to leave teaching, exploring careers beyond teaching, translating your teacher skills, building a resume, networking, job searching, or preparing for interviews, Teachers in Transition has resources designed to meet you where you are in the process.Explore Teachers in Transition: https://teachersintransition.comVanessa is also accepting a limited number of new coaching clients for fall. If you'd like to talk about where you are in your career transition and whether working together would be a good fit, schedule a conversation here:https://teachersintransition.com/calendarTed Lasso Dartboard Scene – Be Curious, Not Judgmental!Keywords: teacher burnout, teacher workload, leaving teaching, teacher career change, careers beyond teaching, teacher career transition, teacher transferable skills, networking for teachers, informational interviews, teacher job search, teacher time management, EdTech, AI for teachersConnect with Vanessa Jackson
I made you a FREE companion guide for this episode that'll take you through every step I suggest to help you reconnect with your motivation, stop judging your lack of motivation, and start getting curious about what it might be telling you.You'll explore your natural motivational wiring, uncover the Very Good Reasons behind your resistance, and discover whether you need to make the thing easier, more enjoyable, or more Loving—or give yourself permission not to do it at all.Get instant access to the editable Google Doc and start exploring what your resistance is trying to tell you.*Summer is ending, the school-year rhythms return, businesses are talking about Q4, our social media feeds are inundated with posts about Virgo Season, and suddenly there's all this pressure to get back on track.But what if you don't feel motivated?And what if your lack of motivation isn't a problem to solve, but information to listen to?There's a million resources out there on how to try to trick or force ourselves to do things when we don't feel motivation for doing them.Instead, I created this episode to help you stop judging your resistance and start getting curious about it.*Press play to learn about...Intelligent Resistance. For women especially, there are endless things we supposedly have to be doing. But I believe resistance isn't laziness or procrastination. It's intuitive useful information about the strategy, timing, environment, expectation, or our motivating force.Changing the environment instead of changing yourself. Rather than trying to change yourself, what could you change in your environment to work with your motivational wiring? It's way more loving, not to mention easier, to remove what's obstructing our Nature rather than endlessly improving ourselves.“What are you motivated to do?” Instead of Why can't I make myself work?, we ask where the energy is naturally trying to go.Fear, force, and shame versus Love. Sometimes we're resisting not the thing itself but the way we're trying to make ourselves do it.Expanding your permission field.Maybe the answer is not to do the thing at all. The goal isn't to manufacture motivation. It's to understand what the lack of motivation is communicating, and then decide what to do.Remember to get the free guide here:[What to Do When You're Not Motivated]
Federal agencies warn of an active campaign targeting critical infrastructure. Citrix races to patch critical NetScaler flaws. More than 50,000 exposed Stripe API keys raise fraud concerns. Black Hat and DEF CON attendees are targeted in a new social engineering campaign. Atlassian, Splunk, and Cisco fix hundreds of vulnerabilities. A new Android banking trojan adds an unusual twist. A healthcare breach impacts 3.8 million people. SilkParasite expands cyberespionage in Central Asia. And CISA eyes a major overhaul of federal cyber software procurement. Our guest is Chris Wallis, founder and CEO of Intruder, on how AI agents killed the annual pentest and are reshaping exposure management. AI powered robots find bananas quite appealing. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our daily intelligence roundup, Daily Briefing, and you'll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow CyberWire Daily on LinkedIn. CyberWire Guest On our Industry Voices segment, Intruder's Founder and CEO Chris Wallis joined Dave at Black Hat to discuss why the annual pentest Is dead and how AI agents are reshaping exposure management. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to check out the full interview here. Selected Reading NSA, FBI warns of hackers using AI-generated tools in attacks on critical infrastructure technology (The Record) Citrix urges admins to patch new NetScaler flaws as soon as possible (Bleeping Computer) 50,000 Stripe Secrets Leaked in Public Code (SecurityAffairs) Black Hat/DEF CON attendees targeted in malware scheme with Google Doc lure (SC World) Atlassian, Splunk Patch Dozens of Critical, High-Severity Vulnerabilities (SecurityWeek) Cisco Patches Critical Crosswork, Secure Workload Vulnerabilities (SecurityWeek) New Manic Android malware can exfiltrate data through nearby devices (Bleeping Computer) EHR Vendor Notifying 3.8 Million Patients of Data Theft Hack (GovInfo Security) SilkParasite: Tracking a China-Nexus APT Across Central Asia (Bitdefender) CISA contemplates whether to hire security software buying help (Washington Technology) I Saw the Future of AI in a Robot That Can Learn on the Spot (WIRED) Share your feedback. What do you think about CyberWire Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. Thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. Want to hear your company in the show? N2K CyberWire helps you reach the industry's most influential leaders and operators, while building visibility, authority, and connectivity across the cybersecurity community. Learn more at sponsor.thecyberwire.com. The CyberWire is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.
Send us Fan MailRead A Flair for Trouble:Read here. Author Events - Yellow Rose Bookshop official grand opening in Caddo Mills, TX 10/03/26. Time TBD.Books Mentioned in this episode:The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ KluneThe Way of Kings by Brandon SandersonUnsteady by Peyton CorinneUnloved by Peyton CorinneBrawler by Lauren GroffHousekeeping by Marilynne RobinsonFirst and Forever by Lynn PainterThe Shippers by Katherine CenterHow to Walk Away by Katherine CenterThings You Save in a Fire by Katherine CenterThe Mash-Up by Laura Marie MeyersHappy Ending by Chloe LieseThe Roommate Rule by Georgia StoneThe Setup Man by Kate WatsonThe Cowboy's Game by Cindy SteelCurrently Reading:Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt DinnimanDoomsdate by Laura Piper LeeWildwood by Ashley WooShe Didn't See it Coming by Shari LapenaFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
Domingo Widen is a Staff Product Designer at Fin (formerly Intercom), where he leads the Frontend Infrastructure team — the team that builds the tools, design system and AI setup everyone else uses to ship. In this episode he opens up his actual workflow: a "Design Playground" repo every designer, PM and researcher can clone, prototyping directly in production, and "Search Intelligence" a persistent knowledge layer that teaches Claude how Fin designs and codes.We talk about what happens when the Figma file stops being the deliverable: how a complex filtering system got built as a working prototype instead of ten mockups, how handoff turns into a PR plus an auto-generated spec, and why engineers ended up being the biggest users of the design team's skills. If you want a concrete, unhyped look at what an AI-native design team actually does day to day, this one is for you.Key LearningsThere are two modes of AI prototyping and you need both. The design system is the guardrail that makes this safe. Because everyone builds on the same components and tokens, a PM or researcher can prototype without producing something off-brand or unusable.Skills are only as good as the information behind them. Fin's early skills gave mixed results — so they built "Search Intelligence", a persistent information layer that every skill reads from. Handoff becomes a PR + a generated spec. A "Search Handoff" skill reads the prototype code and writes the doc: architecture, what was built, which workarounds were needed, what broke. The engineer picks it up from there and focuses on plumbing, data and edge cases.The biggest users of the design team's skills are engineers. Everyone works in the same medium now. PM, designer and engineer used to live in Google Docs, Figma and VS Code. Now it's one shared artifact — which makes conversations concrete but also creates an identity crisis for designers who defined their value by the file.Curiosity + critical thinking are the two traits that survive.Play is back — and it counts. Side projects (a baby sleep tracker, a garden planner that checks on tomatoes) are now part of a portfolio.Domingo WidenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domingowidenPortfolio: https://www.domingowiden.comX: https://x.com/DwidenR24Fin: https://fin.aiFin Operator (the tool Domingo prototypes on in production): https://fin.ai/operatorAI for Designers: 5-week Bootcamp
How can you get your books surfaced when readers ask an AI what to read next? What are the hallmarks of authors and businesses that last more than a decade in the indie author industry? Ricardo Fayet gives his marketing tips after more than a decade at Reedsy. In the intro, Expanding Your Book's IP through Merchandising [Wish I'd Known Then]; Guide to writers conferences [Kindlepreneur]; Rick Rubin and Stephen Pressfield on resistance and the muse [Tetragrammaton]; Pulitzer Prize winners disclose AI usage [Nieman Lab]; My new rebuilt fiction site JFPenn.com. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How AI search actually finds and ranks the books it recommends Why keywords and search volume are disappearing as marketing metrics Building an internet footprint so your book is worth recommending Why Claude leans on Goodreads while ChatGPT and Gemini lean on Reddit Product is more important than marketing, and how to find your comp titles Passion, business sense and resilience in the authors who last You can find Ricardo at Reedsy.com. Transcript of the interview with Ricardo Fayet Jo: Ricardo Fayet is the co-founder and chief marketing officer of Reedsy, a marketplace for writers to find vetted freelancers, author training courses, and lots more. He's also the author of How to Market a Book and Amazon Ads for Authors. So welcome back to the show, Ricardo. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. It's been a while. Jo: It has been a while. As we were saying, it's been a decade, which is crazy, because you and I see each other at events and things. For anyone who doesn't know you— Tell us a bit more about you, where you're from, and also, what is Reedsy these days and how have things changed? Ricardo: Yes, sure. I think I'm hard to dissociate from Reedsy because my only background really is Reedsy. We started Reedsy right after business school for most of the founders. There are four founders, and I'm one of them. We've been going since 2014, so it's been 12 years. We started around the same time, and you started even earlier than we did, but we've had the chance to meet at quite a few conferences since. I think the main thing we're still known for is our marketplace. Since the very beginning, Reedsy is a curated marketplace where authors can come in and look for editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters, literary translators, author website designers, pretty much any freelancer you would ever need to hire throughout your writing career. That's how we started. That's our main source of revenue and our main business. Since then, as you mentioned, we've also added courses, live events, so we've got a membership under Reedsy Learning. The main thing we're proud of right now is our writing tool, Reedsy Studio, because we've been pouring a lot of engineering talent into it over the past five, six years, and I think it's a really cool writing tool that is 90% free. It also does the formatting, so it's a good alternative to Vellum or Atticus for those who haven't purchased those tools. So there's a lot of things that Reedsy does at this point, which always makes it hard for me to describe what we do. Jo: But you generally serve writers. That's probably the crux of it. Ricardo: Exactly, yes. We're mostly at the production stage. The thing we say is we help authors make beautiful books, right? That's a little bit the tagline that applies to 90% of what we do, though we also help a little bit with the marketing side of things. Jo: And then just tell people where your accent is from. Ricardo: So I'm half French, half Italian from my parents, and I was born in Spain. So depending on my mood and the moment, it might be anywhere from French, Italian, Spanish. It's anyone's guess, really, at this point. Jo: Yes, exactly. You've been part of the indie author ecosystem, as you said, since 2014. You're often at the author conferences, and you stay abreast of everything that's going on. So what are the biggest changes you've seen in the industry since you started out? Like you said, you guys came from business school. You chose to come into the industry at a particular point, and yet things have changed. So what do you think are the biggest changes, and how have you seen authors adapt? Ricardo: It's crazy, the amount of things that happened in the past 10 years. Obviously we came into the industry as a result of Amazon launching Kindle Direct Publishing, and then the Kindle Store becoming one of the number one places where people buy books. That's what enabled self-publishing in the first place as an industry, and obviously we wouldn't exist without self-publishing being a thing. But then I think probably one of the biggest changes that happened was the introduction of Kindle Unlimited and various other subscription models. Perhaps as a response to that, afterwards, I would say direct sales is the other massive change that happened in the industry. The ability for authors to sell direct to their readers via their websites, or running Kickstarters, or basically the ability to reach your customers directly. Now, obviously, artificial intelligence is probably the biggest change of them all, not just in publishing, across every industry, but of course it's going to affect publishing very strongly, or it has already started making big waves. So I would say those are the three main changes that we've seen happening in the industry. Jo: Just interestingly, given that you're French, Italian, Spanish, European— Has the pace of change been the same in mainland Europe? Because you and I have also met up at European conferences, but I just get the sense that each individual European country, the UK included, as I include the UK in Europe, goes at a different speed. Ricardo: No, they definitely do. Our market at Reedsy is all in English. We only have an English website, and I would say 70% of our market is US, then 15% UK, and then Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. We do have clients in continental Europe, but they're mostly going to be American or British expats. A lot of retired people who write books and use Reedsy services. I think the main reason for that is that self-publishing as an industry hasn't really grown in Spain, France, Italy the way that it's grown in the US and the UK, probably because these are countries where book buying habits are a lot more traditional. So all my friends from high school and university in France, they all buy books, they all buy paper books. They all buy from bookstores. They don't really buy from Amazon that much. They love the smell of paper, all these sorts of things. So obviously that makes it harder for indie authors in those countries because they cannot place their books in the places where people buy them, which is traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores, or at least it's much harder. So there is an indie movement in those countries, but it's much smaller. I would say Germany is maybe the exception in Europe, where I've seen more and more full-time indie authors, but I don't think it's a market that's comparable even to the UK. Jo: Interesting. Okay, so let's go to marketing, because you love marketing, you have a newsletter about it, and you have a book, How to Market a Book, same title as mine, and we've found each other in our Also Boughts over the years. You have, however, updated yours several times. 2025 was your last update. Mine was 2016, so yours is definitely the most up-to-date one. So what are your thoughts on how authors can reach readers now? And let's split this into two. Let's start with some tips for new authors who just have maybe one book and are really just starting out. Ricardo: Yes, first of all, sorry for stealing your title. Jo: Oh, you know, it's never been a problem. Ricardo: We were trying to come up with something… I know, I know, I know. But still, we wanted something more original, and then we realised that for SEO purposes, that's the title we should really go for. The good thing is, if you search “how to market a book” on pretty much any retailer, you're going to find your book or mine in any order really, but those are going to be the top two books to this day, thankfully, so I'm good with that. I think in terms of marketing tips for new authors who have just the one book, I'd say, despite all the changes in the industry, the basics of marketing still stay the same. One of my big mantras when it comes to marketing is that product is more important than marketing. So having a great book is going to be more important, in my opinion, than being a great marketer. Having a great product. By that, I generally don't talk about literary value or prose or anything like that, just because I'm not a book critic. I'm not an editor. My opinion on whether a book is good or not is worth zero. From a marketing standpoint, for me, a good book is one that resonates with its intended audience. So the first step for newer authors is to basically figure out who they wrote this book for, right? Have an idea of who their target market is. A great way to do that, without entering into marketing jargon like proto-personas and stuff like that, is to think in terms of comp titles, comparable titles. I think that's probably the base of any marketing, whether traditional publishing houses or indie authors, to think, “Okay, which other books out there are similar to mine?” If your book is completely unique, you have, I would say, 99.9% chance of not selling, because your market doesn't exist, and 0.01% chance of creating your own market and completely dominating it, right? So being unique is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would say 99% of the time, it is. Obviously being unique within an existing niche, within an existing market, that's completely different, but you need to work on some comparable titles. So I would say that's where I would start, and that's one of the things that AI is great at. If you even just plug in your book into an AI chat that has enough context, if you're comfortable doing that of course, or if you plug in a synopsis, like a long synopsis, you can basically ask the AI chats, “Okay, what would be some comp titles?” Either you'll have heard of those books, and you'll think, “Okay, they're good comps,” or you may not have heard of them, in which case I would really recommend buying them and reading them and seeing whether they're comps or not. I think that's where marketing starts. Jo: Yes, and we might come back to that for book discoverability. Well, let's just talk about it now, because I now pretty much use Claude for discovering books as well. I just find that the Amazon search, for nonfiction it works really well, right? As you said, if you want to learn how to market a book, you just search “how to market a book”, and our books are very well titled for that. But for fiction, it's so difficult to find new books and comp titles, especially if you don't write in a clear genre, which I don't. I know lots of people do. So we're writing cross-genre. So in terms of book discoverability, I know you've been looking into SEO for books and all of that. What are your thoughts on how authors can more effectively have their books surfaced if people are using the AIs for finding books? Ricardo: That's a very big topic. That's one of my favourite topics right now. That's what I talk about in my marketing newsletter, and I want to start a Substack on the topic as well, because I think it is the future of book discoverability. As you say, search on Amazon isn't great, and if it's not great on Amazon, you don't even want to imagine on Google Play, Kobo, all these sorts of places, right? If you search on Kobo or Apple Books or Google Play for witch cozy mysteries, the top 10 books are going to have exactly “witch cozy mystery” in the title or the subtitle or the series title, right? Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Search is very simple on those sites, so it's very easy to game, but it's terrible as an experience for readers. So I do think that a big part of search is going to move to AI, and now you have Rufus within Amazon itself that appears as a chatbot and encourages you to talk with it, to ask for recommendations. In the beginning Rufus was really terrible, but now I recommend authors play with it. In general, I recommend when it comes to AI discoverability that authors play with all the AI search tools. So it's going to be Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Rufus within Amazon. Just like we talked about comp titles, right, ask for something like, “What would you recommend for fans of this book? Which other books would you recommend?” Or if you're looking for something specific that describes your book, what books would you recommend on… I think one of your examples was fiction around masonry or something like that, right? Jo: I always say, for example, if you ask for action adventure thrillers on pretty much anywhere, you're going to get 20 books by male authors. For those of us who are female authors, but also who have female main characters, you can then be far more granular. That's just not something that necessarily works on Amazon. So, action adventure thrillers with female protagonists written by female indie authors, which is very specific. That will work in AI, whereas that definitely won't work on Amazon. Ricardo: Exactly. So one of the great things about AI search, and terrible things at the same time, is that the concept of keyword is lost, right? So we title our books How to Market a Book because the keyword that people would search for is “how to market a book”, or “book marketing for authors”. Those were the two keywords that had the biggest search volume if we looked at Google Keyword Planner, or any search tools that give you keyword volume. When it comes to AI search, since it's conversational, and it's very personalised, and it can go as niche as you want, keywords are going to disappear, and search volume as a metric is going to disappear. The search you just told me about, maybe there are 10 people who are going to run it exactly. Most people are going to run variations of that. Since you can go as granular as you want, it's going to be very long phrases, very long sentences. So the whole concept of keywords, search volume, SEO, is going to disappear in favour of what some people call GEO, generative engine optimisation, AIO, AI optimisation, AI search optimisation. There's a bunch of names for it, but it is a different discipline. It still works on the basis of Google SEO because what most of these search engines will do is they're going to search the internet, right? They've been trained on a lot of information, but not all of that information is current. Most of these models have been trained on documents and web pages before 2021. That's why when you used the very early versions of ChatGPT, and you asked it about current events or current books, it didn't find it. It didn't have that information. Now all these models have the ability to search the web, and they do that really effectively. So the first thing they're going to do if you run a search like that is they're going to run dozens of different searches on Google or a similar search engine. Action thriller books with female protagonists. Action thriller books with female protagonists by indie authors. Action thriller books by indie authors. They're going to create what I call a corpus, so a massive document of information with candidates, books that probably meet those criteria that they have found through regular web searches. Then they're going to go through all those books and determine which are the most relevant to recommend, and they'll return with that. Then they'll usually have a verification layer as well, which is, okay, I have these five books that I want to recommend to this user, but I just want to make sure first that they are written by indie authors, that they do have a female protagonist, et cetera. And if I'm not able to verify that, I'll flag it in my answer to them. So there are these three layers. Web search, then ranking of the book candidates, and finally a verification layer, and then they serve you the answer. Obviously, that's really powerful. If that's the way that search is headed, which I firmly believe, then we as authors need to learn how to get our books in there. Jo: Yes. It's so interesting, and I do this all the time. Really niche stuff, like a thriller about anatomical Venuses, which are these models from anatomy museums and stuff like that, with an edge of the supernatural. What is brilliant is that you can find the books that come up. I actually got one that I read and reviewed, and it was fantastic. So I love the more granular thing, but we're really in the very long tail now, right? It feels like you can write a very nuanced book, and it will be surfaced, but only by a few people. So do we have to write our books and then try to not even retrofit them in the way that we used to? We used to try and figure out the seven keywords and all of that kind of thing, and now I almost feel like we just get to be grownups, where you just get to write the book and put it out there, and these things are more intelligent than the search terms. Ricardo: Yes, absolutely. I think in terms of the variety of books that are going to be read and discovered, that's amazing. A little bit like the whole indie publishing movement was amazing, because if you remove the traditional publishing gatekeepers, then suddenly zombie books aren't dead anymore. Zombies are alive again. They've… Jo: Come to life. Ricardo: They've come alive, and so you get a bunch of zombie books again. It's not a small niche audience. It's actually a pretty big niche audience that loves zombie books, and suddenly they have those to consume. This is a little bit similar on a much, much bigger and more granular scale, because anyone can find exactly the kind of book that they're looking for, with the tropes they want, with the type of characters they want, with the type of author they want, and you can basically use any kind of filter. So for discoverability on the side of the reader, that's great. For the authors, it doesn't mean that you can just write whatever you want and then rest, and readers will find them. Because your books still need to have generated a certain internet footprint and a certain review footprint in order to become interesting or recommendable to AI search engines, right? Unless you're the only book that an AI search engine can recommend for that specific search, and yours was very specific, so it might have been the only one. If there are other candidates, the AI search engines are pretty smart. They're going to recommend the candidates that have more reviews, better reviews, or are more famous, that have more, when I talk about internet footprint, more pages talking about them on the internet. That's for me the big finding I've seen. The more pages you have on the internet talking about your book, so that could be book review sites, that could be Goodreads lists, Listopia lists, anywhere on the internet where your book is mentioned, that creates a footprint for it. The more footprints, the more famous your book looks to AI search engines, and so the more worthy of recommendations it is to them. Jo: Yes, and this is one reason why I now ask people, especially when you sell direct, or say you have a Kickstarter and you want reviews, I ask people if they can review on Goodreads. Obviously Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but it is far more searchable by the bots than Amazon is. I sometimes find that Amazon gets blocked. Or Amazon blocks some of the bots, let's put it that way. They might change over time. They own 15% of Anthropic or something. But Goodreads I feel like does get indexed, and I'm not willing to engage on Reddit. I know Reddit is another popular one. Just be very clear on social media, because some people think, oh, I just need loads of influencers to talk about my book, and that will impact the AIs. But I find that social media just almost isn't even there. Ricardo: It depends on which social media. For me, Reddit is a social medium, right? It's a very weird one, but it's obviously the number one social medium used by AI search engines, and it's pretty dodgy stuff with lots of conflicts of interest, because Google has a paid partnership with Reddit. I think Sam Altman has shares in Reddit. So both OpenAI and Google Gemini heavily rely on Reddit for their AI answers, right? If you ask anything from ChatGPT or Gemini, I'd say there are very high chances that in the sources and the citations of the answer, you're going to find Reddit, right? That goes for books as well. Every time you ask for book recommendations, Reddit is going to be big for those two AI search engines. Claude, it's a little bit different. They do have a little bit of a relationship with Reddit, but I don't think it's as big. I found that Claude relies heavily on Goodreads, not Reddit. To me, Goodreads is another social medium at the end of the day, right? It's not the kind of social medium we think of, like… Jo: It's not TikTok. Ricardo: It's not TikTok. TikTok is surfaced a little bit, but not that much. It might become more surfaced in the future, but right now what I've found is, it's really Reddit and Goodreads. Facebook, LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is big for nonfiction topics more than fiction, because there are just not a lot of fiction readers, sorry, talking about their favourite books on LinkedIn. They usually go to other places for that. Jo: Yes, it's really interesting. So obviously TikTok has its own BookTok thing, so some people are finding books on BookTok, and some people like me are finding books through asking Claude, and that's just my overwhelming feeling about the industry. We talked earlier about what's changed. When I started, so 2006, there wasn't even KDP, and then KDP arrives, then you came in 2014, and probably until maybe a few years after that, there was one way to self-publish. Then what's happened since is this kind of splintering. There are so many ways to self-publish. There are so many ways to reach readers. There are so many ways to market. So someone, for example, could sell direct on TikTok Shop, only market through TikTok, and you wouldn't even know that they existed over in another ecosystem, right? So do you feel like that's happened too, this total splintering? Ricardo: Absolutely. I think there are so many different ways in which you can reach your audience now and monetise it as well, that it's absolutely possible. We both know examples of authors who are only visible to their TikTok niche, right? I think the big difference is also monetisation, because earlier you also had different ways of becoming well-known. Like you had Facebook, you had potentially Twitter, back when it was Twitter. Various social media, word of mouth. But where people bought books was Amazon. So that was your monetisation. It was either selling your book on Amazon, or potentially getting KU reads after that when KU launched. Now you can sell on TikTok, you can sell direct, you can run Kickstarters, you can start a Patreon or Substack and make your money through there. There are pretty much infinite ways through which you can monetise your content as a creator. Most of those places will also have a discoverability engine built in, so you can not only sell through there and make money through there, but also grow an audience there. That's probably the biggest competition that Amazon has ever had to face, is this sort of splintering. For us authors and content creators in general, it's amazing, because it's a bunch of different opportunities. Jo: Yes, and I think probably that's circling back to marketing. As we've said, some things have changed, some things stay the same. Is the email list still the number one way to market, do you think, for authors who want a long-term career? Ricardo: I think so. It's just the one thing you really own that allows you to communicate with readers, right? Because even if you build a following on TikTok, TikTok can change. The things we said about Facebook 10 years ago, if you build your Facebook group, Facebook can change, and Facebook changed. Facebook destroyed the reach of pages, and now groups also aren't amazing, et cetera. So the same thing that happened to Facebook can happen to TikTok, can happen to any other social media. Substack is a bit of a hybrid because it is a newsletter, it is a mailing list, but it also has a discoverability engine built in. So I still wouldn't really go all in on Substack. The great advantage there is that you do own the emails, right? So you can move away from it at some point. For me, the email list is the one thing that you are completely in control of. Personally, the main thing I check is my emails every day. I spend more time in my inbox than anywhere else, and I think that's probably the case for most people. So I do think, despite the influx of mails that readers are getting in their inbox, I still think it's one of the most important marketing tools for authors. Jo: Yes, and I still remember when I started my list in December 2008, and I still have people on the list who've been with me that whole time, and have moved email list services several times as well. So I think that's important too. The care of that list too is so important. One of the things that I am annoyed about with Substack, I don't have a Substack, but when I follow some people's, it's always constantly trying to get you to sign up to other people's lists, trying to subscribe you to this or that or the other. I'm like, “That's so annoying.” Now I've found on all these email services they're trying to pair you with other creators and cross-promote and all of this. So it feels like even the email list is becoming a difficult place unless you really protect it. So just protecting your list, I think, and remembering that those are people. Those are people who've bought your books, or people who read your emails. Like people listening to this, these are humans. Sure, some bot might be looking at the transcript, but humans listening to this are individual humans with individual email lists. We tend to forget that, don't we, as you get a bigger list. You think about it as a big number, whereas it's still individual people. Ricardo: Yes, it becomes a number, it becomes metrics, the open rate, the click rate, and all that. But the great thing about email is that you get replies in your inbox. There you remember that they're actual human beings who write you back. I think for readers, the ability to write back to an author and get a response is just amazing, right? If you write to your favourite author and they write back to you, that's the best feeling ever as a reader. So I think email is still one of the best ways to turn your readers into fans and into super fans of your brand, by just interacting with them and answering them. Because yes, you can answer comments on TikTok, Facebook, and all those places, but it doesn't feel the same as an author answering you in your inbox, I feel. So you do get that ability to create a real connection with readers directly through email. Jo: Yes, and I think that trust and the reputation is so important. Just in terms of seeing the authors that you've seen over the years, like I said, you've been going to a lot of the author conferences. You know a lot of the authors in the industry. A lot of people will know you from events. But you've also seen authors come and go, and you've seen vendors come and go. Both of us have seen people arrive, and we'd be like, “Oh, yes, I wonder how long they're going to last.” Then some people do and some people don't. So what are some of the elements that you've noticed about the businesses that last more than a decade? Ricardo: I think they need to solve a genuine problem, or offer a genuinely better solution than one that already exists. I see a lot of businesses come in and they do what another vendor already does, without doing it necessarily better. Those businesses tend to disappear, or linger there, but you don't really hear about them again. When they solve a real need… I still remember when BookFunnel came out, and they've since become massive with one very, very basic thing, which is, “We will take care of delivering your ebook files to readers.” That's how they started, and that's how they became massive. To me at the time, I was like, “That seems like a very small problem,” because I can just email an ebook file. I didn't realise that it was so complicated for a lot of readers to upload files to their Kindle or other devices, and that having a service that takes care of that for you is just massively helpful. I realised that when I published my books, actually. So businesses that solve even micro or apparently very small problems, but they really solve them effectively, they stay. Others that surf on trends, they tend to disappear when the trend disappears. When there's a new marketing trend, and that trend stops working, then those businesses tend to go. Jo: Yes, and what about the authors who last? Because let's face it, most of us don't solve a problem in a different way. Maybe you could say we solve your entertainment problem in a different version to your last book. What about the authors who last long term? What have you noticed about them? Ricardo: Two things. So the first one… Maybe three things. First one is passion. I always say to people who are looking to start self-publishing, I always say that publishing in general is probably one of the worst ways to make money. It's awful. You can pick up any other occupation and it's probably going to be easier to make money. So writers who make a career do it because they need to write, because they have a passion for writing. So a lot of people who come into the industry thinking, “I've heard about all these self-publishing success stories. Surely I can write a book and I can market it. It's not that hard. So that's going to be a great way to make quick bucks,” those generally don't last, because they don't have that genuine passion. The first hurdle they're going to face—and there's going to be a bunch of them along the way—they're going to quit. The second thing is business sense, or business education, the basics of business, right? Thinking in terms of marketing, thinking in terms of who's my reader, unit economics. If I'm selling my books at $3.99, I shouldn't be spending a ton of money. If I just have one book at $3.99, I cannot afford to pay $5 on ads to generate a sale. So those kinds of basic economics or business knowledge, I think, if not a requirement, it's a massive plus. The third thing is resilience. The industry has changed a lot, as you mentioned. There are a bunch of ways now to reach an audience. There are a bunch of ways to make money. It can also be distracting, because you go to one of these conferences and you go back thinking, “Oh, I've got to create my own website, sell direct. I've got to launch my Substack. I have to use Claude Code for my ads,” and three more things, “and I have to set up my TikTok Shop and do TikTok Lives to sell books,” right? Jo: All of those by next week. That's why we go to the conference. Ricardo: Exactly. All those by next week, right? And during that one week after the conference, you have the energy to start implementing all those things, but afterwards you lose that energy and you go back to, “I just want to quit.” So you need to have some sort of resilience, and the business sense of, “Okay, I'm going to try this for the next six months, and I'm going to stick to it, and I'm going to see whether it works or not. And if it doesn't work, I'm not just going to despair. I'm going to try something else.” That goes for marketing tactics, but also goes for books. Most authors I know who make a living writing, they didn't get there with their first book or even their first series. A lot of times I see authors who write a couple of series, and those series do okay. They sell a little bit, but not much, and it doesn't afford them to quit their day job. Then suddenly, based on what they've learned with those first two series and what they've learned potentially going to conferences or listening to podcasts like this, et cetera, they write a third series that's a hit. That's a hit, and that's instantly much easier to market, and that's when they can afford to go full time and write full time, because they've found that sort of product market fit. And product market fit for me is the main thing for marketing in general and for authors in particular. Until you find that, everything is really difficult from a marketing perspective. But finding it usually requires writing more than one book and more than one series, because you're rarely going to get the big lottery ticket on the first try. Jo: Or ever. I think it's really important. I've never had a breakout book, but I've made good money every year. I think, and Hugh Howey said this, that the real story of self-publishing is not the people who make seven figures a year, it's the people who can go on a holiday once a year, or the people who can just put a bit towards their mortgage or whatever. So you may never have a breakout series. I think that's really important, too. Ricardo: That's true. Jo: That's true. You can just keep writing and make all right money and be what we call in the mid-list. Ricardo: Yes, but you've got to keep going. You've got to have that resilience to keep going, probably because it's your passion. Exactly. You're not chasing that seven figure series. You're writing because you need to write. Jo: Yes, and you can't stop, and you get the bug. I think when you're writing that first book, I'm not sure if people understand that you either get the bug or you don't, I think. You've written a couple of books now. Do you think you have the bug, or is it more about the business? Ricardo: I don't have the bug. I definitely don't have the bug. I would've kept writing otherwise. Jo: You're a technologist, right? Ricardo: Yes. I'm more of a technologist, more of a marketer. To write my first book, How to Market a Book, I actually had to write newsletters, because that I can manage, right? One newsletter a week. Now I don't even manage that. I send it once every two weeks when I can even manage that pace. But back then I did one newsletter a week, and that's how I wrote my first book. I then put all these newsletters together, and that was before the age of AI, so I couldn't just dump all that into ChatGPT and tell it, “Create me a book based on that.” I had to do it myself. Jo: Oh, terrible. Ricardo: Terrible, I know. The days when we had to work. No, but that was a really good experiment. The second book, Amazon Ads for Authors, I actually wrote it from scratch, and I didn't love the experience. I loved the finished product, I'm very proud of it, but I didn't enjoy the experience of writing it. Amazon Ads is not the most exciting topic in the world. Even for people like me, who actually enjoy Amazon Ads, it's not super exciting to write about. The fact of having to write that whole book from scratch, I didn't love the experience. So now I do want to write a third book at some point, but I think it'll probably be in the format of the first one. Like, when I finish my series of newsletters on AI search and AI discoverability, I might do a booklet or something around it, but we'll have to see. It's not my favourite thing. It's a good thing I don't need to. Good thing I'm not an author, basically. Jo: No, but I think that's really great to recognise. You actually have written books that support your business, and that is very common for nonfiction writers. That's completely normal for nonfiction authors. So I think that's another important thing for people to recognise, is that the reasons we write are different, the reasons we market are different, and we all have different approaches. As we wind up, and obviously you talked a bit there about how easy it is to generate books with AI, and that is probably one of the biggest things that people are worried about. Now, those of us like you and I have been talking about AI at conferences and things for years now. Neither of us are afraid of it, I think basically because both of us use it, and we're technologists, so we just get on with it. There is so much fear in the community. There's so much negativity. You mentioned Substack, and now they've integrated Pangram, which is renowned for false positives around what is written with AI, and so people are very worried. If we look forward and we look at the next decade, this is not going away. This is going to change a lot of things. So how should authors be thinking about AI, do you think, if they want to prepare for the next decade? Ricardo: I think they need to play around with it, because you and I know that until you actually use it, you don't realise what it's capable of. We've both had these moments of “Oh my God, I'm going to be out of a job,” or “Oh my God, this is incredible,” the kind of things it's able to do. You also realise by using it the things it's not great at, or the things it can be good at but needing a lot of human input. There are courses out there, there are books, there are a lot of things, but for me, the most important thing is to start playing around with it. So you can pick one specific topic to play around with. Either something that you've been meaning to get into for years and haven't done, or something that really annoys you. Looking at the results of your Facebook ads, for example. If you run Facebook ads in the first place, and when you log into your Meta dashboard you cannot make sense of it, take screenshots or download the data, feed it to an AI chat, and talk with it. One of my biggest tips when talking to AI chats is asking them questions rather than asking them for things to do. Because if you just feed it your advertising data and you tell it, “Tell me what I should do,” the chat has no context about what your ads are about, what your goal is, et cetera, et cetera. If you feed it just a screenshot and you say, “Here are my ads. I would like you to help me make sense of them. What do you need to know from me in order to help me with this?” Then it's going to start asking you questions. “Okay, what are you advertising?” They're books. “Okay, what kind of books? Where are you selling? Are your ads going straight to Amazon or retailers, or are they going to your website? If you sell direct, okay, are these conversion ads?” Et cetera, et cetera. So you build that context, and they can help you with it. So that's just one example, but I would pick one thing that you want to test AI with, with zero expectations. Don't expect that by the end of the week you'll have a full system for understanding your Meta ads thanks to AI. You might get to that or you might not, but at least you'll play with it and you'll understand its capabilities, and have a sort of understanding of how it works and how you can potentially use it for other things. I think that's the best way to adapt, because once you play with it, you start thinking. You're walking the dog and you're just thinking, “Ha, I could maybe use it for this thing or that other thing,” and that's how you progressively become more familiar with it. I think there are a lot of worries around AI, but as you say, it's there to stay. So far, I think I was looking at data this morning, and the unemployment rate in the US has stayed stable ever since ChatGPT was introduced two years ago. So there are a lot of narratives out there around how it's going to replace humans, it's going to replace jobs, et cetera, which it might do. I'm not great at predictions usually, but so far it hasn't. What it will definitely do, however, is completely change the way we work. Obviously AI was one of our big reckonings at Reedsy, because we run a marketplace. Our main business model is the marketplace, where authors come in and look for editors, for marketers, for cover designers, for translators, and some of these domains and services are being transformed by AI, right? AI translations are massive right now. We haven't really seen a decline at all on the Reedsy marketplace, but we're prepared for it. It might very well happen, but what we think is happening, or is going to happen, is professionals using AI tools to provide a better output or a faster output or a cheaper output, or all three of these things. So for example, we now have literary translators who say they're open to editing AI translations, right? So you can come in, you can have your book translated with AI, whichever tool or method you choose for that. Then if you want a set of human eyes on it, you can hire a literary translator who's open to working on an AI-translated manuscript, and that's obviously going to be much, much cheaper than paying 10 cents per word from scratch for a literary translator. I'm not necessarily recommending you completely bypass literary translators, or that you go this way, but you have options, right? You have options for different sets of budgets. I think all these human editors, narrators, translators, designers, et cetera, they're not going to disappear, but they might have to reinvent the way they work in the future. Jo: As we all are doing. As you say, for me mostly it's the business side, getting Claude to help me with business stuff. Like even bookkeeping. There are bills that we've all been paying for years that we can now maybe reduce, and reducing costs as well as increasing profit is obviously good business sense. So, interesting times. But just as we wrap up, what are you excited about in what's coming? How do you see Reedsy shaping up in the next decade? What is coming for you and Reedsy? Ricardo: We're really excited about the decade to come, because obviously 10 years for a startup is a long time. I think most startups after 10 years, the founders are gone. Jo: Yes. Ricardo: Or they've exited or they've sold or whatever. We've stayed, we're the same founders, and we're still as excited because I think we have new products, right? We're working on new things. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Reedsy Studio, our writing tool, is probably one of the things we're most excited about, because first, it's getting adopted very fast. It has startup-like growth that we hadn't seen for other products in a long time, and it has very cool technology built in. We probably have a team of 10, 15 engineers now working full time on it and adding a lot of things. So we've added templates for plotting your book, with relationships within different characters and places and magic systems and things like that. We've added writing goals and writing statistics. We still have the free exports. One very cool thing we've added is real time collaboration. So just like Google Docs, you can write in real time with a co-author, or you can get an editor to work in there live with track changes. So you could have an editor working on chapter one while you're writing chapter three, for example. That kind of thing. It's really powerful technology, and that's one of the things we're really excited about for the future. A business, just like authors, we've got to reinvent ourselves. We've got to find ways to keep things exciting and keep motivated, and that is definitely one of them. When adoption goes along with it, then that's obviously super satisfying. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and Reedsy online? Ricardo: So Reedsy you can find at reedsy.com, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com. And there you'll find the whole suite of tools and services. For me, you can find me mostly by email, as I mentioned. That's the one place I check consistently every day, and my email address is ricardo@reedsy.com. So again, R-E-E-D-S-Y.com and ricardo@reedsy.com. You can email me any questions you have about this episode, about AI book discoverability, about marketing, about Reedsy. I always try to answer every email I get, because I think when we started Reedsy, I really appreciated people like you, and some other agents and editors and authors we contacted who were influential in the industry, who actually answered us and took the time to do that. So now I try to answer every email I get, because I feel like we've been very lucky in the beginning to have those people answering our emails, so we should do the same. Jo: Oh, well, thanks so much for your time, Ricardo. That was great. Ricardo: Thank you, Jo. Thanks for having me again.The post Book Marketing, AI Book Discoverability, And Resilience, With Ricardo Fayet first appeared on The Creative Penn.
Sign up for Practi, a new platform that helps law firms use subscription billing.Here are the top 5 takeaways from this episode:* Gemini Notebook (formerly, Notebook LM) is the standout tool. The speaker calls it “the best value in Google Workspace.” It uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to answer questions only from sources you provide, making it ideal for analyzing contracts, running playbooks against briefs, and even as a client-facing lead generation tool.* Listen to your documents. Google Docs has a built-in text-to-speech feature (the play button next to the editing mode toggle) that lets you listen to documents at variable speeds. It's a significant time-saver for document review, especially for auditory learners, though it's currently limited to ~6 pages at a time.* Google Workspace's subscription tier matters. The Business Standard plan (~$14/month) unlocks Gemini Notebook Pro, advanced Gemini features, Google Cloud Search (search across your entire Google ecosystem at once), and HIPAA compliance options via a free Business Associate Agreement (BAA). The starter tier is insufficient for serious law practice.* Underused productivity features. Chrome tab groups (organized per client, synced across devices), email aliases/alternates (use multiple domain emails without extra seats), and Google Cloud Search are powerful built-in tools most attendees hadn't fully explored. Google Sheets' Gemini integration can also auto-build tracking spreadsheets by pulling from existing email/payment data.* AI-powered video and podcast generation from legal documents. Gemini Notebook's Video Overview and Audio Overview features can turn a client handbook, brief, or contract into an explainer video or debate-style podcast. This lets lawyers deliver client-facing explanations without recording themselves, and the debate feature can surface gaps in legal arguments before filing.__________________________Want your question to be answered on a future show? Fill out this short survey.Have subscription model question? Check out this free resource to ask all of your questions at notebook.practi.ai.Check out Practi.Sign up for Paxton, my all-in-one AI legal assistant, helping me with legal research, analysis, drafting, and enhancing existing legal work product.Get Connected with SixFifty, a business and employment legal document automation tool.Sign up for Gavel, an automation platform for law firms.Visit Law Subscribed to subscribe to the weekly newsletter to listen from your web browser.Prefer monthly updates? Sign up for the Law Subscribed Monthly Digest on LinkedIn.Check out Mathew Kerbis' law firm Subscription Attorney LLC.Want to use the subscription model for your law firm? Click here to sign up for a new platform that helps law firms use subscription billing. Get full access to Law Subscribed at www.lawsubscribed.com/subscribe
Sign up for the Party Girls Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PartyGirlsIn the weirdest and most NSFW Thoughts From Montreal yet, Pete says as much as he publicly can about a situation he stumbled into after one simple Twitter notification about an ultra-left podcaster he follows.The usual Google Doc is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hxqg0xn2X13T51PPqICjERTzk-90fnK337l5sgFYooM/edit?usp=sharing
Why do good strategic plans so often fail to produce different results? John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to explore a simple idea: organizations do not run on strategic plans. They run on the routines leaders and teams follow every day. From meetings and priorities to problem solving and learning, those routines form the management system that shapes results. Listen to a practical conversation about strategy, leadership, Deming, and designing an organization that can continually learn. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. Well, John, your most recent blog post, you titled it "The System Your Organization Actually Runs." Interesting title. And it starts with a question that I think every leader has probably asked at some point, which is, how does this strategic plan actually change what leaders do on Monday morning? Why did you start at that point? 0:00:50.1 John Dues: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Andrew. I think the article kind of gets at a question that I've found myself asking over the years as I've led school systems. And I've seen a lot of different strategic plans, and I've seen a lot of different strategic plans at my own organization. And most of them contain worthwhile goals. Most of them are written by leaders that want to genuinely improve their organization. I think the problem is, it wasn't the quality of the goals. It was... After reading the plan, I often couldn't tell how the leadership of that particular organization was actually going to operate once the plan was finished, or how at least how it was going to operate differently. And this is true of my own organization. The plan would tell me or those leaders where the organization wanted to go but it rarely said like how that was going to happen, what was going to happen differently every day in order to get there. And what I eventually basically came to the realization that this wasn't just a minor oversight or omission, it was like the central issue. And so that realization really changed how I started to think about strategic planning, 'cause I do think that's an important component of running an organization, but it's not the management system itself. It's just the starting point basically. 0:02:22.7 Andrew Stotz: There's a great book on strategy that I like called Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt and he basically focuses in on how bad most strategy is, and it's just lofty statements and generalizations with very little action and trade-offs that the senior management or the leaders are really making. And so it just plops in people's lap like, "Here's a good-feeling thing." So was there a specific moment when that clicked for you? 0:02:59.4 John Dues: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think what I think of when you mentioned that book, which I haven't read, "Good Strategy Bad Strategy," I think there certainly is good strategy and there is certainly bad strategy. But what I most often was seeing is like pretty good strategy that maybe a consultant would write. Like we did a strategic plan with a consultant, a great consultant about a decade ago and the strategic plan that that work resulted in was great and useful in some ways. But by and large, it did end up in the sort of stereotypical fancy binding and all kinds of colors and graphs and stuff like that, but it was mostly sitting on shelves and closets. It really wasn't formatted like literally and figuratively, it wasn't formatted in a way that was going to guide our work on a daily or a weekly or a monthly basis. So that experience, and I went through a couple of those types of strategic planning sessions with consultants over the years. So then I was thinking about what's actually happening is that, well, if the strategic plan mostly gets shelved, what is it exactly that is guiding and running the organization on that day-to-day basis? 0:04:30.4 Andrew Stotz: Interesting kind of distinction between the plan and the day-to-day running. So let's answer that question. If the strategic plan isn't the management system, what is it? 0:04:45.9 John Dues: Well, I think one thing is some people might be familiar with the management system terminology and some people may not. It probably has a technical meaning for a lot of people that are doing this type of work. But whether you use that terminology, "management system," in your organization or not, every organization has one. And so when a lot of people hear management system, they may picture some type of software system or some more formal operating manual. But that's not what I mean when I say there is a management system whether you realize it or not. I don't mean something formal necessarily. I'm just talking about a management system as a simple collection of like recurring leadership routines that determine how the organization actually functions. So it's things like how are priorities established? When you have meetings, how are they run? How frequently do the meetings occur? What measures are the leaders reviewing on a regular basis? How are problems surfaced in the organization? How do decisions get made? How the information flows? How leaders learn whether the organization is improving. So there's all kinds of these routines, and in some places they are not intentionally designed at all. But some version of those things are happening in every single organization. And in a lot of places they sort of just simply kind of evolve naturally on their own over time. But the thing that's similar, and it's pretty remarkable, is that whether you're doing this deliberately or not, these become like powerful behavior shapers in the day-to-day of an organization. So I think the key thing is that people respond much more to that daily management system, those leadership routines, and those things reinforce more so like the behavior of people that work in an organization more than what leaders say is important or more than what is written in a strategic plan that people often sort of shelve after the initial rollout and don't reference back very often. 0:07:16.7 Andrew Stotz: This makes me think of a quote by a guy named Stafford Beer, who is a systems thinker, and he said, "The purpose of a system is what it does." 0:07:23.8 John Dues: That's it, yes. That is it in essence, yeah. 0:07:31.0 Andrew Stotz: And the meaning of this is like never judge a system by its stated goals. This is also what Rumelt is talking about in "Good Strategy Bad Strategy." Don't judge it by its stated goals or its mission statement or what its designers have intended it to do. Really, we've gotta judge it by what it does. So you're saying every organization already has a management system then? 0:07:57.6 John Dues: Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, I think that's probably the biggest idea I was trying to get through in that most recent blog post, this idea that every organization has a management system whether they call it that or not. So the question is not its existence. The real question is, is there any intentionality behind the design of that system? 0:08:22.2 Andrew Stotz: So to follow that up, if every organization already has a management system, why do so many strategic plans fail to produce different results? 0:08:33.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think from what I've seen is that the goals and maybe the tactics and the strategic plans change every three years or every five years depending on how your organization does it but those management routines don't. So you spend all this time creating a new strategic plan and you may even do some things differently for a short time period, kind of like when you make a New Year's resolution, but you kind of settle back into those natural patterns if any changes were made in the first place at all. And so if you're a leader, you kind of just keep holding those same meetings, you kind of keep looking at the same reports, looking at the same data, you make decisions in the same way, you respond to problems in the same way. New initiatives sort of get absorbed up into that old existing management system. And so these initiatives come and they go but the system really doesn't change, kind of just like what you were saying with that quote. And then because the system doesn't change, the results usually don't change very much either. I think one follows from the other. So I think this is why two organizations, like two school systems can have pretty identical strategies and then produce completely different outcomes. And the difference usually isn't the plan, it's that management system that sort of lives underneath the plan. That's kind of how I think about it. 0:10:06.8 Andrew Stotz: It kind of makes me think of like a military. An army is told by their leader, "We're gonna take that hill," and then a new guy comes in and he goes, "I'm gonna change the plan. We're gonna take that hill and that hill." And then a new guy comes in and he goes, "We're gonna take that hill and that hill and that hill." And all of a sudden there's no tradeoff, there's no letting go, there's no sacrifice. And when you don't have a clear tradeoff, you're basically saying that we've got all these resources and we can do all this stuff. So it's interesting because most people would probably say that the problem is execution. 0:10:44.7 John Dues: Yeah. And I think... I mean, you run a business. I mean, execution, obviously... 0:11:01.7 Andrew Stotz: That's hard. 0:11:02.7 John Dues: It's critical. It's very critical. But the execution, how that goes, the execution itself is shaped by that management system. And so I think if you want different execution, you have to design a different set of management routines that people are gonna then follow to implement that plan. 0:11:22.6 Andrew Stotz: Well, it's not only me working in a real business. Of course you are too. So how did this change the way you approach strategic planning at United Schools? What are you doing differently? 0:11:34.3 John Dues: Yeah, I think the last couple rounds of strategic planning, so kind of in the middle of the pandemic, we decided that we were gonna take a stab at creating our own plan internally. And by that, I just mean that we were gonna do it ourselves and not utilize a consultant. And I think there can be times when utilizing someone from the outside, a consultant, there's lots of good ones out there, we've worked with a couple different ones over the years that I'd recommend, but I think there is something to be said for writing the strategic plan yourself if you have that capability. I mean... So we have a very stable senior leadership team, and so because of that cohesiveness, I think that's one sort of condition that allowed us to write it ourselves. And so I think one of the things then that happens when you write it yourself is you internalize it in a different way than if someone else wrote it for you. Even if you're studying it and reading it carefully, there's just something about writing it yourself and workshopping different goals and tactics and things like that that really make you deeply internalize. And that just doesn't happen when you use a consultant for something, in my opinion. And then one other, I think some people might see this as a small thing, but the strategic plan actually is in a Google Document. And the great thing about Google Documents, of course, is that they are dynamic and easy to collaborate in. And so this may seem like a small thing, but when a consultant hands off a finished product, it's often in a slide deck or a PDF. And that's actually kind of hard to change. There are programs where you can obviously change a PDF fairly simply, but there's something about it living in a PDF versus living in a Google Document. Now, it's not something that we're just changing all the time. However, we're regularly in that Google Document and adjusting things, let's say on a quarterly basis as we adjust and as we learn as conditions change and stuff like that. So I think it's sort of like a two-part thing. More internalization happens when you do it yourself, and then we made this decision to put it in a Google Doc and let it live there. And it's sort of a working document that gets continually updated across the life of that particular strategic plan. 0:14:03.5 Andrew Stotz: I've just spent probably 500 hours developing a corporate strategy module for my Profit Bootcamp and I also have been teaching it and developing it with executive education here in Bangkok. And I have 12 activities that, I basically look at the best books on this topic, break it down, and then it's a series of activities. And I just couldn't imagine a consultant, and even myself, what I'm trying to do is guide people through it, but ultimately you gotta think about it and you gotta really... And it starts, in my case it starts with why. Why are you doing what you're doing? And for me, a lot of what I try to do is inspire learning that leads to lasting change. And lasting change is because I had some people in my life that delivered lasting change to me. They provided an environment and the knowledge that allowed me to absorb it and make a lasting change in my life. In my case, it was stop using drugs and alcohol, which has worked for more than 40 years. And so it starts with why and then it goes through a lot of things. But one of the questions is like, what trade-offs are you making? If somebody's not upset with your strategy, you got it wrong because you must... You have limited resources and you're gonna have to pull it from one place to another. And I think that's part of what people miss and what they avoid a lot of times. So I love the idea of developing it yourself and going through it. But the document, of course, itself isn't really the point, is it? 0:15:53.5 John Dues: Yeah, I think the fact that it lives in a Google Document is just kind of one component of it that works for us. But yeah, I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think ultimately what we're looking for the strategic plan to do is kind of reaffirm or reassess what our long-term purpose is. For us, that's a time for us to look at our purpose and our mission, our values, and kind of reaffirm those things or make adjustments if we need to. But I think the key is, and this is where the management system comes, is that the plan then immediately flows into things like annual goals, quarterly priorities. Our senior leaders have management plans that sort of guide their work and outline their work for the year. It's gonna inform what's happening. All of our schools start with a daily huddle amongst the staff team, much like you'll see on the floor of a hospital or something like that. Our biweekly leadership team meetings, the quarterly strategic reviews that we do with our leadership team, and then the annual planning, all that, all of those routines are flowing from the strategic plan, but they're like the management system that sort of brings it alive. And these routines that I just mentioned really create these learning cycles that then feed back into the strategic plan, and that's the sort of updates that it gets over the course of its lifespan. And so if I had to boil it down, it's like the strategic plan provides the constancy of purpose, to kind speak in Deming's terms, and then the management system helps us continually learn and how to achieve that particular purpose. 0:17:35.5 Andrew Stotz: I like your distinction of the routines because that helps us understand like these are cycles that we're going through and routines that we're doing and as long as that routine is serving the ultimate aim of the system, then fantastic. So towards the end of the blog, you say something that really stood out to me, and that is you said, "The real work of leadership is designing an organization that can learn." What do you mean by that? 0:18:08.0 John Dues: Yeah, I think what I was trying to get at is that early in my career, I really thought leadership was mostly about developing better strategy. If you just had better strategy, you'd be on the right course. And today I have a more nuanced view that's only one part of the job. I think the larger responsibility is designing an organization that continually improves its own thinking. And that requires those intentional routines that you were just talking about. And I think, of course, you're gonna review performance over time. If you have a Deming lens, you're gonna study variation. You gotta have some collaborative ways that you're solving problems. For us, that includes running PDSA cycles to refine our methods. And then through it all, you're keeping everyone connected around this common purpose. And I think that when those routines become a part of the everyday work, improvement then becomes much less dependent on a single leader, or sometimes it's a heroic leader that drives the organization. It's the organization itself that's capable of learning then because these various routines have become a part of the behavior pattern of the organization itself. 0:19:24.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, that sounds very Deming. 0:19:26.2 John Dues: It's very Deming, very Deming. Yeah, I think I kind of think of one of Deming's greatest insights is that organizations don't improve because people simply work harder. They improve because leaders improve the system deliberately. And this, the article and then this podcast is one particular part of that system, about one particular part of that system, the management system itself. 0:19:54.6 Andrew Stotz: In the strategy course that I do, I talk about identifying strengths. And then I looked at 8,500 companies globally, and I do a measure where I look at each company relative to its global peers each year. And then I say, where is its ranking on two things: how profitable it is and how fast it's growing earnings. Both of these are opposing forces, so it's very hard to have both of them at a high level. But that's what I do as a score I call the profitable growth score. And then I ask the question, how many companies out of 8,500 sustain a number one or number two ranking out of one to 10 over five years? And out of 8,500 companies, it's 400. 0:20:36.7 John Dues: Wow. 0:20:48.2 Andrew Stotz: And I would say that these have a clear competitive advantage that's illustrated in their numbers. Where it's coming from, how they're getting it, okay, those are deeper questions. But this is where I talk with the executives that I work with, the companies I work with, and I ask them, how do we look for a strength in your business that we can convert to a competitive advantage? Because right now, looking at the financial performance of almost everybody, we just have a lot of strengths, which is great. But strategy really is about how do we do that? And the second component of that, which kind of relates back to this learning, is that if you have an all-star in your company and they leave and the sales go down or the business goes down, then you didn't have a real competitive advantage. And so the concept of building learning into a company where everybody's learning creates what I call a hard to copy strength or competitive advantage and that ultimately leads to a long-term performance that is reflected. And it's a little bit like, some people listening may think, "Oh, I'm not into the numbers and all that stuff, Andrew." Well, just imagine that your kid comes to you and says, "Hey, Dad," or "Mom, I'm gonna get A's next semester." And you go, "Right, great. How are you gonna do it?" And they go, "Well, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, and I'm gonna change this and I'm gonna change that." "That sounds like a good plan. Go for it." And then at the end of the term, they had been getting C's and then they come back and they say, "I got C's." Well, is there no meaning in the output of that? I think there's meaning in it. And then that's ultimately where I say a strength has to convert to be a competitive advantage, and the competitive advantage has to be reflected in the financial performance, or what is it? 0:22:49.8 John Dues: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great sort of sum-up of the discussion today. 0:22:53.2 Andrew Stotz: So if someone's listening and only remembers one thing from today's conversation, what would it be? 0:23:01.7 John Dues: Yeah, I mean, I think what I would hope they remember is that what we've talked about is organizations don't actually run on strategic plans. They run on a management system. So every organization has one, whether they've called it that or not. Everybody has a management system that's sort of running the organization. And I think the key question is whether it's intentionally designed or not. So in my mind, if a leader wants different results, then they have to examine those recurring routines that shape how work is getting done every day. And ultimately, organizations improve not because they have impressive plans but because they have these intentionally built management systems that continually translate that long-term purpose into better daily practice and operations, basically. 0:23:56.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, it's great and personally, I really like the routine aspect of what you talked about today 'cause I think about a management system, sometimes it's a little bit nebulous or hard to grasp, but a routine is very clear. And I was just thinking about what often happens is we have routine stacking where the prior manager had these five routines and now a new manager comes in and he added two, now we got seven. And then the next one comes in and he added three, now we got 10. But looking at these underlying routines really was something that hit me with what you're talking about. So that's pretty exciting. 0:24:38.1 John Dues: Yeah. And you drew the battle plan analogy and you talked about the leader with one hill and then the next guy says two hills, the next guy says three hills and it's like, did you take any hills? Those are all strategic plans. The management system is the operation that actually allows you to accomplish that thing. 0:24:56.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, exciting. Well, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNEXT to continue your journey. And you can find John's book, Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge and the Science of Improving Schools on amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is "People are entitled to joy in work."
Thanks Pressable for supporting the show! Get your special hosting deal at https://pressable.com/wpminuteBecome a WP Minute Supporter & Slack member at https://thewpminute.com/supportOn this episode of The WP Minute+ podcast, Matt is joined by Jared Rethman, creator of WPSignal, a tool that adds real-time infrastructure to WordPress. It started as an idea for powering Google Docs-style collaborative editing. But Jared shares how this technology can transform WordPress development and what it means for the platform's evolution. He also reflects on the diminishing importance of technical hurdles for future developers and the opportunities for those willing to push boundaries.Key Takeaways:Real-time infrastructure turns WordPress into a live, interactive app instead of a static site.Infrastructure is the real moat, not just the feature set.WordPress keeps evolving because its architecture is flexible and API-driven.AI speeds up building, but it also compresses the traditional learning curve.WordPress's future depends on adaptability more than a fixed identity.Hype around AI can distract from the core technical skills that still matter.Reliable infrastructure will separate real solutions from flashy ideas.Important Links:WPSignalWorldHouseConnect with Jared: LinkedInThe WP Minute+ Podcast: thewpminute.com/subscribe ★ Support this podcast ★
Google quietly shipped four new ad formats inside AI Mode, and almost nobody covered it. We did. Plus: a $13 CPC on ChatGPT ads, and Memrise's growth agent that lives entirely in Slack.CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open03:06 Welcome — Victoria joins, Polina returns04:24 What's on the show today05:30 WATERCOOLER: Sonnet 5's price hike and Fable 5's return07:38 Token-maxing culture and the hidden cost of the price hike10:16 Ford rehires the people it fired — to train the AI12:47 Why the most elementary AI framing gets the most buzz14:27 Benchmarking models on price, speed and quality before you buy15:12 Product Hunt's June: the top tools were integrations, not standalone AI17:30 The core stack nobody has replaced (and why Slack survived)22:14 The vibe-coded app problem: broken back ends, ToS exposure, $20 lessons26:01 Cannes Lions: the agency billing model everyone admits is dead28:02 Creator activations go niche — eyeballs over follower counts28:45 Why Victoria skipped Cannes, and the CEO as the next creator31:04 Celebrity clout vs. an actual event strategy33:40 AI's image rehab in marketing, and the founders paying for their own message36:06 SheaMoisture flipped the creator brief39:21 Why YouTube mid-roll ad reads stopped working40:42 Google's AI Mode ads — the story nobody covered43:03 Four new ad types, and what a business owner is actually signing up for44:43 A $13 CPC on ChatGPT ads46:10 Could ChatGPT just run an affiliate network instead?49:44 MARKDOWN: Lizzie Lawley, Head of Applied AI at Memrise50:20 From pilot, to AI companion platform, to Wombat, to Memrise53:39 The system map: every input feeding the growth machine56:00 Core principles: context first, cheapest capable model, disagreement as a feature56:36 "Months of work in hours" — what it actually saved58:36 The loops: synthesis, experiment shaping, prototyping, build ticket, human gate1:00:41 Live demo: "It's just Slack, baby"1:03:10 How the agent gets fresh context every single night1:06:04 OpenClaw V1, then real engineers rebuilt it1:07:06 The failures: how expensive it got, real quick1:08:32 The model pricing tier system, tier by tier1:11:19 Where the user interviews actually live (it's Google Docs)1:13:59 The bot that spammed banana emojis, and what it taught her1:15:54 Claude Design as a starting point for growth people who can't design1:17:35 Why we skipped Hot Button this week1:18:27 ADAHOLIC: the rules1:20:22 Round 1: Ed Sheeran, a posh restaurant, and way too many forks1:23:33 Round 2: red key, blue key, and a luxury pitch1:26:23 Round 3: "Yo... where's Dukey?"1:29:03 Round 4: the Mother's Day one1:32:26 Round 5: the car ad Arnav paused a second too late1:35:14 Round 6: puffballs, chrome nails and woodworking1:39:07 Round 7: "a better everyday life for the many people"1:40:41 Victoria takes the crown on her first appearance1:41:54 CloseTHIS WEEK'S GUESTLizzie Lawley — Head of Applied AI at Memrise, co-founder of Wombat. She built a platform handling millions of simultaneous AI interactions with cost-efficient model routing, and now runs agent orchestration for Memrise's growth team. Her system pulls from transcripts, app reviews, Zendesk tickets, past experiment synthesis, Athena and BigQuery, and runs a nightly cron job so the agents never work off stale context. Methodology follows Bob Moesta's jobs to be done. The team calls it BYOB — bring your own Bobby.Ads featured in Adaholic this week: Heinz, Kia, Budweiser, Honda, Pinterest, IKEA.
I recorded this one live on the last day of week two of my birthday sabbatical, and it published about ten minutes after I stopped talking. Because I spent the last seven days — on roughly four hours of sleep a night — building a custom client portal that replaced Airtable, Fillout, Notion, Google Docs, and Google Sheets in my business.What started as "let me move my AI assistants out of ChatGPT" turned into a full app where my clients log in, map their client journey, draft their emails, submit support tickets, send me voice notes, and do their weekly check-ins. I had a fully deployed version in 12 hours after telling myself since February that I needed time to plan it.I also knocked South Dakota off my list (47 states down, 3 to go), and I get into the irony of doing the exact thing I tell y'all not to do with your own systems.Demo and debrief coming to the blog soon. Get on the list so you don't miss it: coliejames.com/subscribeWork with me: Systems in Session | The Experience Edit
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Terminal as an Agentic Interface appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Send us Fan MailThanks to Simon & Schuster and Author A.J. Symon for talking about his debut novel, Golden Boy.Support A.J.:Read Golden BoyAdd on GoodreadsFollow A.J. on InstagramBooks Mentioned in This Episode:The Talisman by Stephen KingThe Top of the World by Ethan JoellaMisery by Stephen KingFor links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Terminal as an Agentic Interface appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Terminal as an Agentic Interface appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Terminal as an Agentic Interface appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.Sponsorship inquiries:sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post The Terminal as an Agentic Interface appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Okay I cannot believe I'm saying this, but I just had a $100K week
Discover how ChromeVox on Chromebooks is transforming accessible computing for blind users. With insights from Charmaine Cole of the Accessible Learning Lounge, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece explore whether Chromebooks can truly replace traditional PCs or Macs for everyday tasks. In this episode of Double Tap, Steven and Shaun dive into the world of Chromebooks and Google's built-in screen reader, ChromeVox. They're joined by Charmaine Cole, who has recently expanded her Accessible Learning Lounge courses to include training for ChromeVox, NVDA, and VoiceOver. Together, they discuss how Chromebooks perform for blind users, the surprising accessibility improvements in ChromeVox, and how these affordable devices could meet daily computing needs like email, Google Docs, and cloud work. Charmaine shares her journey of learning ChromeVox, the benefits of free screen reader tools, and the accessibility challenges still present in areas like Braille support and missing place markers. The conversation also touches on inconsistent hotel accessibility, the rising cost of tech, and why Chromebooks might be the budget-friendly solution for many users. Like what you hear? Share your thoughts in the comments, subscribe for more accessible tech discussions, and check out Charmaine Cole's courses for 10% off with code doubletap. Relevant Links Accessible Learning Lounge: https://accessiblelearning.gumroad.com ----Follow on:YouTube: https://www.doubletaponair.com/youtubeX (formerly Twitter): https://www.doubletaponair.com/xInstagram: https://www.doubletaponair.com/instagramTikTok: https://www.doubletaponair.com/tiktokThreads: https://www.doubletaponair.com/threadsFacebook: https://www.doubletaponair.com/facebookLinkedIn: https://www.doubletaponair.com/linkedinSubscribe to the Podcast:Apple: https://www.doubletaponair.com/appleSpotify: https://www.doubletaponair.com/spotifyRSS: https://www.doubletaponair.com/podcastiHeadRadio: https://www.doubletaponair.com/iheartAbout Double TapHosted by the insightful duo, Steven Scott and Shaun Preece, Double Tap is a treasure trove of information for anyone who's blind or partially sighted and has a passion for tech. Steven and Shaun not only demystify tech, but they also regularly feature interviews and welcome guests from the community, fostering an interactive and engaging environment. Tune in every day of the week, and you'll discover how technology can seamlessly integrate into your life, enhancing daily tasks and experiences, even if your sight is limited."Double Tap" is a registered trademark of Double Tap Productions Inc. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
AI in the classroom isn't a tool problem — it's an assignment problem. Dr. Nancy Frey on designing work students can't fake. Dr. Nancy Frey — professor of educational leadership at San Diego State and teacher leader at Health Sciences High and Middle College — joins Vicki Davis for a practical conversation about what actually changes in a classroom when every student has AI. Not which app to use. What to assign, what to collect, and what to teach kids to verify. Nancy's newest book, Teaching Students to Use AI Ethically & Responsibly, is co-authored with Salman Khan, Douglas Fisher, James Marshall, and Meghan Hargrave. In this episode, you'll learn: - How to build verbal assessment into a classroom that has 180 students — including a Google Docs workaround when face-to-face isn't practical - Why you should collect the student's dialogue with the chatbot, not just the finished product - How lateral reading — Sam Wineburg's method — transfers directly to interrogating AI-generated content - What appropriate AI use looks like by grade band: "truth detectives" in K–2, "information investigators" in grades 3–5 - How to redesign a task so it's AI-resistant, plus Carol Jago's reflective questions a chatbot can't answer for a student Show notes, the full transcript, and every resource: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/e957 ★ REVIEW ASK: If this show helps you teach, please rate and review it wherever you're listening. It's the single best way to help another teacher find us — and I read every one.
Send us Fan MailIn this episode, Vanessa explores what happens when companies eliminate entry-level positions while still expecting experienced employees to magically appear. As AI continues taking over more beginner-level work, who will develop the next generation of experts?You'll discover why teachers may be uniquely positioned to solve a workforce problem that employers don't even realize they have yet, and how to position your experience as the solution.In this episode:Why the traditional career ladder is disappearingHow AI may unintentionally widen the experience gapWhy teachers are experts at developing people—not just delivering contentA new way to think about résumé bullet points: Task → Problem SolvedHow to connect your classroom experience to the business problems employers are trying to solveThis week's Teacher Hack: a simple Google Doc that keeps all of your beginning-of-year ideas, shopping lists, and PD notes in one searchable placeVanessa's recommendation: Ride or Die on Amazon PrimeReady to start your own transition? Schedule a complimentary Discovery Session at https://TeachersinTransition.com/calendar.Resources:
Sign up for Practi, a new platform that helps law firms use subscription billing.Here are the top 5 takeaways from this episode:* Perplexity Enterprise is a cost-effective, secure AI hub for lawyers. At $400/year, it provides SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance while giving access to multiple top AI models without needing separate subscriptions to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.* The Comet Browser unlocks agentic workflows that let AI control your browser on your behalf. By clicking “Control Browser,” you can instruct Perplexity to navigate websites, fill out forms, and complete tasks like adding calendar events without you lifting a finger.* Connectors (MCPs) let Perplexity directly read and write to tools like Google Calendar and Drive. Once connected, the AI can bulk-schedule deadlines from case management orders or contracts by computing dates itself using its Wolfram Alpha integration.* AI can handle contract redlining and document drafting in stages, with the lawyer staying in the loop. By combining Paxton for legal analysis with Perplexity's agentic browser to apply suggested edits in Google Docs, attorneys can maintain judgment and oversight while offloading manual work.* Whisprflow enables voice-driven input across all apps for around $288/year. Speaking instead of typing, with the AI intelligently cleaning up dictation errors, dramatically speeds up the process of giving instructions to AI tools throughout the day.__________________________Want your question to be answered on a future show? Fill out this short survey.Have subscription model question? Check out this free resource to ask all of your questions at notebook.practi.ai.Sign up for Paxton, my all-in-one AI legal assistant, helping me with legal research, analysis, drafting, and enhancing existing legal work product.Get Connected with SixFifty, a business and employment legal document automation tool.Sign up for Gavel, an automation platform for law firms.Visit Law Subscribed to subscribe to the weekly newsletter to listen from your web browser.Prefer monthly updates? Sign up for the Law Subscribed Monthly Digest on LinkedIn.Check out Mathew Kerbis' law firm Subscription Attorney LLC.Want to use the subscription model for your law firm? Click here to sign up for a new platform that helps law firms use subscription billing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lawsubscribed.com/subscribe
Go Book Yourself! - Master Writing, Marketing, and Publishing One Byte At A Time.
DescriptionEditing is one of the most misunderstood parts of the publishing process—but it's also one of the most important.In this episode of Write Effing Now, Hilary Jastram breaks down the different types of editing every author should understand before publishing a book. From proofreading and line editing to comprehensive developmental editing, she explains what each service includes, why they're necessary, and how they help transform a rough manuscript into a polished, professional book.Hilary also shares insights into the author-editor relationship, discusses the pros and cons of online versus offline editing tools, and offers practical advice on receiving constructive feedback without losing confidence. Whether you're writing your first book or considering a career in editing, this episode provides an inside look at the editing process and why it's one of the most valuable investments an author can make.The differences between proofreading, line editing, and developmental editing.What each level of editing includes—and when you need it.Why developmental editing focuses on structure, storytelling, and clarity.How professional editors provide feedback that strengthens your manuscript.Why Microsoft Word remains the preferred platform for editing long-form content.The advantages and limitations of Google Docs and other online editing tools.What traditional publishers expect before reviewing a manuscript.How to choose an editor who is experienced, knowledgeable, and invested in your success.Editing is much more than correcting grammar and punctuation—it's about helping writers communicate their ideas as clearly and effectively as possible.Hilary begins by explaining the three primary levels of editing: proofreading, line editing, and developmental editing. She walks listeners through each stage, illustrating how every level builds upon the previous one to improve clarity, organization, storytelling, and the overall reader experience. She emphasizes that developmental editing goes beyond sentence-level corrections by evaluating structure, pacing, character development, and logical flow to ensure a manuscript is engaging from beginning to end.The conversation then shifts to the relationship between authors and editors. Hilary discusses the importance of constructive feedback, encouraging writers to view editing as collaboration rather than criticism. She shares why great editors balance honesty with encouragement, helping authors improve while preserving their unique voice and creative vision.Favorite Quote"You write. I edit... unless we've agreed otherwise."ProofreadingLine EditingDevelopmental EditingGhostwritingManuscript StructureStorytellingBook CoachingTraditional PublishingSelf-PublishingMicrosoft WordGoogle DocsOneDriveConstructive FeedbackEditing WorkflowWriting ClarityAuthor CoachingTrack ChangesBook FormattingEditorial EthicsPublishing PreparationWhether you're writing your first book, refining your manuscript, or learning the craft of editing, Write Effing Now is your trusted resource for practical publishing advice and professional writing guidance.Follow Hilary for weekly insights on writing, editing, publishing, storytelling, and building a successful author career.InstagramLinkedInTikTokFacebookWrite Effing Now is the podcast for writers who want to write smarter, publish confidently, and share stories that make an impact.Hilary Jastram, delivers practical instruction on writing, editing, publishing, storytelling, marketing, audiobooks, artificial intelligence, and the business of becoming a successful author.Whether you're just beginning your writing journey or preparing to publish your next book, you'll find actionable strategies, professional insight, and honest conversations designed to help you cross the finish line.Learn more at BookMarkPublishing
Get the 200+ Page Optimal Living Daily Workbook (PDF) — Free. Want to turn today's episode into an actionable plan? Join the Optimal Living Weekly newsletter and I'll send you our 200-page digital workbook immediately. It's packed with the best takeaways from the show, formatted for easy reading and implementation at home. Get your free PDF workbook here: https://oldpodcast.eo.page/join Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 2125: Antonella Pisani shows how structured feedback, recognition, check-ins, and goal setting can strengthen communication and morale across a fully distributed team. Her practical approach offers leaders a blueprint for creating accountability and clarity while preserving gratitude, humility, and respect. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.eyefulmedia.com/blog/performance-management-remote-workers Quotes to ponder: “Eyeful is a high-performance environment, and we believe in giving feedback early and often.” “Check-ins have made it easier for employees to share progress and help with performance management by supporting committed action.” “There's no substitute for face-to-face interaction, but for the times in between, adding performance management has helped improve our culture and communication.” Episode references: Slack: https://slack.com/ Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/ Adizes Corporate Lifecycle: https://www.adizes.com/lifecycle/ 15Five: https://www.15five.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Send us Fan MailSupport Jessica:Read Lyrics and Love Letters (on KU)Read Roses in Rome (on KU)Follow her on InstagramWebsiteBooks Mentioned:Dolly All The Time by Annabel MonaghanSame Time Next Summer by Annabel MonaghanNora Goes Off Script by Annabel MonaghanOther Mentions:Alexis Curran (xolex)For links to the books discussed in this episode, click the link here to take you to the Google Doc to view the list. For episode feedback, future reading and author recommendations, you can text the podcast by clicking the "Send us a message button" above. For more, follow along on Instagram @whereileftoffpod.
#374 | Most B2B marketers think brand means bigger budgets. This episode shows otherwise. Dave sits down with Ryan Narod, VP of Marketing at Rippling, to talk about what it actually takes to build a brand people recognize in B2B. Ryan walks through the real campaigns behind that shift - from scrappy iPhone videos and webinar promos to high-production customer films and their Super Bowl commercial. Ryan breaks down how he built a content flywheel, why injecting real humans into every piece of content matters, and how they measure brand impact without losing accountability to pipeline. It's a practical look at going from growth-only marketing to a brand with real personality, with examples you can steal no matter your budget.Timestamps(00:00) - - Today's guest: Ryan Narod, VP of Marketing at Rippling (02:44) - - What Rippling actually does and why HR, finance, and IT live under one roof (07:00) - - Why brand building starts with content and story, not billboards and TV ads (09:00) - - Building a content flywheel out of interviews, written pieces, and video (13:10) - - Getting the brand story straight across personas and the C-suite (18:30) - - Marketing plays in action: from scrappy iPhone videos to big-budget customer films (27:09) - - How to build a brand on a startup budget without Rippling's resources (29:33) - - Comparing production value head to head: a big-budget campaign vs a lo-fi one (32:29) - - How Rippling measures brand marketing with mixed media modeling and incrementally testing (39:49) - - Inside the Super Bowl ad and the reverse timeline it took to pull off Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, helping modern marketing teams build fully custom sites—no developer needed—that perform in AI search. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Markup AI - A content quality platform that scans your content against brand voice, preferred terms, messaging standards, and AI-search readiness before it goes live, right inside Google Docs. Learn more at markup.ai.Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Learn how to deploy agents on your marketing team at Agents in the Mix. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive. Walker Sands - An integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency that helps marketing leaders turn strategy into measurable business impact through their Outcome-based Marketing model. Learn more at walkersands.com/exitfive.Knak - A no-code, campaign creation platform that lets you go from idea to on-brand email and landing pages in minutes, using AI where it actually matters. Learn more at knak.com/exitfive, or check out the MCP server by clicking this link.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more
Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERETired of the billable hour, overlearning, and feeling like your tech stack still owns you? In this episode, Tyson Mutrux sits down with subscription‑based attorney and Practi co‑founder Mathew Kerbis to break down exactly how AI tools like Perplexity, WhisperFlow, Paxton, Gemini, and agentic workflows are reshaping how modern law firms are built and run. You'll hear how Mathew went from insurance defense litigator to “AI‑native” transactional lawyer, why he believes the billable hour is bad for both clients and lawyers, and how subscription models and recurring revenue can unlock more freedom, better margins, and a saner life.They dig into real‑world examples: using AI dictation and desktop agents to draft and format complex contracts, running redlines across multiple tools, replacing parts of traditional case management, and orchestrating systems so that actual legal work keeps happening while Mathew is teaching a CLE or recording a podcast. Tyson and Mathew also wrestle with big‑picture trends, MSOs and private equity in law, BigLaw's addiction to the billable hour, and how bar regulators and ethics rules might respond to the AI wave. If you're a law firm owner wondering how to actually use AI to save time, make more money, and serve clients better (instead of just “playing” with tools), this one is packed with practical insights.What You'll LearnWhy the billable hour breaks incentives and how subscription/flat fees create better results for lawyers and clientsHow Mathew's AI stack (Perplexity, WhisperFlow, Paxton, Gemini, Google Workspace) powers his daily legal workWhat agentic workflows look like in practice for reviewing, redlining, and improving complex contractsHow WhisperFlow lets him talk instead of type across apps and replace traditional dictationWhy he runs his practice on Google Docs, NotebookLM, and AI search instead of case management softwareHow standardized templates plus AI speed up NDAs, MSAs, and other routine documentsThe core business model behind Practi and how it helps firms launch subscription legal servicesWhy solos and small firms may be better positioned than BigLaw in an AI‑driven legal marketHighlights00:00 – Challenging the status quo and taking aim at the billable hour06:10 – Lawyers as “professional students” and the trap of endless overlearning09:01 – Why many women and lawyers of color leave BigLaw to start their own firms12:10 – Perplexity, WhisperFlow, and Paxton as Mathew's core AI tools15:01 – Using WhisperFlow for OS‑level dictation, prompts, and text expansion27:43 – Orchestrating AI tools to clean up, analyze, and redline contracts at scale31:00 – Running a subscription practice on Google Workspace and NotebookLM45:15 – MSOs, private equity, and why Practi is being built as an alternative path49:08 – How subscriptions and recurring revenue unlock growth beyond hourly billing56:59 – Letting AI run recurring tasks so work continues while you're offlineAccess Agentic Browser Redlines Demo HereConnect with Mathew KebrisLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kerbisverse/
You don't usually run out of podcast ideas.You run out of places to start.Most of us plan episodes by asking, "What should I talk about this week?" But what if that's the wrong question?Because your ideal client isn't searching for a podcast because they want another episode about pricing, visibility or marketing. They're searching because something has happened in their world, and they're trying to make sense of it.In this episode, I'm sharing the shift that's completely changed how I plan my podcast—and why starting with your listener's moment, rather than your content topic, can make your episodes feel more relevant, more engaging, and far easier to plan.In this episode, I talk about:Why planning around topics often leads to repetitive content.The difference between a topic and the moment that makes someone search for it.A simple shift that will help you create episodes your ideal clients are ready to hear.A practical exercise to uncover the conversations your podcast should be having next.If you've ever found yourself staring at a blank Google Doc, scrolling through old posts or asking ChatGPT what to record next, this episode will help you think about podcast planning in a completely different way.—Not sure what moments your podcast should be speaking to? The Decision Gap Diagnostic will help you uncover them. Learn more and apply for a diagnostic here: https://evergreenpodcaststrategy.co.uk/podcast-audit-Resources mentioned in this episodeSimple SEO and Marketing Podcast-Thank you for listening to this episode of Rethinking Podcasting. If this episode made you think differently about your podcast, your content or the role your podcast plays in your business, I'd love to hear what shifted for you.Send an email to info@evergreenpodcaststrategy.co.uk with DECISION in the subject line. I read and respond to every email personally.
One of my favorite shows is Scrubs, and there's one episode that's stuck with me for nearly 2 decades, and I think about it nearly every day. In it, the team can't diagnose a patient showing every sign of Lyme disease, because they can't find the tick bite. Every test comes back negative. Then Dr. Cox shaves the patient's head, finds the bite, and mentions Occam's Razor: the simplest solution is often the correct one.That idea has run through my whole business; I'm a natural overthinker. So today I talk about why we overcomplicate things, and why tool hunting feels productive when it's really just busy work in disguise.If you feel stuck or don't have a system in place yet, get the free Solopreneur System Starter Kit at https://streamlined.fm/kit. (00:00) - A Lesson from Scrubs on Simplicity (01:18) - What is Occam's Razor? (03:20) - Simplifying Client Onboarding with a Google Doc (04:14) - The Trap of Tool Hunting: Tools vs. Systems (05:22) - Designing Simpler Workflows (Fewest Links Philosophy) (07:37) - Practical Takeaways & The Starter Kit ————Streamlined Solopreneur helps solopreneurs automate their business so they can take time off worry-free. Each week, Joe Casabona shares practical systems, tools, and strategies to help you reclaim your time and run your business without sacrificing your the rest of your life, or your health. If you're looking to get started, you can download the Solopreneur Systems Starter Kit. It's 4 systems every solopreneur should have, the simplest way to get started, along with the exact tools, automations, and AI prompts you need. No guessing here. Get it for free at https://streamlined.fm/kitConnect with Joe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcasabona/
#372 | Dave sits down with Jay Schwedelson, founder of subjectline.com and Guru Media Hub, one of the sharpest tactical minds in email, webinars, and live content. Jay explains why so many B2B marketers get live content wrong from the very first step, and how small shifts in packaging can completely change who shows up and who doesn't. They dig into the psychology behind when people actually open and engage with email, why shorter almost always wins, and the habits that quietly keep you out of the spam folder. Jay also shares the specific email and send-day habits he swears by, a few of his go-to tricks for getting people to actually reply, and how he thinks about testing your way to what works for your own audience.Timestamps (00:00) - – Why "webinar" might be costing you registrations (01:12) - – Meet Jay Schwedelson and the virtual event he built to 30,000 people (06:26) - – A simple trick to get more people to actually show up live (08:44) - – Why giving everything away on-demand might be a mistake (10:23) - – The case for live, human connection in an AI-saturated world (13:00) - – The send times most B2B marketers are sleeping on (15:18) - – How to package and name your content so people actually want it (22:02) - – The newsletter habit that makes people stick around (26:09) - – Small email tweaks that quietly boost open rates and deliverability Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, helping modern marketing teams build fully custom sites—no developer needed—that perform in AI search. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Markup AI - A content quality platform that scans your content against brand voice, preferred terms, messaging standards, and AI-search readiness before it goes live, right inside Google Docs. Learn more at markup.ai.Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Learn how to deploy agents on your marketing team at Agents in the Mix. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive. Walker Sands - An integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency that helps marketing leaders turn strategy into measurable business impact through their Outcome-based Marketing model. Learn more at walkersands.com/exitfive.Knak - A no-code, campaign creation platform that lets you go from idea to on-brand email and landing pages in minutes, using AI where it actually matters. Learn more at knak.com/exitfive, or check out the MCP server by clicking this link.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more
What if the best leaders are not the ones with the biggest ideas? In this episode, John Dues argues that the leaders who make the greatest impact are the ones who create the fastest learning cycles. John and Andrew Stotz explore why small tests often outperform large initiatives, how PDSA builds real organizational knowledge, and why improvement is a learning process, not an implementation process. If your organization is launching new initiatives, this conversation offers a different question to ask: What's the smallest test we can run to learn whether this idea actually works? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is the Fastest Way to Learn What Works. I love that title, John. Take it away. 0:00:30.0 John Dues: Hey Andrew, it's good to be back. Yeah, I was thinking about talking about leadership today, and I was thinking about who are the leaders that we tend to admire? I think the typical person would say these leaders with big, bold ideas. In my world, a superintendent launches this district-wide initiative, or maybe it's a principal has this sweeping school improvement plan that they've put in place. In your world, maybe some CEO unveils this new strategic direction. We think about these leaders, if they're described, they're visionary, decisive, courageous. But I think, as I've done this study, I've become increasingly convinced that we're paying attention to the wrong leaders in a lot of cases... 0:01:31.6 Andrew Stotz: So the right leaders are the ones that have their pen over their right ear. 0:01:36.9 John Dues: Always. That's the mark. That is the mark... 0:01:39.6 Andrew Stotz: I think I see that on you. 0:01:43.9 John Dues: I'm definitely not describing me. I'm just an observer, observer of the world. But I think these leaders make these big promises, but I'm increasingly convinced that the leaders who we should be paying more attention to are the ones that create these fast learning cycles. So in a typical place, a company or something, a school, they're faced with a problem. These leaders don't immediately ask, "How do we scale this? How do we scale this idea?" I think they're turning to a different question, and that's, "What's the smallest test we can run to learn whether this idea actually works?" It's a very different, very different question. And I think it's tough because this is a question that's not gonna make headlines, but I think it's one of the more important questions that a leader can ask... 0:02:49.9 Andrew Stotz: Isn't a great leader supposed to be doing the big things? You're talking about the smallest. 0:02:52.8 John Dues: The big things, right, the large initiatives, that's what gets attention. But I think the larger the initiative, the problem is the longer it takes to learn whether that thing, that idea, is helping or hurting or maybe having no effect at all. And I think what happens is, and what I've seen in schools repeatedly, I'm sure it's probably the same in the private sector, is oftentimes by the time the evidence actually arrives, if it ever does, so much time, money, and goodwill has been spent that it almost doesn't matter whether the idea itself was successful. All this cost was sunk into training people, all these new expectations have been established, and then we almost become more invested in proving the initiative was the right decision. And then once that happens, it's almost impossible to go about learning if it's actually having the effect that we intended to. And I think a lot of this has to do with many improvement efforts that I see. They start with a solution. They're sort of starting with not a clear definition of the problem, but this idea that they think is gonna have an impact, whatever that is. It could be a new curriculum in a school, an attendance campaign because attendance has been a big thing lately, some type of new evaluation process that they're gonna use with teachers or workers, whatever. But the point is that the assumption is that the solution's known at the beginning and that success really just depends on implementation. But I think the problem I see is that no one stops and thinks, "What if this solution actually doesn't work in our system?" We copy these ideas, we've seen this thing, whatever it is, work somewhere else, and we almost don't even consider whether the context matters. And it's maybe the most important thing to consider. 0:05:11.7 Andrew Stotz: I think about Deming, Dr. Deming, saying, "How would they know?" 0:05:16.0 John Dues: How would they know? Yeah. And I think, again, so much gets sunk into the initiative, all that training, all the money, all the resources, whatever. At a certain point, the organization is so invested that they almost sort of solidify into defending the idea rather than trying to learn whether it's actually working. That tipping point, I think, can happen pretty quickly, especially if it's a large, organization-wide initiative. 0:05:50.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I can imagine a new person coming... A superstar coming in from another place where they implemented something that really worked, and now they're going, "Let's do it in our..." and that may or may not have the same impact in that new location that that person's responsible for. 0:06:09.6 John Dues: Yeah. And I think almost immediately the conversation then shifts from learning whether the idea is working to confirming what everyone hopes will happen. I think that might be the most dangerous moment in an organization. And so the purpose that I'm talking about, testing on a small scale, is not actually to verify the idea. The purpose is to learn whether the idea survives contact with reality. A good scientist, for example, their first step when they have a hypothesis is try to falsify it. And I feel like if it was ever taught to education or business leaders, that idea has been completely lost to history. And maybe even in some respects in the science world too, that falsification principle is sort of... That's the first step when you're testing an idea. That is not what I've experienced as an educator. I don't know if you've had that same experience in the business world. 0:07:21.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep, yep. I'm just thinking about that quote about no plan survives first contact with the enemy. I know von Clausewitz said it. There was another guy that said it, I think, before him, but it's just so, so true. 0:07:41.2 John Dues: Yeah. And I think this other way of thinking that I'm talking about is so counter to how most organizations operate. Once that solution is selected, whatever it is, the focus completely shifts to implementation and adoption. But the thing is, improvement, at its most fundamental level, it's a learning process. It's not an implementation process. And so... So often we're asking, how do we roll this thing out? I think a good leader, what they're gonna ask, is how can we learn more about this idea as quickly as possible? Right? This other way of thinking, this small testing, it reduces risk, generates feedback, reveals obstacles that you're blind to initially. But most importantly, it creates knowledge, like real working knowledge in your system, in the context where this idea is eventually... When it does roll out system-wide, where it's gonna have to work. And the thing is, is if it works at that small level, you can expand it. If it fails, you can cut your losses when not much has been lost in the way of time, resources, that type of thing. But either way, the organization is gonna learn from that small test... 0:09:09.2 Andrew Stotz: I found it, by the way. 0:09:10.6 John Dues: Oh, go ahead. 0:09:11.9 Andrew Stotz: Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, a Prussian field marshal and military strategist. The closest translation was, "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." Or summarized as, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." So it wasn't Mike Tyson who said it first when he said, "Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face." 0:09:45.3 John Dues: Yeah, right, same idea. I think the Prussians had quite a bit of revolutionary ideas coming out of their military prowess. I think the organizational structure maybe came even from Prussian military hierarchies and stuff like that. 0:09:54.0 Andrew Stotz: Definitely. 0:10:02.8 John Dues: Yeah, but I think, going back to my original sort of statement about which leaders get branded as outstanding or great or leaders to pay attention to, is those large initiatives attract attention, right? And we tend to celebrate those leaders with bold visions or these big plans, sweeping announcements. They're decisive and courageous because when you make those pronouncements, it appears as if they know exactly where the organization could go next or should go next. I think the problem here is that confidence can so easily be mistaken for knowledge. And often, especially in the world that I live in, not just schools but urban schools, the average superintendent is only in their seat for three or so years. Some a little more, some, a lot, a lot less. And so by the time you find out whether the thing worked or didn't, the person's gone. They're on to the next thing, and no one remembers what exactly they promised to do when they got here three years ago... 0:11:18.7 Andrew Stotz: He was really good. "I liked him. He was nice. I thought he had some good ideas." 0:11:21.5 John Dues: Right, right. 0:11:24.4 Andrew Stotz: "Who's our new boss now?" 0:11:27.4 John Dues: Yeah. And so they get this recognition for these big announcements, and it's before any evidence exists that this thing works, right? And so meanwhile, there's these other leaders who I think deserve more attention, are frequently doing something that's much less visible. And what they're doing is building a system that learns. 0:11:40.2 Andrew Stotz: Mm. 0:11:53.1 John Dues: And so instead of asking people to just trust their ideas, they're really thinking about ways to design tests of those ideas. So they're not really trying to prove themselves right like this first camp of leaders is. What they're trying to do is discover where they might be wrong. And that's just not as flashy. It just doesn't garner the same type of attention as that first type of leader. But I think if we really want to improve organizations, schools in my case, or businesses in your case, the thing is, if you're really gonna improve, it depends on actual knowledge, not just enthusiasm, not just charisma. When I think about a promising idea, that's not the same thing as a good idea. And a good idea, even a good idea, is not the same thing as an idea that works in your system, right? And so what we're trying to do is learn, learn, test, not confirm, learn what actually happens when we put something to the test in our system. 0:13:04.7 Andrew Stotz: It makes me think about what I mentioned to you before we turned on the recording, which is that I've been starting to do PDSAs with my accounting and inventory team. Every month I go and sit down with them after they've closed the books, and I've designed a simple format for them. And the way I've explained it to them is that imagine that you want to lose weight, and you think, okay, there's three things I read on the internet: get good quality sleep, eat less carbohydrates, and walk every day. If we do all three of those things, we're probably gonna lose weight. And as an individual, that may be good enough. But if we do them separately, we'll actually acquire knowledge as to which one has the biggest impact. Now, it gets even more difficult because if you do them consecutively, it's harder to make an impact as you start to lose weight. But the point is, is that... And the reason why it's important is because we need to think about how we as an organization are acquiring knowledge. And so I've got a golden three-ring binder, and each of the PDSAs we put in there, and then we're starting to collect them. Once a month, our impact that we're expecting from that PDSA may take six months to occur, but we're revisiting and discussing and deciding, do we continue with this or do we improve it? And we just have two things that we're focusing on, the accounts receivable and also reducing the amount of inventory that we have in the business. And those two things, the beauty of doing PDSA with accounting is that it's a repetitive cycle. Marketing's not a repetitive cycle. Sales, not necessarily a repetitive production, but accounting is the same thing over and over again. So what a great opportunity to improve. 0:15:10.8 John Dues: Yeah, and that's really interesting because a lot of times financial or accounting functions in businesses sort of get left out of the improvement equation. And that's a big mistake, I think, because especially if those people are sort of left to their own devices and the sole focus is on the bottom line, right? And so you could cut cost in an area and actually cause the business, obviously, great harm if you don't have the full picture in mind. So I think that's a great... 0:15:44.0 Andrew Stotz: And that's a whole another area of misusing finance. But the point that I'm thinking about as I'm going through this, because I was thinking about where is the best place to really start strong implementation of PDSA, and my conclusion is accounting. Because accounting is not even like finance saying, "Oh, we need to hit this target" or something. They're just cranking through a process over and over again. And I told my accounting team, I said, because it's a pretty big team of people in both accounting and inventory, I said, "We're gonna work on this for 12 months until we've got the format, the structure, everybody understands it, we have it all translated into Thai from English so it's very clear." I said, "And then you guys are gonna then teach the rest of the organization how do we do PDSA." 0:16:34.0 John Dues: The accountants are, huh? 0:16:36.1 Andrew Stotz: Which is pretty exciting. 0:16:38.4 John Dues: What's... How are they receiving it? 0:16:40.8 Andrew Stotz: It's confusing. It's hard. They're thinking about things and writing stuff down. The first few ones, they realize they didn't really make it that clear, so it's a struggle. And I can say for myself, being an expert in this area, that bringing it to them in a simple way, not easy. And it's also easy to abandon. And I suspect that many employees would think, "Okay, this is the next initiative," versus something that I'm just gonna, every single month, review, work with them on, and keep improving. And then we want to build that competency to understand what works. Because if we can test things one at a time, they also can see how you really got to narrow it down. 0:17:30.8 John Dues: Yeah, that's a great application of continual improvement where you're learning by doing. There's no better way. It's gonna feel clumsy at the start, the first few cycles that you go through. But I think once people see it's not a test, it's not an evaluation especially, it truly is a learning process that can have a big impact on whatever the problems in your area are. That's what I've found. After people go through this a few times, and you make the predictions, and people think they're gonna get judged on their predictions, or the predictions are gonna be wrong, especially at the start, I've continually had to tell people, "No, you're not failing. Yes, your prediction may have been off quite a bit, but that's in the first cycle." We do this a few times, and you're gonna get your sort of understanding of reality and that gap is gonna get closer and closer as you run those cycles. 0:18:28.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and I've been teaching more and more on corporate strategy, and I've identified what I call 11 Ways to Win, how great companies win. And so I've kind of tried to narrow it down to what I think are the core ways that companies win. And one of them is know-how. And Toyota is a good example. 0:18:40.2 John Dues: Yeah. 0:18:52.0 Andrew Stotz: And part of the question for know-how is, does this company have a method of acquiring knowledge? Because know-how can't just be, "We got a couple really smart guys," because when they leave, that competitive advantage is gone. 0:19:00.4 John Dues: Yeah. 0:19:08.8 Andrew Stotz: And that's where the process of how do we acquire knowledge, this idea of narrowing it down as you're talking about, yeah, exciting. 0:19:19.8 John Dues: Yeah, that is exciting. And the PDSA is a great, I think, technique to use to introduce people to continual improvement methods. Because I think after you've gone through it a few times, it becomes pretty intuitive pretty quickly. And it basically combines all the elements that Deming taught into a single sort of learning process. You get the psychology in there, the systems thinking is in there, understanding variation, obviously the theory of knowledge, the PDSA is core to that. So you get all four components right there with the PDSA. 0:19:55.1 Andrew Stotz: Well, shall we wrap this up? What do you want to leave people with? 0:20:13.3 John Dues: Yeah, I think one thing I was gonna say right before the wrap-up was one of the areas that we're trying to do this actually in is actually strategic planning, which is a broad area of an organization that's sort of comprehensive. But we've, I think, tried to incorporate that same sort of PDSA thinking into our strategic planning process. Because schools, like any organization, they're dynamic and the conditions are unpredictable, especially over an extended period of time. And so what we're thinking through is how do you have sort of this combination of a long-term constancy of purpose, because you have to have that, what's our long-term purpose, our long-term aim? But then how do we also continually adapt? And we've tried to build both of those things into our strategic plan. So I think that's sort of a unique approach, a unique way of thinking, even down to the fact that the strategic plan document itself, what we used to do is the culmination would be this color spiral-bound document that looked really, really nice when the consultant would hand it off to you at the end of the process. Now we're doing this all internally, and the strategic plan is in a Google Doc, and it is literally continually updated as we learn through the various tests that we're running over the three-year period. So it's more like a management system than a static document. So even a thing like a strategic plan, which of course there are components that we have locked in for the three-year period, these are some long-term priorities, but there are some annual and quarterly things that we're updating all the time based on what's actually happening on the ground and what the data is telling us. So you kind of have to sort of do a hybrid of both those things in certain areas of your organization, I think. And I think the most important thing is that we're creating a system that's capable of generating knowledge that we're learning over time, all while focused on a sort of clear long-term aim. I think that's kind of the key thing. So... 0:22:15.2 Andrew Stotz: Excellent. I don't think I can add anything to that. So on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNEXT to continue your journey. You can find John's book, Win-Win: W. Edwards Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge, and the Science of Improving Schools, on Amazon.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is that "people are entitled to joy in work."
For years, I was convinced I just hadn't found the right tool for our styling evaluation reports. So I kept searching, rebuilding, and starting over. Every new solution fixed one problem while creating another, and every switch demanded more time, money, and energy than I ever expected. Looking back, I wasn't really searching for better software. I was trying to create a workflow that actually fit the way staging businesses operate. What I didn't realize was how much opportunity I was losing while trying to force tools to do a job they were never designed to do. Today, I'm sharing what that journey taught me. Not just about technology, but about systems, opportunity cost, and why the right solution isn't always the newest one. What You'll Learn The hidden opportunity cost of forcing software to do a job it wasn't designed to do What worked and what didn't with paper checklists, Google Docs, Dragon Dictation, GoCanvas, and Jotform The features I was searching for but couldn't find in any existing platform Why efficiency matters just as much as presentation when creating client deliverables RESOURCES: Join the Harlowe Inner Circle Waitlist Here: https://waitlist.harloweco.com Apply for Private Coaching: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/privatecoachingapp Enroll in Staging Business School Accelerate Track: www.rethinkhomeinteriors.com/accelerate Follow the Staging Business School on Instagram: www.instagram.com/stagingbusinessschool Follow Lori on Instagram: www.instagram.com/rethinkhome If you want to learn how to streamline your operations so you can grow with less stress and burnout in your staging business, enrollment is open for Staging Business School Accelerate Track. I'd love to see you in the classroom! ENJOY THE SHOW? Leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts so that more Staging CEOs find it. Also, include links to your socials so that more Staging CEOs can find you. Follow over on Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or Audible.
#371 | Most B2B companies gate everything and hide their pricing. Funnel Leasing does neither, and grew from $3 million to $50 million in revenue anyway. Dave sits down with Alex Howe, SVP of Marketing and Growth at Funnel Leasing, to talk about how he built that growth engine with no marketing background, no paid ads, and no sales team pressure. They get into why his whole philosophy is built around being different rather than better, why ungating everything (including pricing) builds more trust than gating ever could, and how to prove marketing is working without hard metrics like a two-week sales cycle. Plus: how a background in political PR shaped his approach to getting attention, the event marketing stunts that actually got prospects talking, and why messaging should keep evolving without ever losing its core story.Timestamps(00:00) - - Introduction (05:32) - - Be Different, Not Just Better (09:13) - - Why You Should Ungate Everything, Including Pricing (13:34) - - How to Prove Marketing Is Working Without Hard Metrics (18:38) - - A Great Product Makes Marketing Easier (24:54) - - Build a Point of View by Staying Close to Your Customers (27:10) - - Creative Event Marketing Beats a Boring Booth (31:00) - - What a PR Background Teaches You About Getting Attention (35:59) - - Hire Specialists and Give Them Ownership (39:00) - - Why Differentiation Matters More Than Ever in the AI Era Join 50,0000 people who get Dave's Newsletter here: https://www.exitfive.com/newsletterLearn more about Exit Five's private marketing community: https://www.exitfive.com/***Brought to you by:Webflow - A website platform built for the agentic web, helping modern marketing teams build fully custom sites—no developer needed—that perform in AI search. Learn more at webflow.com/for/exitfive.Markup AI - A content quality platform that scans your content against brand voice, preferred terms, messaging standards, and AI-search readiness before it goes live, right inside Google Docs. Learn more at markup.ai.Optimizely - A no-code AI platform where autonomous agents execute marketing work across webpages, email, SEO, and campaigns. Learn how to deploy agents on your marketing team at Agents in the Mix. Learn more at optimizely.com/exitfive. Walker Sands - An integrated B2B marketing and growth services agency that helps marketing leaders turn strategy into measurable business impact through their Outcome-based Marketing model. Learn more at walkersands.com/exitfive.Knak - A no-code, campaign creation platform that lets you go from idea to on-brand email and landing pages in minutes, using AI where it actually matters. Learn more at knak.com/exitfive, or check out the MCP server by clicking this link.***Thanks to my friends at hatch.fm for producing this episode and handling all of the Exit Five podcast production.They give you unlimited podcast editing and strategy for your B2B podcast.Get unlimited podcast editing and on-demand strategy for one low monthly cost. Just upload your episode, and they take care of the rest.Visit hatch.fm to learn more
Today I'm giving you the two emails that have made my company millions of dollars — word for word — so you can send them to your list this week. One reconnects a cold list and starts real conversations. The other one drives booked calls using a three-sentence email and a Google Doc that most people would never think to write. In this episode, I walk through both of them line by line. But before you send anything, there's a rule about email deliverability that almost nobody follows — and if you get it wrong, it'll wreck your inbox placement for months. I learned that the hard way. We have over a million contacts in our database. We email maybe 30-50K of them. I explain exactly why. I also get into the real reason most coaches aren't emailing their list at all — and it has nothing to do with not knowing what to say. "The thing you keep avoiding — that avoidance itself is the tell that you're close to something that could change your life. We don't resist things that don't matter."
In this episode of The Truth In This Art, the guest is Miles Johnson!About Miles Johnson: Miles Johnson is a self-described "unclassically untrained oil painter" and mechanical engineer based in the DMV area. In over 4 years—starting with over a year on iPad before transitioning to oils 3 years ago—he has created numerous pieces. His late grandmother was a painter herself who created approximately 300 pieces and inspired his creative path. Miles first painted her portrait last summer for his solo show.Growing up, Miles would run cross-country to the Smithsonian, where Thomas Cole's four-part series "Voyage of Life" gave him a revelation: "I never thought that paintings were like almost manga panels." He also draws inspiration from Little Black Goat, incorporating anime-style faces into his work. Miles applies his engineering background with painting by creating bullet-point lists and maintaining over 200 pages of documentation in Google Docs. His research process studies figures like Fannie Lou Hamer—someone who was "born into sharecropping and ended up dying with a foundation that gave a million acres of land across Mississippi."Later we discussed Miles working on Common People Ain't Common, a 2025 undertaking. He made 100 pieces dedicated to celebrating the small moments in life and of the people he has observed. His goal was to make this art affordable for the everyday people who supported him on his art journey. His aim is that these pieces will serve as a great investment for first-time collectors. His Instagram handle @MJonthewall pays homage to Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall" album. Connect with Miles on Instagram and TikTok at @MJonthewall or visit MJonthewall.com.Photo courtesy of subject. The Truth In This Art is supported by William G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, the Maryland State Arts Council's Creativity Grant and Mayor's Individual Artist Award - Creative Baltimore Fund (Baltimore). Host: Rob LeeMusic: Original music by Daniel Alexis Music with additional music from Chipzard and TeTresSeis.Production:Produced by Rob Lee & Daniel AlexisEdited by Daniel AlexisShow Notes courtesy of Rob Lee and TransistorPhotos:Rob Lee photos by Vicente Martin for The Truth In This Art and Contrarian Aquarian Media.Guest photos courtesy of the guest, unless otherwise noted.Support the podcastThe Truth In This Art Podcast Fractured Atlas (Fundraising): https://www.fracturedatlas.orgThe Truth In This Art Podcast Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thetruthinthisart.bsky.socialThe Truth In This Art Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truthinthisart/?hl=enThe Truth In This Art Podcast Website: https://www.thetruthinthisart.com/The Truth In This Art Podcast Shop: Merch from Redbubble ★ Support this podcast ★
You sit down to work on your business, not in it, but on it. Two hours later you have a 14-page Google Doc, a color-coded spreadsheet, and a project management system you've never opened before. And you haven't done a single thing that moves the needle. That's not preparation. That's procrastination with lipstick on it. Over-planning is fear in disguise and it's the number one thing keeping smart entrepreneurs stuck. In this solo episode, George breaks down why concrete actions always beat elaborate strategies, the real cost of waiting until you feel ready, and the simple 24-hour rule that breaks the planning loop for good. This one pairs directly with last week's 3M capacity episode. Together, they're a daily execution playbook. What You'll Learn In This Episode: Why over-planning is procrastination dressed up and how to spot it in yourself The Jeff Bezos 70% rule: why waiting for certainty kills momentum The three things small concrete actions give you that strategies never can Why clarity comes after action, not before it The 24-hour rule: one question that breaks any planning loop How to separate ideas worth pursuing from ones that only sound good on paper Why the market, not your Google Doc, is the only thing that gives you real data Key Takeaways: ✔️A perfect plan you never execute is just a very expensive journal entry. ✔️19% of businesses fail due to weak execution, not bad ideas, bad products, or bad markets. ✔️Most decisions should be made with about 70% of the information you wish you had. Waiting for 100% means the moment passes and the fear grows. ✔️Small, concrete actions create three things strategies never do: feedback, momentum, and clarity. ✔️Clarity is not a prerequisite for action. It is almost always a byproduct of it. You cannot think your way into clarity, you act your way into it. ✔️The 24-hour rule: anytime you find yourself over-planning, ask one question, what's the one thing I can do in the next 24 hours that gives me a piece of data to know if this is worth pursuing? ✔️Over-planning beyond a reasonable window is never about being thorough. There's usually something underneath it, fear of rejection, fear of failure, or fear of finding out. ✔️The market is the only one that decides if you win. Build the feedback loop with them, not around them. ✔️Stack this with the 3M model from last episode: must move, must maintain, must release. Together they're a daily execution system. Timestamps & Highlights: [00:00] — The 14-page Google Doc, the color-coded spreadsheet, and zero needle movement [01:18] — Procrastination with lipstick: why over-planning feels productive but isn't [03:30] — Less-prepared entrepreneurs stumbling into progress and why that works [05:00] — The real cost of over-planning: delay, distraction, and someone else ships first [07:00] — Jeff Bezos's 70% rule and why waiting for 100% costs you the moment [09:30] — Small concrete actions vs. elaborate strategies: the three things only action gives you [11:00] — Feedback: why no plan can give you what the market can [13:00] — Momentum: why it's built by moving, not built up to [15:00] — Clarity: why it comes after action, not before it [17:00] — The 24-hour rule explained: one question, one test, one next step [19:30] — What over-planning is really hiding: fear dressed as due diligence [21:00] — The recipe analogy: you can't eat dinner by staring at the kitchen [22:30] — George's challenge: identify your one thing and your one action in the next 24 hours Your Challenge This Week: You already know the thing you've been planning without executing. Write down the one action you can take in the next 24 hours. Not the launch. Not the full strategy. Just the first move. Then tell George what it is, DM him on Instagram or email through the site. Follow George: @itsgeorgebryant Work with George: The Alliance — Community for entrepreneurs committed to execution, not just planning. 1:1 Coaching — Limited spots. Live Retreats — In-person experiences for entrepreneurs ready to stop planning and start shipping. Follow for dates.
The Tropical MBA Podcast - Entrepreneurship, Travel, and Lifestyle
Brian O'Connor spent three years building a 40,000-person Twitter following, launched product after product into that audience, and made almost nothing. The turning point came when he stopped looking for clever ideas and started running a boring business where product market fit already exists. He wrote down everyone he knew, sent texts, and sold $20K of recruiting services off a single Google Doc in two weeks. Today he runs TalentHQ, a recruiting agency placing Latin American project managers into US businesses — built nomadically with a co-founder, now operating with a team of two plus AI. In this conversation: why reach and revenue have almost nothing to do with each other, how he turned a podcast into his primary acquisition channel, and what it actually looks like to build a service business from scratch in 2026. Guest: Brian O'Connor, Founder of Talent HQ Sponsor: wayfront.com/tmba Thanks to this week's sponsor Wayfront — the AI-ready operating system for productized agencies. One client portal. One team dashboard. All your data, AI-accessible. TMBA listeners get an extra free month on top of the trial at wayfront.com/tmba. Links: Business Resources Upcoming DC Events
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