Category: Leadership & Culture

Lessons on team management, mentorship, internal controls, and building productive teams.

  • The Tyranny of Studying Winners

    Much of modern management thinking is built on a narrow and deceptively comforting habit: studying winners and working backward. From a small set of outliers, we extract traits, frameworks, and moral lessons, then present them as generalizable insight. This habit has consequences. When winners become the primary dataset, success is treated as evidence of virtue,…

  • Is Founder Dependence a Deal Killer?

    Founder Dependence Isn’t Always a Problem — Until You Want Options I recently read a LinkedIn post highlighting a red flag in acquisitions: if the founder can’t step away and the business can’t run without them, you’re not buying a business — you’re buying a job. Yes! Great insight. Dead on. For cash-flow–driven acquisitions, standalone…

  • CFO vs Controller Discussions

    How’s It Like the Game – Can you spot the differences? But Founders don’t have time for games. They want solutions – not titles. The real question isn’t whether you need a CFO or a Controller. The question is: do you have a foundation that lets you make confident decisions and grow value? 1: The…

  • The Pacer

    Working with founders is like being the pacer in a race: you run at what feel like sprint speeds to you, yet seem almost leisurely to them. There is always a goal—an Ahab-like pursuit—and you get to run an important leg of their journey, making it your own by helping translate ambition into measurable progress.…

  • Passion, Accounting, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

    The Problem with “Follow Your Passion” Stories I’ve been reading and watching a lot of TED talks lately—successful people telling the story of how they followed their passion and ended up fulfilled, happy, and successful. There’s a recurring theme: “Follow your passion. Look at me—I did, and it worked.” These talks highlight the outcome. What…