The Productive Pessimist

  Everyone wants to be able to not just charge  the luxury price, but actually reliably bank  the luxury price, customer after customer, week in, week out, with no complaints or refunds, but without offering the luxury experience. 'Luxury' doesn't have to be unique, exclusive, or out-of-this-world 'special'; what makes something a luxury  experience, and has people choosing it without thinking about it, even when a very similar experience is available from a nearby business charging 50% or more less than the luxury item is that luxury = zero friction. The experience of minimal friction is why people will pay half a week's groceries cost to have a single meal delivered to them; for those people, the friction of identifying the meal you want to eat, pulling out/buying the ingredients, prepping and cooking them, and cleaning up afterwards is more friction than they can handle at that moment; in contrast, putting in an order and waiting for it to arrive is very low ...

  British business spends a lot of time, energy, focus, and yes, money  "developing leaders".  Progression opportunities are secured by "demonstrating leadership skills." Constant calls are made that business, education, government, society at large, "needs more/stronger/better leaders." We need more women in leadership. No, actually, we need a different kind of masculinity  in leadership. Ah, actually, maybe we went too far, and it's time for "traditional masculinity" to be brought back to leadership. What about minority leaders? Maybe we should look at how neurodivergent folks and marginalised communities express leadership differently. The conversations, books, podcasts, and seminars around leadership are endless - and often contradictory.  We spend so many resources trying to give one definitive, always-true answer to the question "What makes a good leader?" The answer is simple: "What makes a good leader is competent, capa...

  TW: Discussion of systemic transphobia, Discussion of racism "How can a trans woman be CEO of an endometriosis charity?!"  Well, the head coach of the England Women's Rugby team is a male-identified, cisgender (assigned male at birth) man. The CEO of the RNIB isn't blind. CEOs of anti-poverty charities are certainly well-remunerated enough to not actually be in poverty. Most have never  experienced hardship, having danced from Executive post to Executive post, before eventually landing as a CEO. The upside of being a pessimist is you spend so long looking at problems that you gain an intuitive awareness that, very often, the thing being presented as "the problem" isn't, in fact, the real  issue that needs a solution. In endometriosis , the (very real, for those who suffer from the condition) issues of medical fact would be fairly straightforward to address. The problem  is medical disinterest, and, very particularly, the attitude of the medical profess...