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Don’t Let Writers and Influencers Control Your Narrative
Jessica Grose’s recent New York Times review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation she describes a memoir that wants to be purely personal yet repeatedly drifts into the language of 12-step recovery and spiritual self-help. Gilbert insists she isn’t offering a program, but her story leans heavily…
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The Visionary Who Forced Madison Avenue to Take Black Buying Power Seriously
Picture America in 1970. Corporate boardrooms were almost entirely white and male. Major advertisers on Madison Avenue—the nerve center of U.S. marketing—saw the “general market” as code for white consumers. Black households, though representing billions of dollars in purchasing power, were either ignored or caricatured. Into that landscape stepped Earl G. Graves Sr. Brooklyn-born to…
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How Quickly Can You Dismantle Democracy Within an Organization?
Timothy Ryback’s The Atlantic piece, How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days, is a case study in speed and strategy. In less than two months, Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic—complete with constitution, free press, and elections—was hollowed out and replaced with a dictatorship. This isn’t about comparing leaders to Hitler. It’s about recognizing how systems…
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Realistic Timelines Enable Unrealistic Complexity
The word realistic is used often within business discussions. “Is that realistic?” “Are we being realistic?” “This sounds really good on paper but perhaps we need to be MORE realistic.” Realistic suggests the reasonableness of the timeline and therefore guarantees success. Realistic timelines are often a hiding place for organizational drift, where inefficiency and mediocrity…
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Scarcity isn’t about Economics
I’ve always had some kind of morning ritual, from as far back as I can remember. My current ritual is reading a chapter of Proverbs, reading a Daily Stoic entry, and reading an thinking on a card from a deck by Esther and Jerry Hicks about money. The card I’m pondering today says that the…
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The Consulting Crash We Were Warned About
In 2005, Martin Kihn cracked open a world that, until then, largely operated behind frosted-glass conference rooms and perfectly bound slide decks.His memoir, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, was part confession, part dark comedy, and part industry autopsy. Kihn wrote from the inside. As a…
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Building from Brilliance
Some communities have developed recognizable economic signatures. Jewish merchants, shaped by centuries of restrictions on land ownership, mastered literacy and finance, creating networks of trade and professional services. Indian diaspora families, carrying memories of colonial merchant roles and extended kin systems, now own large shares of global hotel and corner-shop markets. Ethnic Chinese networks, long…
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When your Gift Becomes a Cage
Scott Clary, in his Saturday Strategy Sessions newsletter, asked a powerful question: What if the thing you’re best at is the thing that’s killing you? He used the example of Josh Waitzkin — chess prodigy, national champion, International Master, and the inspiration for Searching for Bobby Fischer. By all external measures, Josh was destined for…
Clarity BEFORE Execution. Structure BEFORE Speed
If you could better understand one thing about your business right now….
Most costly decisions begin with
an inaccurate understanding of the situation.
I help leaders understand what is actually happening before major decisions are made or
resources are invested in solving the wrong problem.
Giselle Hudson | Pre-Decision Diagnostic Advisor | Sensemaking for high-stakes business decisions 