Mid Career

You Don't Have to be a Manager to be a Leader Because Leadership != Management

Leadership is a way of relating to others. Management is an organizational construct. Many leaders are not managers, and (unfortunately) some managers are not leaders.

Late Career

Motivation — The Secrets Behind How to Create Drive in Yourself and Others

A walk through of the major components of motivation (autonomy, mastery, purpose), and the tools you can use to build an energizing workplace.

Personal Dave Posts

An Announcement, a 2.5 Year Newsletter Update, and My Highest Ever ROI Action at Amazon

My move to Substack, a bit about how the newsletter has grown, and a great story about how I helped drive down errors across dozens of systems, without my team lifting a finger.

Career Growth

On the cusp of senior management - will she make it?

Career growth is a tricky thing. We have ups and downs, two steps forward and one step back. How will she fare?

Late Career

A Detailed Account of a Failed Principal Promotion

Not everything we do will be successful. We learn a ton from failure. Unfortunately for managers, our failures sometimes impact our teams as well.

Organizations

Finding an Explanation vs. Permanent Resolution of Issues

If we're not careful, we default into defensiveness when issues arise. And everyone involved will be tempted to avoid blame, and keep things simple. Don't fall for that trap.

Mid Career

Don't Let Your Soft Skills Block Your Career - Overcoming Mental Blocks

Everyone recognizes that hard skills can be a blocker for their career, and that means everyone focuses on strengthening their hard skills. Soft skills are similar. They can hold you back, and they can be improved. And I'm going to talk about how.

Career Growth

Leveraging the Three Phases of Career Growth for Outsized Rewards

Many employees tend to let their careers drift from opportunity to opportunity. That can lead to excellence, or not. Purposefully driving your career through the three phases of career growth is a way to have agency over your career.

Interviewing

Crush Your Interviews with the Power of Storytelling

For interviews, it's not what you've done, it's how you explain what you've done. It's that fundamental difference which makes storytelling a critical interview skill.

Organizations

A Few Days of OP1 — Perspectives From Middle Management

OP1 is a massive bureaucratic monstrosity, where billions of investment and over a million employees are allocated to projects across Amazon. And this is a bit of what it feels like to be buried in the organizational structure.

Early Career

22 Invaluable Life and Career Lessons

This fun article was a list of topics I wanted to write about, but didn't want to turn into entire articles on their own. And to encourage you to read, I suggest that number 19 is particularly great!

Organizations

Write That S**t Down. The Importance of Taking Notes.

In organizations, you will continually re-litigate decisions and agreements if you don't carefully document them.