Recent articles
April 9, 2026
Attention and effort
The door-to-door salesperson had no leverage. If he was at your door, he wasn’t at anyone else’s door. Every minute you spent with him was a minute he had to spend with you. While it was a tough gi...
seths.blog
April 8, 2026
The ecard virus
Three of my friends got hacked this week. You get an ecard and click. It asks you to log in to your email. Boom, done. It hacks your email account, steals all of your contacts and then sends itself...
seths.blog
April 8, 2026
The right answer
Engineers, scientists, and most of all, businesses are looking for the right answer. It’s such a common quest that we take it for granted, but it’s new, and it continues to cause stress. The right ...
seths.blog
April 7, 2026
All the letters
Every writer has all of them. 26 in most Western languages. But no writer knows all the words. That’s the gap where creativity, effort and possibility lie–between the universal letters and the unli...
seths.blog
April 6, 2026
Kinder than necessary
If it’s just the right amount of necessary kindness, it’s not really kindness. It’s pleasantness. If the people in our circle begin to experience behavior that’s kinder than necessary, the expectat...
seths.blog
April 5, 2026
Plumbed
If you want to drink more herbal tea, get a hot water dispenser that keeps it handy and on tap. On the other hand, if you want to watch less television, disconnect the TV after every viewing sessio...
seths.blog
April 4, 2026
Where do bad choices come from?
We all make them from time to time. You might not know what you need to know. This is where experience is created. You might have an identity that pushes you to make those choices. If you’re determ...
seths.blog
April 3, 2026
“There is no alternative”
TINA! This is what Margaret Thatcher said about her draconian free market policies. It’s an easy thing to tell ourselves about compliance to any dominant system. But it’s incomplete. The complete s...
seths.blog
April 2, 2026
Who sets your agenda?
It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where ti...
seths.blog
April 1, 2026
A persistent sense of being correctly located in time
Word salad is actually nutritious when consumed in small amounts. Placebos are real, they’re effective and they often help us find solace or perhaps to heal. If they do no harm, there’s no problem....
seths.blog
March 31, 2026
Rehearsing possibility
Most of us would like to live with wonder, grace and optimism. Perhaps it pays to practice this in advance. When considering any given moment, is there a glimmer of good worth focusing on, even mak...
seths.blog
March 30, 2026
Redundancy and resilience
If it’s important, don’t ask the team to try harder. Instead, create the conditions for ordinary effort to produce redundant outputs that reduce crises. If quality is a problem, look at the system,...
seths.blog
March 29, 2026
Long odds and unseen differences
“The odds of winning the lottery are the same whether you buy a ticket or not.” This seems nonsensical at first. Obviously, there are lottery winners. Therefore, the odds aren’t the same. Except we...
seths.blog
March 28, 2026
Systems and the default to yes
Joseph Brandlin is a scofflaw. After months of fighting to get the city council to put a stop sign on the corner of the dangerous intersection near his home, he simply did it himself. A first-rate,...
seths.blog
March 27, 2026
What’s in the status bottle?
It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much. Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.
seths.blog
March 26, 2026
The end of the content shortage
You can be fashionable without reading Vogue. You can be informed without watching the nightly news. You can be smart about science without going to MIT. It’s possible to be a great chef without bu...
seths.blog
March 25, 2026
“Too complicated for people to understand”
That’s a great reason to dumb things down. It’s also a trap that leads us to stasis and mediocrity. Let’s break it down: People: Which people? All people? The majority of voters? Day traders or ins...
seths.blog
March 24, 2026
Numbers and the human/computer interface
If you tell me your ID number, your phone number or the wiring instructions for your bank account, not only will I forget them, I’ll need you to repeat it a few times so I write it down without mak...
seths.blog
March 23, 2026
Follow-through
How does the ball know? In tennis, golf or just about all ball sports, the follow-through determines the flight of the ball. Great players always have a complete and confident follow-through. But t...
seths.blog
March 22, 2026
“Cheaper not to care”
This is the slogan of so many industrial behemoths and existing bureaucracies. It’s in quotation marks for a reason: it’s not true. Not in the long run, not even in the medium run. One way to highl...
seths.blog
March 21, 2026
The hats
You wear a hat, you’re not a hat. State nouns are verbs that we talk about like they are nouns. Hurry, panic, frenzy, rage, funk, stupor, daze, fog, rut, bind, pickle, fix, slump, tailspin, tizzy. ...
seths.blog
March 20, 2026
Can you make it worse?
Is there something you can do right now that would impede progress, degrade quality or simply mess up the current situation? Is there a way you could shift perceptions to make people more distraugh...
seths.blog
March 19, 2026
Freedom of focus
Tonight, when you’re off the clock, what will you listen to, watch or read? I imagine that most of us would agree that this is a free choice. To watch a silly video on YouTube, read a book on Greek...
seths.blog
March 18, 2026
The hollow orange
It’s tempting but useless. The skin is unblemished and the perfect color. It’s well displayed, promoted widely and on sale. But there’s nothing inside. It’s not worth eating and certainly not worth...
seths.blog
March 17, 2026
Green flags
We were taught to look out for red flags. Little signs that something is wrong, that we should be careful or even turn around. Don’t let that distract you from being on the lookout for green flags....
seths.blog
March 16, 2026
A kitchen metaphor
Colleagues you care about are coming over for dinner. What should you make? Some people don’t care if it’s delicious, as long as it’s interesting. Some don’t need it to be interesting, but it needs...
seths.blog
March 15, 2026
Sitting in zimbo
You’re at the Zoom meeting, on time, and no one is there. Are you the ghost or is everyone else? We needed a word for this existential minor dread, and now we have one. Coordination is hard. PS the...
seths.blog
March 14, 2026
Visible measures
When an organization is known for speed and quality, it’s likely that if times get tough, quality will suffer before speed does. That’s because customers notice speed right away, but it takes a whi...
seths.blog
March 13, 2026
“It’s faster to just do it myself”
Here’s a simple rubric for outsourcing: If you’re never going to need to do this again, and it’s easier to do it than to instruct someone else to do it, by all means, do it yourself. If doing it yo...
seths.blog
March 12, 2026
Over the top
Unreasonable commitment is unreasonable. It happens before there’s a guarantee it will work. It’s out of proportion to what others think is standard. Unreasonable commitment is dedication, persiste...
seths.blog