Carl Pradelli spent 18 months building a co-branded skincare launch with the Home Shopping Network, then watched it unravel when the contract manufacturer he had chosen on a referral produced a formula that was nothing like the one he approved. He ex...
Tiffany Auvil spent more than twenty years inside the U.S. healthcare system, starting as a volunteer firefighter and eventually serving as System Director of Outpatient Clinics for a three-hospital health system. Then her husband Dave was diagnosed...
ESPN founder Bill Rasmussen burned through his own money, his credit cards, and his family's money to get a 24-hour sports network to the brink of launch — then signed the Getty Oil deal that funded ESPN and cost him control of it. Mike Soltys, hired...
Fighter pilots fly missions where a moment of ego or self-protection can get people killed — so their debriefs are built to strip blame out entirely. Former Royal Australian Air Force pilot Christian “Boo” Boucousis explains the method that lets seni...
Another example of asking people to work around the design instead of improving it I recently spent time in a hospital while a loved one was hospitalized. In situations like that, my attention is obviously focused on the patient and the clinical deci...
Andrea Carpenter and Elizabeth Ledoux, co-founders of The Transition Strategists, were mid-negotiation on a business succession deal when Andrea found out she was pregnant — and her real mistake wasn't the timing, it was treating the deal as a fixed...
At 25, Larry Kasanoff risked his dream job to greenlight a movie nobody at his studio wanted to make — and Platoon went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. He shares how that bet became a philosophy he carried through Terminator 2, Mortal K...
To save herself the hassle of mixing a pen name with her real name, publishing strategist Wiebke Tasch opened two Amazon accounts — a move that quietly violated Amazon's rules. One morning she woke up to an email saying both accounts were gone, her b...
To save a few thousand dollars in legal fees, six-time Silicon Valley CEO Mike Grossman acted as his own lawyer on a routine contract — and nearly torpedoed the acquisition that would later save his company. He shares how a single ambiguous sentence...
Kate Lowry — CEO coach, venture capitalist, and author of Unbreakable: How to Thrive Under Fear-Based Leaders — joins to share why reporting misconduct early in her career backfired, and what it taught her about the gap between good intentions and ef...