Lessons from Witkins and three women who shaped my thinking August has been a month of celebration for women, and I have been reflecting on the three incredibly smart women I have been privileged to work under across my career. Their way of thinking rubbed off on me, and when I problem-solve business issues today, I sometimes catch myself approaching a problem the way one of them would have. Working under them is where I watched strategic thinking up close, and it left me wit

A four-step guide to designing a career you won't regret The expectation that work should be fulfilling is a surprisingly new obsession. Nowadays, young professionals don’t only expect to obtain a salary through the work they do, but to a greater or lesser extent, there is an expectation to find meaning and satisfaction in the work we do. Today, we ask two things of our careers at once: money and meaning. That can be a big ask sometimes, but it helps to explain why so many ca

The 5-step operational framework for controlled chaos. I spend a lot of time iterating work processes, constantly looking for the fastest path to the best result. Recently, I revisited a framework that puts this exact pursuit into perspective. It is based on an operational playbook utilised by former Tesla President Jon McNeill and codified by Elon Musk, known simply as ‘The Algorithm’. It is a framework designed for radical simplification and acceleration. To apply it, you m

Why you need to learn to write, even if you are not a writer This essay is a small milestone, the tenth I have put out on this newsletter, so I am writing about the habit underneath all of them: writing itself. If you don’t know what skill to learn, learn how to write. Writing is one of the best teachers for learning how to think, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer or have never liked writing. I have been writing since I was young, first in my Dad's old diaries, lat

Why replacing workplace adjectives with simple arithmetic is the only way to fix your actual bottlenecks. Every department has a throughput. Most have simply never been asked for the number. Ask a team how the month went, and you will usually get an adjective. Busy. Tough. Promising. Adjectives are comfortable because they cannot be wrong, and they cannot be wrong because they cannot be checked. A number, on the other hand, is a commitment. It can be compared to last month, t

How small businesses and subject matter experts build authority, without forcing a marketing medium they hate. I have kept journals for more than twenty years. Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me. Through university, through every move and career change, I kept writing. So when I finally decided to build something public, I did not agonise over whether to start a podcast or film videos. The answer had been sitting in a box of old notebooks the whole time: my natural mode of cl

It has one segment that needs it and many that don’t. Finding it is the job. I work at an IT consulting company that also sells its own SaaS. One of those products is a point-of-sale (POS) system for SMEs and corporates. For the longest time, our marketing took a blanket approach: ads that spoke to “your business” without naming which business. When we finally narrowed our focus, we chose the spaza market. It felt logical. It was a massive market with thousands of shops and s

Why making work look easy is making us worse at our jobs. AI “slop” has officially taken over the digital landscape. It fills our feeds with low-quality, low-effort text, synthetic images and generic video, mass-produced by generative models. On the surface, this looks like a problem of aesthetics, too much noise, not enough signal. Beneath it sits a quieter, more dangerous crisis: the erosion of critical thinking at work. Cartoon: Tom Fishburne AI itself isn’t the problem. O

Measuring the gap between acceptable and exceptional. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been thinking about a specific yardstick: what does “good work” actually look like in the marketplace? I recently finished a project for a client, and after submitting the final deliverable, I got a brief thank-you email. That was it. Silence. It got me thinking. It’s one thing to finish a project and hand it over, but was it actually good? Was it the absolute best work I could have done, or j

A stronger link doesn't matter if it's not the one that's breaking. Business is, at its core, a physics problem. The physicist Eli Goldratt mapped this out perfectly with his Theory of Constraints. The premise is brilliantly simple: view an organisation not as a collection of separate departments, but as a single, interconnected chain. A chain can only bear as much weight as its weakest link. Therefore, any improvement made away from the actual bottleneck is a total waste of

Stop being a commodity in a crowded market We all have something that feels like play to us but work to others. Yet, instead of leaning into that, we go to school to learn how to be exactly like everyone else. People graduate expecting the market to eagerly hire them for their newfound knowledge, only to face a harsh reality. They enter a talent pool flooded with thousands of others holding the same qualification, and they quickly realise that nobody actually cares about thei

You don’t need to know how to solve every problem. You just need to know who has the solution. When we first start working, we operate like learner drivers. We rely on an instructor in the passenger seat telling us exactly what to do, when to brake, and what hitting the goal looks like. There are generally two ways people try to get ahead from there: they either spend their whole careers trying to follow instructions to the T, or they figure out how to connect with the people

I grew up a deeply curious person. I loved to read, and I have always documented my life in journals and pictures. Initially, I lacked a proper framework, and because of that, I lost most of my writing and pictures from my teenage years all the way through my early twenties. That loss forced a realisation: succeeding at documentation and sustaining it long-term requires purpose, structure, and a clear, reliable system. My academic background is in Anthropology. From there, I