What I Want to Bring to Work Every Day
Five leadership principles I want to bring to work every day, especially when the pressure is high: curiosity, ownership, courage, optimism and love for the work.
Latest
Rowing Backwards
What transformation taught me about strategy. For most of my career, I believed transformation followed a fairly predictable sequence. You started with a vision, translated that vision into a strategy, built a roadmap and then executed the plan. It was neat. Logical. Comfortable. If someone had asked me a few
I Thought We Were Just Implementing Asana.
What started as a simple Asana implementation became a complete rethink of how marketing works. A story about software, AI, transformation and the surprising lessons that emerged along the way.
AI Doesn't Replace Experts. It Amplifies Them.
AI doesn't replace experts. It amplifies them. Learn why curiosity, judgment and human-in-the-loop collaboration matter more than ever, and how leaders can help teams experiment, learn and turn AI into a force multiplier.
Transparency Is the Actual Transformation
A simple Post-it note sparked a bigger lesson: transparency is the foundation of transformation. Learn five practical ways to create honest conversations, surface challenges early and build a culture that improves continuously.
Built for People
Most processes fail for a simple reason: they weren't designed for the people expected to use them. Learn how empathy, simplicity and right-sized governance create processes that teams actually follow.
Transformation Is a Road Trip, Not a Destination
Transformation isn't a destination—it's a road trip. Learn a simple five-step framework for leading continuous improvement, adapting to change and building an organization that can evolve as technology, markets and customer expectations shift.
Keep Your Creative Team Inspired
Creative teams cannot produce inspired work while running on depleted energy. A reflection on creative replenishment, beautiful questions and building small daily practices that reconnect people with curiosity, imagination and creative flow.
Your Creative Team Is Not Slow. Your Approval Structure Is Broken.
Creative teams are often blamed for being slow, but the real bottleneck is usually the approval structure around them. This post explores approval anxiety, endless feedback loops and why unclear decision-making quietly damages creative quality, team morale and delivery speed.
You Don’t Need More Data, You Need a Decision
When analysis stops helping, it is time to decide. A real look at how bottlenecks show up in creative workflows and why action is what creates better data
Holly’s Top 10 Project Management Tips
Ten practical project management tips from the trenches. Built for real creative teams, not textbooks. Learn how to manage shifting priorities, messy inputs, tight timelines and stakeholders without losing your sanity or your team.
From Activity to Decisions: Rethinking Creative Ops Metrics
Creative Ops teams are busy. The real question is whether the work is driving the right outcomes. This post explores how better measurement leads to better decisions.
AI & Tools
AI Shortcuts for Creative Ops That Saves Time & Gets Results
Most Creative Ops teams aren’t short on ideas, they’re short on time. Here are practical ways to use AI to reduce friction, speed up work and improve outcomes.
Creative Ops
How Creative Ops Pushes Back Without Breaking Trust
Creative Ops pushback isn’t about saying no. It’s about making constraints visible and tradeoffs clear. When grounded in facts and applied consistently, it builds trust, protects teams from unrealistic demands and reinforces credible delivery.
Creative Ops
Preventing Stakeholder Gotchas with Proper Intake
Creative Ops isn’t just collecting requirements at this stage. We’re figuring out who actually has influence and how that influence will show up when it counts. When that work gets skipped, it doesn’t disappear. It usually reappears at final review, louder and with very strong opinions.
Creative Ops
Creative Ops: Stop Accepting This
These aren’t annoyances. They’re patterns that slow teams down, lower quality and burn people out. If we want creative teams to do better work, we have to stop accepting the conditions that make good work harder than it should be.
Transformation
What Actually Works in a Re-Org: Progress Over Perfection
Re-orgs create pressure to prove value quickly. That’s usually when teams start looking at their workflows and asking, do we tweak this or do we rebuild it entirely? The honest answer is, sometimes you do need an overhaul.
Transformation
How to Survive a Re-Org
Re-orgs test your instincts, your patience and your ability to lead without all the answers. New leadership shows up, teams shift, you lose people you trust or you find yourself in a completely different org overnight. Even if you’re fine on paper, people around you might not be.
Transformation5
Reset a Workflow Without Overcomplicating
After a re-org, there’s always pressure to “fix the workflow.” Sometimes that’s necessary. But more often, teams jump straight to solutions without really understanding what’s broken.
Transformation
How to Actually Make Changes Stick in a Re-Org
One thing I’m seeing right now is a lot of focus on where things moved. Who reports where. What team sits under what org. What changed on paper. But the reality is, most of us are still working with the same people, often in very similar ways, at least to start.
Creative Ops
Workflows: What’s Actually Broken (and How to Audit It)
Most workflows aren’t broken end to end. They’re usually breaking in a few predictable places. The real work isn’t identifying what those places are. It’s knowing how to audit them and what to do when you find the issue.
Creative Ops
Intake Starts with Strategy, Not a Form
Great intake starts before the form. Strategy, insight and evidence are what protect creative work from late chaos. The most important part of intake is not the form. It is the strategic thinking that happens before a request is submitted. When work comes into Creative Ops, the real job is
Creative Ops
Intake Prioritization: How It Actually Works
Prioritization works best when it is collaborative. Demand will always exist. The difference is whether we make it visible, measurable and actionable. And intake is where that visibility is created through shared accountability between the Requesting Team and Creative Ops.
Teams
Trend #13: Team Rituals Reinforce Culture and Creativity
Creative teams finally recognize that culture isn’t something you “get around to.” It’s designed. The most effective studios build intentional rituals that strengthen collaboration, protect creative energy and keep teams connected, especially in hybrid or remote environments.