Are you an otrovert? Why this personality type could be your greatest gift. So if introverts look inwards, and extroverts outwards, where the hell do otroverts look? Neither of the above. “Their fundamental orientation is defined by the fact that it is rarely the same direction that anyone else is facing.” (more)

Taylor Pearson on Why I Gave Up on AI Meeting Notes. (more)

Sven Brodmerkel: You're Not Too Sensitive. The Feeling Rules Were Written Without You. Part 4 of a series on why (smart) organizations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional Picture a moment you’ve probably had more than once. A meeting. A presentation. A conversation with a senior colleague about a decision you have significant reservations about. And in that moment, you had the wrong feeling. (more)

Sven Brodmerkel: You Solved It. The Institution Didn’t Notice. Part 5 of a series on why (smart) organisations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional You solved the problem before anyone else knew there was one... Not through the correct channel (more)

Sven Brodmerkel: Why Sensible Suggestions Get Strange Reactions. Part 6 of a series on why (smart) organisations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional (more)

Sven Brodmerkel: The Story Forms Before the Meeting Starts. Part 3 on why (smart) organizations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional Picture the aftermath of something that went wrong....a project that didn’t land the way it was supposed to, or a meeting that went sideways, or a decision that produced consequences nobody had planned for (more)

Sven Brodmerkel: How Organizations Teach Us Not to Think. Part 2 of a series on why (smart) organizations do strange things to smart people. (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional Picture a problem you’ve flagged before. Not once. Several times. With evidence, with context, with a clearly articulated explanation of why this keeps happening and what would need to change to stop it happening again. (more)

Venkatesh Rao term: something fundamentally mediocre (lowish value/quality), but with some extra-yet-pointless feature that makes it seem better. e.g. paying for signalling. Or even an entire Lifestyle Design outcome. See (2017-08-18) Rao Premium Mediocre Life Of Maya Millennial. (more)

Sven Brodmerkel: Why Most Values Exercises Don't Actually Help You Find Your Values. A few years ago I sat down and tried to find my values with one of those lists. Forty-odd words in two columns. Integrity. Growth. Connection. Courage. Etc. Circle five. (more)

Venkatesh Rao: A Quick (Battle) Field Guide to the New Culture Wars. the United States is in the middle of the worst culture wars I’ve seen in my life, either in my 20 years in the US, or in the previous 20 years in India (which in the 90s saw equally ferocious, but less digitally mediated, culture wars). And for once, you can’t blame Donald Trump. He’s more consequence than cause. (more)

Emotional labor is the act of managing one's own emotions and the emotions of others to meet job expectations. It requires the capacity to manage and produce a feeling to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job.[1][2] More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, co-workers, clients, and managers. This includes analysis and decision-making in terms of the expression of emotion, whether actually felt or not, as well as its opposite: the suppression of emotions that are felt but not expressed. This is done so as to produce a certain feeling in the customer or client that will allow the company or organization to succeed.[1] Roles that have been identified as requiring emotional labor include those involved in education, public administration, law, childcare, health care, social work, hospitality, media, advocacy, aviation and espionage.[3][4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_labor (more)

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT, typically pronounced as the word "act") is a form of cognitive behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) that uses mindfulness to recognize one's psychological responses and be open to one's experiences and accept them, and commitment to one's core values to create a meaningful life. ACT was developed in the 1980s by Steven C. Hayes, taking a contextualistic and holistic[a] approach to human behaviour, arguing that human suffering is created by human language (cognition), that is, the way we create and are entangled in our subjective world, and avoid certain unpleasant feelings.[1] Theoretically, ACT is rooted in B. F. Skinner's philosophy of radical behaviorism and in Hayes' post-Skinnerian functional contextualism.[2][3][4] As a therapeutic practice, ACT takes a holistic approach[3] borrowing aspects from "the human potential movement, Eastern traditions, behavior therapy, mystical traditions, and the like". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_and_commitment_therapy

Making the invisible rules of professional life visible. I explore communication, creativity, culture & neurodivergence at work — drawing on 20+ years in academia and advertising, and being late-identified at 52. Cats and sarcasm included. https://substack.com/@svenbrodmerkel

Sven Brodmerkel: Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional. Picture a meeting you’ve been in — probably more than once. The agenda is ambitious, the stakes are real, and you’ve done your homework... And somehow, again, the meeting moves around you. The person who delivered three confident-sounding sentences about “alignment” and “moving the needle” gets the nod. Your point — the careful one, the one with the nuance and the caveats and the actual evidence — gets a polite “that’s interesting” before the conversation cheerfully rolls on without it. (mediocrity) (more)

The neurodiversity paradigm is a framework for understanding human brain function that considers the diversity within sensory processing, motor abilities, social comfort, cognition, and focus as neurobiological differences. This diversity falls on a spectrum of neurocognitive differences.[1] The neurodiversity movement views autism and other neurodivergences as a natural part of human neurological diversity—not diseases or disorders, just "difference[s]".[2] Neurodivergences include autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, developmental prosopagnosia, developmental speech disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysnomia, intellectual disability, obsessive–compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, synesthesia, and Tourette syndrome.[3][4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity

idea from Mats Alvesson - see (2026-05-12) Brodmerkel Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity And The Invisible Professional

George Nurijanian has a "Find the Strategic Crux" skill based on Rumelt's book. Most strategy work in product orgs stalls in the same place. Everyone agrees something needs to change. Nobody can name the core reason the gap exists. So the team writes pillars, bins roadmap items underneath them, and calls it strategy. The Find the Strategic Crux skill exists for that moment. It is a guided five-step problem-solving sequence inside PM OS. You start with a messy or unclear strategy situation. You end with a named crux and a tested recommendation. Your company knowledge stays with you. The skill supplies the step-by-step structure and the questions that keep you from skipping the hard parts..... Find the Strategic Crux is one skill inside AI PM OS, an AI operating system for product managers. It sits alongside company context, two hundred other skills, and eight guided workflows. Run a crux analysis on a strategy problem here. Then feed the output into opportunity mapping, decision work, or stakeholder prep without retyping the diagnosis.

AI/Product Management guru. https://x.com/nurijanian https://www.prodmgmt.world/

Agile Product Development writer. https://medium.com/@johnpcutler (more)

Print-to-disk format used by Adobe Acrobat. Sometimes used for EBook publishing. Just horrible, pls use epub. (more)