vertical positioning benefits from common venues that spread the word about your firm,

vertical positioning, which is defined as an industry:

most researchers would accept a 5% margin of

And if you are solving those problems keeping them up at night, they’ll have no problem paying you comfortably for that expertise. They’ll even know that it took you 20 years to get to the point where you can diagnose and prescribe for their setting within 20 minutes. They’ll get that and still gladly pay as if it took you 20 hours to come up with

I do not, however, want to be a guru. Guru is what people who aren’t experts call themselves. It’s self-referential and it’s meaningless.

I want to know, or to be close enough to knowing. I want to be an expert.

Having embarrassed myself with no claim to expertise and having delivered confident, kind answers are two extremes that I will no longer choose between. I’d rather say no than pretend.

— I think you’ll be well served by trying to achieve these three goals all the time: profit, effectiveness, and culture. Any one of them could be trumped or put on pause for a greater good, but the big picture is comprised of consistently meeting those three goals. And if you can enjoy your work building your business, you have a pretty ideal job

These four things, in the order I’m suggesting here, are not quite as they seem. An ethicist would call this exercise a false choice or a false dichotomy. What we should really be aiming for is balance. Many business are very effective and make a lot of money with an admirable culture in which people love what they do — so why should we have to