Juan Orbea

Socrates isn’t giving many graduation addresses these days. Yet this wisdom is at the heart of a new generation of aptitude assessments intended to help individuals, including middle- and high-school students, understand themselves better.

Where “snacking” is the broad category of doing easy and low-impact work, there’s a particularly seductive subset of snacking that I call “preening.” Preening is doing low-impact, high-visibility work.

Many folks would assume that companies, rational optimizers that they are, avoid spending much time on low-impact high-effort projects. Unfortunately that isn’t consistently the case. It’s surprisingly common for a new senior leader to join a company and immediately drive a strategy shift that fundamentally misunderstands the challenges at hand. Th... See more

Crossroad #3 – College NetworkYou should choose your college based on its network of students and the geographic network they inhabit more than course of study or sports teams. If you choose the right people to be around in college, they will open up ideas, relationships, jobs, aspirations, attitudes and resources that fit with you and a virtuous c... See more