The Difference Between a Coach and a “Great Coach” There seems to be no shortage of “life” and “business” coaches these days, and some of the more entrepreneurial ones appear to be making a fortune selling courses on how to become a coach. That is not what I mean when I talk about coaching. What
Epiphany 39: Find a Great Coach Read More »
When Everyone Agrees, Nothing Can Move One of the most dangerous moments in an organization is not when something breaks. It is when a room full of intelligent, capable people quietly agrees that nothing can move forward. I encountered this again in a recent meeting. The account team was pushing to deliver more value for
Epiphany 38: Help People See Around the Wall Read More »
When I wrote Epiphany 23 — Contribution Value Beats Contract Value I was trying to call attention to something simple and yet often overlooked: Delivering exactly what was paid for is not the same as delivering what matters to the client. That distinction has held up well over time. But there’s a deeper truth beneath
Epiphany 37: Why Contribution Value Is Invisible Until It’s Lost Read More »
In this third article of our series, following “How Attention Shifts Before Replacement” and “Agency Denial,” we examine the underlying question clients rarely voice directly: What is the true quality of this partnership? The answer lies in the phrase they put at the end of every evaluation rubric: “overall partnership quality.” It is not a soft metric — it’s the
Overall Partnership Quality Is Not a Soft Metric Read More »
In the first installment of this series, “How Attention Shifts Before Replacement,” I showed that clients don’t begin exploring alternatives because something broke. They begin exploring because something else became possible, typically another narrative, another perspective, another way of connecting the future to their strategy. What tends to follow, internally and externally, is a moment
The Moment Clients Become Open to Something Else Most agency relationships don’t unravel because something breaks. They begin to shift because something new catches the client’s attention. Performance is stable. Communication is functional. Trust hasn’t collapsed. Reports are delivered. The relationship, by all visible measures, still works. And yet something subtle changes. The client listens
How Attention Shifts Before Replacement Read More »
When I wrote Epiphany 8, Showing the Love, the lesson was simple but powerful: At the time, that felt like the breakthrough. But recently, in a conversation with one of my advisory clients, I found myself asking a harder question — one that exposed a more uncomfortable layer of partnership. Do you think the client
Epiphany 36: For Them, Not Just With Them Read More »
Yesterday, I published a new Signal & Friction article titled “The End of Local by Default” It was meant to surface a structural shift I keep seeing; one that helps explain why local market brands are quietly disappearing from AI-generated answers, even when users never asked for anything global. I tried to explain that Google
The End of “Local by Default” (And Why There’s More to the Story) Read More »
After publishing several articles and posts on how AI is quietly reshaping cross-market content visibility, I noticed something that initially surprised me. There was no reaction. No debate.No disagreement.No “this is wrong.”No “we’re seeing this too.” Just silence. Not even from those who reached out to understand why their hreflang was not working. At first,
Why the Market Hasn’t Reacted (Yet) to AI’s Cross-Market Content Problem Read More »
Doing the final tally of what I hoped to achieve and did achieve relative to my 2025 Aspirations. I think overall I did pretty good in ticking them off. Health & Wellness My goal for 2025 was 350 workouts and 325 iFit sessions using the treadmill, bike, and elliptical. According to iFit’s year-end recap, I
Reflecting on 2025 Aspirations Read More »