by John Macdonald | Feb 19, 2026 | AI, Leadership, The250
Middle management gets a bad rap in corporate America. Professional meeting organizers Professional delegators PowerPoint creators The people who stop me from doing what I want to do Buzzword ninjas However, quiality middle managers are good at: Goal decomposition... by John Macdonald | Feb 18, 2026 | AI, Human, Leadership, The250
Struggle first on your own. Then pull in AI. David Epstein wrote a great article about whether AI is rotting our brains, based on an MIT study. I wrote about it also. Spoiler Alert: It depends. Basically, start with yourself, rather than starting with AI. The best... by John Macdonald | Feb 17, 2026 | AI, Human, Leadership, Technology, The250
When I first started The250, my writing and publishing were 100% manual. Here’s the original workflow for The250: I’d start with a topic (or a few) that I’d been thinking about. If necessary, do some research. Open Grammarly, start writing. Iterate in Grammarly until... by John Macdonald | Feb 11, 2026 | Human, Leadership, The250
They are anybody you serve. Your customer. The test team. The developers. The sales team. The program manager. Your spouse. Your kids. Your neighbor. It’s not always about them, and you may not be able to give everybody what they want. But it’s always worth... by John Macdonald | Feb 10, 2026 | Human, Leadership, The250
No, not that swamp. The swamp of everything is urgent, they’re all number one priority, and we don’t have enough resources. The inbox overflows. Every meeting requires two more meetings. Nobody can push back. You can’t even figure out what the real highest priority is... by John Macdonald | Feb 9, 2026 | Human, Leadership, The250
But they rarely are. All things being equal is the English version of the Latin phrase ceteris paribus, which economists and scientists use to talk about the effect of one change while theoretically keeping everything else the same. It’s a useful academic approach,...