Hi there,
Here's my weekly update for Sep 14, 2026...
Why Self-Promotion at Work Isn't Vanity - with Dr. Jonathan Thorp
Jonathan Thorp spent 24 years as a naval aviator, then led organizational development at JPMorgan Chase before becoming CEO of Quantum Connections. His favorite mistake was assuming that creating something valuable is where the work stops, because promoting it felt like vanity. Good work kept landing as a non-event - including an incentive plan he redesigned for a client services group that people mistook for a lucky run of customer calls.
🗒️ Why Delegating the Finances Became a Blind Spot — with Publicist Susan von Seggern
Susan von Seggern joined a friend's Los Angeles PR agency in the late 1990s as the business development half of the partnership and left the money to her partner.
Business was good, so when she decided to open a New York office — lease, three hires, payroll — she never looked at the numbers.
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🗒️ Training as a Countermeasure? The “Fix” You Can Finish by Friday.
In 2006, regulators cited a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin for six violations of state and federal rules after a patient died — three federal, three state.
They threatened its license and its Medicare contract.
The hospital updated its policies and re-educated its nurses, and the citations were withdrawn.
Training as a countermeasure “worked,” in the only sense anyone measured.
Think about what you'd have to believe for that to be the right remedy.
🗒️ What 21,050 Clinicians Told Us About Fear and Futility
Hospitals have Quiet Rooms now.
There's soft lighting.
There's a chair.
There's a noise machine, which is a machine that makes calming noises.
There's sometimes a succulent in a small white pot.
🗒️ GM Adopted Forced Ranking in 2024. Ford Dropped It in 2001.
Phoebe Wall Howard reported recently that a fired GM engineer is suing the company over its employee evaluation system.
Tuan Le, 58, spent 27 years at General Motors, moving from industrial engineer to senior throughput simulation engineer.
GM terminated him on January 17, 2026.He is the third GM employee represented by attorney Michael Pitt to allege that GM's forced ranking system (as they describe it) requires managers to hit job-elimination quotas that fall hardest […]
Enjoy,
Mark Graban
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