Weekly newsletter #180
The best of what I've read this week, about operations, training and education, communication, and more
Hello!
I don’t have any personal updates to share, so let’s move on to the curated resources!
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Last week’s most popular link:
Leore Spira writes how one of the most dangerous dashboards was also the most beautiful.
What I've been reading, watching, and listening to:
LinkedIn
Jamie Bell writes about a first 90-day plan for internal communication roles🚢
Courtney Sembler writes that enablement and education aren’t different flavors of the same activity competing for the same territory. They’re solving for opposite sides of a transaction.
Kathryn Castle writes that instead of leaping ahead to layer on more complexity, it’s often good to first check the fundamentals and see if you’re standing on a firm foundation.
Maya Knight writes about helping a team cut 11 recurring meetings in a single afternoon
Rosalyn Santa Elena writes about creating process before choosing systems or tools
Dr. Alaina Szlachta writes that when training is based on a clear framework, organizations can compare the employee’s self-reported progress with the manager’s direct reflections on those exact same step-by-step capabilities.
Heike Young shares two excellent business editorial publications as inspiration for your own content strategy
Sean Adams writes that the training is not built wrong. It is placed wrong. And Sean shares a way to assess the maturity of your training program
Rachel Nazhand shares lessons learned from the first 90 days on a job 🚢
Richard (Rick) Weithas writes that one of the most valuable items we ever built wasn’t a sales deck, launch plan, or battlecard. It was a shared, internal Go-To-Market webpage. 📝
Jenny Jones shares five things every intranet homepage needs 📝
Cathy Flynn writes that no COO can fix a founder who refuses to be accountable to the same standards as everyone else. There is also zero chance that the company will truly scale.
Matt Furness writes that a learning experience that changes behavior needs four types of activity
Seán Reid writes that if you’re interviewing for a Customer Success role this year, prepare for these questions.
Daria Rokutova is looking for learning and development event speakers
Monique Hathaway writes that once you have alignment on ownership and a clear prioritization framework, everything else becomes easier to build, from onboarding and coaching to product enablement and ongoing learning
Ashley Faus writes that being exhausted from working on a hard, engaging problem is completely different from the exhaustion of fighting yet another edict from someone who has no expertise in your craft.
Amy McClain writes that the higher you move in leadership, the more your role shifts from delivering the work to creating the conditions for great work to happen consistently.
Jill Brown writes that they always thought that if you can design great training, you can design it for any size company. Then they got the first enterprise client.
Mike Simmons writes that half of what’s on your meeting agenda isn’t a meeting. It’s a status update wearing a calendar invite.
Articles, Reports, Guides, Newsletters
Colette Molteni writes about The Hidden Cost of Being the Person Who Makes Things Make Sense. The translator tax is real. Here’s how to stop paying it on your own
Andrea Chiarelli and Dennis Collins write about When Good Performance Stops Getting You Promoted: A field guide to the plateau between ‘doing well’ and ‘moving up’
Chris McGrath shares a guide for Say This, Not That: The Internal Comms Translation
Andrew Ormerod writes about employee onboarding 🚢
Yue Zhao writes about How to Prioritize Your Relationship-building Tasks
Moni Oloyede writes that “Be More Strategic” Is the Most Useless Advice in Marketing, which often keeps marketers trapped in execution mode.
Jay Mandel writes about Why Big-Box Retailers Must Align Corporate Margin with Consumer Health
Eddie Reynolds writes about The CRO’s First 90 Days: Go-To-Market Ops Framework 🚢
Karl Sakas writes about how to integrate a new agency leader without creating a leadership vacuum 🚢
Al Dea writes How to Use Context Mapping When Leading Change
Julia Cyboran writes why you should Stop Asking What Marketing Should Do
Noam Segal and Lenny Rachitsky write about how tech workers are feeling in 2026: a workforce splitting in two
Harleen Kaur Mann writes about CMO vs VP Marketing vs Director of Marketing: What Each Role Actually Is
Dr. Christie Vanorsdale writes about Why Behavior Change Dies at Month Three (And How to Design for Sustainment)
Sarah Shepard writes that The Basics Aren’t the Problem, Forgetting to Maintain Them Is
Carmen Ohling writes about The Hidden Cost of the Words Leaders Choose
Melody Wilding writes about how to Escape “Hero Mode”: The Overfunctioning Leader’s Guide to Letting Go
Odd Morten Sørensen describes trends from a podcast season, including the human work of marketing ops and how technology is not the real problem (or solution)
Podcasts, Webinars, Videos
Christina Garnett and Matt Lyles discuss that You’ll Never Have Loyal Customers Without This
Julie Hamada and Michael Hartmann discuss From Promise-Making to Promise-Keeping: Why Great Ops Starts with the Customer Journey
Daniel Pink discusses Why Forcing Yourself To Work... Never Works
Featured Events or Classes:
July 15: No Spare People: Why lean teams need to punch above their weight on wellbeing
July 23: The Demand Gen Event Playbook: Fewer Events, Better Pipeline
August 8 in Del Mar, California: SoCal Coffee & Conversation from Wednesday Women
Featured Book:
Leading for Tomorrow: Unlocking Human Potential in the Era of Continuous Change and Endless Possibility by Scott Kaufman and Chris Shipley (affiliate link to bookshop.org)
Featured Remote Jobs:
A Few Ways I Can Help You
On-demand courses:
Live courses:
The next free RevOps BootCamp session starts in the fall
Participate in the research for the next live course about employee onboarding
Emoji Key:
📝 Documentation | 🚢 Employee onboarding | $ Paid course/event/resource
Good roundup. Hero Mode got me, mostly because I was that guy for about a decade and genuinely thought it was commitment.