At work

Managers, coworkers, the handbook, HR, safety, and the day the wheels come off.

HR is not your enemy and not your advocate. The meeting produces a record, and unless you make one too, theirs is the only version that survives.

7 min read

Nobody reads a handbook on the day it matters. Four sections decide real money and real risk, and each one takes about five minutes.

6 min read

Most records of a difficult colleague are long, written from memory, and useless. A usable one is short, dated, boring, and written the same day.

7 min read

A decline gets overturned because it was too long, not because it was too blunt. Every extra reason you give is one more thing to argue with.

6 min read

Eight questions for one meeting, sequenced so the two that matter most are still answerable by the time you get to them.

6 min read

The first hour is not for fixing it. It is for making sure nobody finds out from a customer, and that is a writing job, not a repair job.

5 min read

What decides how a hazard gets handled is rarely how bad it is. It is whether a dated written record exists, and who got told in what order.

6 min read