Why the old essays are back

Some of what you will find here is old.

I wrote the management-theory essays — Taylor, Fayol, Weber, Smith, Maslow, and the rest — more than a decade ago, while I was reading my way into the discipline and building my first companies. One of them, a short introduction to motivation theory, ended up cited on Wikipedia and was quietly read for years. When the original site went offline, those pages went with it. I have restored them here almost exactly as they were written — tidied for the odd typo — because the ideas have not aged, and because people still link to them.

The newer writing comes from a different place: twenty-five years of starting companies across four countries, and the founding, failing, pivoting, and persisting that came with it. Less summary of other people's theories, more of what actually happens when you try to build something.

I keep both in the same place on purpose. The fundamentals I read about at the start turned out to be the ones I kept returning to. Sequencing matters in a company — purpose before people, people before product. It matters in how you learn, too.

Start anywhere.