Case Studies: A confession

I admit it. I lied. These stories never happened. 

...Or did they?

None of these stories are true in a literal sense. The names and details were changed. They're composites drawn from situations that come up again and again. 

When you support multiple companies at once, you start to see the same patterns. The tools, people, and circumstances are different, but the story's the same. 

Most of them borrow from real events, cherry picking details from a few different incidents to clarify the stakes. 

Sometimes I embellish, playing out what could have happened if we hadn't caught it in time. For effect.

The details are fake but the insights are real—earned from more than a decade in the trenches, solving problems behind the scenes.

If you're thinking, "But wait, that sounds like my company..." 

That's the point. 

These situations come up in all kinds of companies. They're as common as meetings that could have been emails. 

Yet, because they happen in the shadows, it's hard to see how common they are. Companies sweep them under the rug with shame and blame, making the patterns even harder to spot.

They're painful, and painfully solvable. But only if someone knows what to look for. 

There are no stories in the problems that don't happen. It takes hard-earned insight from many "exciting" stories to build "boring" operations. 

If your HR department feels like a soap opera, let's talk. 

We can help you build the kind of "boring" People Operations that let you sleep at night.

Let's make HR boring again