Hello again! Apologies for two emails in two weeks - way above my normal erratic email frequency.
As mentioned in the last email - I'm at the early stages of writing a book. It's got a working title I'm too scared to share but the subtitle is: The theory and practice of independent consulting.
Hopefully this resonates - I'm trying to amass a group of folks charting their own unique paths through independent / freelance / founder / self-employed life and provide a resource for those - especially those who dive into client environments.
My latest post is looking at that tension directly - how do you work in an environment where the culture is foreign? (and we know that their culture is going to eat your strategy for breakfast!) The post takes the central premise that you can learn a lot from art and ethnography in understanding culture and cultures.
(There's also the usual snark).
This post is 3,700 words and tries out a new style of writing but hopefully you'll enjoy it:
https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/29/ways-of-seeing/
As always - I'm forever grateful for those who contributed and reviewed drafts behind the scenes. I thought I'd show you a few of those and how they played out:
The first kind of feedback I love is inspiration for ideas and links I've not seen. For example the little grey book is a truly wonderful text and an addition from Robin:
The second kind of feedback I love is friends helping reign me in or add counters to my points, this really helps tighten up the "wild" sections and make my whole piece stronger and better. For example here's Thomas keeping me in check:
The third kind of feedback I love is where I'm forced to get off my theory and dive into practice. This comment from Sean and Susie directly helped me add a section talking about an actual client case study - this helps people connect to the ideas and also just makes the overall piece more interesting:
And finally - here's a really insightful remark from my friend Toby that cuts to the real "why" of the piece to help make it stronger. This comment forced me re-work the piece from start to finish to add a theme beyond "just" ways of seeing. Thank you Toby!
Anyway - I always enjoy this kind of insider baseball and I hope you do too. And of course hello and thank you to all who contributed thoughtful edits and comments!
Another thing you might notice about this blog post is the new format and layout. I've adopted a very slightly modified tufte css style:
This design has stronger readability for longer-form writing and hopefully allows me to start collecting all of this stuff in once place. It also lets me do these nifty sidenotes which I think are great:
Anyway.
I start a new client gig tomorrow so I can only imagine that you won't get another one of these emails for a little bit! Hopefully there's enough to chew on here. You can see that I've been thinking about this stuff closely for a long time!
As always - just because it's published the feedback process is not done - any and all feedback and comments are greatly welcomed. Hit the reply button!
Much love.
Tom
As mentioned in the last email - I'm at the early stages of writing a book. It's got a working title I'm too scared to share but the subtitle is: The theory and practice of independent consulting.
Hopefully this resonates - I'm trying to amass a group of folks charting their own unique paths through independent / freelance / founder / self-employed life and provide a resource for those - especially those who dive into client environments.
My latest post is looking at that tension directly - how do you work in an environment where the culture is foreign? (and we know that their culture is going to eat your strategy for breakfast!) The post takes the central premise that you can learn a lot from art and ethnography in understanding culture and cultures.
(There's also the usual snark).
This post is 3,700 words and tries out a new style of writing but hopefully you'll enjoy it:
https://tomcritchlow.com/2018/10/29/ways-of-seeing/
As always - I'm forever grateful for those who contributed and reviewed drafts behind the scenes. I thought I'd show you a few of those and how they played out:
The first kind of feedback I love is inspiration for ideas and links I've not seen. For example the little grey book is a truly wonderful text and an addition from Robin:
The second kind of feedback I love is friends helping reign me in or add counters to my points, this really helps tighten up the "wild" sections and make my whole piece stronger and better. For example here's Thomas keeping me in check:The third kind of feedback I love is where I'm forced to get off my theory and dive into practice. This comment from Sean and Susie directly helped me add a section talking about an actual client case study - this helps people connect to the ideas and also just makes the overall piece more interesting:
And finally - here's a really insightful remark from my friend Toby that cuts to the real "why" of the piece to help make it stronger. This comment forced me re-work the piece from start to finish to add a theme beyond "just" ways of seeing. Thank you Toby!Anyway - I always enjoy this kind of insider baseball and I hope you do too. And of course hello and thank you to all who contributed thoughtful edits and comments!Another thing you might notice about this blog post is the new format and layout. I've adopted a very slightly modified tufte css style:
This design has stronger readability for longer-form writing and hopefully allows me to start collecting all of this stuff in once place. It also lets me do these nifty sidenotes which I think are great:Anyway.I start a new client gig tomorrow so I can only imagine that you won't get another one of these emails for a little bit! Hopefully there's enough to chew on here. You can see that I've been thinking about this stuff closely for a long time!
As always - just because it's published the feedback process is not done - any and all feedback and comments are greatly welcomed. Hit the reply button!
Much love.
Tom