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1 week ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
Let’s skip the appetizer. You want to matter in recruiting? Stop being polite. Stop hiding behind your LinkedIn Premium subscription. Stop sending 47 follow-up emails like a stage-five clinger. Put down the tech stack, pick up the phone, and do what makes your peers sweat through their startup hoodies. Here’s the truth: Every recruiter can send an email. Few can coach a founder through their first hire. Fewer still have the stones to tell a VP, “Your expectations are delusional.
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1 month ago | 
nationalgeographic.fr | Nora Bradford |Brian Fink
À la question « Qu’est-ce qui rend la vie belle ? » on répond souvent par une liste de ce qui nous rend heureux. Mais tout le monde ne mesure pas sa vie par le bonheur, et certains y accordent plus d’importance que d’autres. Les humains ont du mal à trouver une recette pour une belle vie ou pour le bien-être qui dépasse le simple fait d'« être heureux ».
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
Leadership today isn’t about building empires. It’s about buying neighborhoods — then inviting the right people to move in. Enter: the acquihire. Acquihiring is the corporate equivalent of talent smuggling. You’re not buying the product. You’re not buying the tech. You’re buying people. You’re not investing in scale; you’re investing in potential. It’s not about what they built. It’s about who built it — and whether those builders can construct your next skyscraper. Let’s get tactical.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
There’s hiring. There’s acquiring. And then there’s the corporate lovechild of both: acquihiring. A move so bold, so strategic, and — let’s be honest — so ego-driven, it deserves its own Harvard Business Review case study… or at least a Netflix miniseries called “The Vibe Was Worth It.”The acquihire is not just a transaction. It’s performance art for the boardroom. It’s how power signals ambition.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
In an age obsessed with instant results — “crushed it,” “scaled it,” “10x’ed it” — we’ve somehow forgotten one of the most basic, boring, and brutally effective truths of success:Big things don’t start big. They start boring. They start small. They start Tuesday. We are so enamored with the finish line that we ghost the starting line.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
Everyone’s obsessed with scaling up. More products, more platforms, more meetings, more headcount, more KPIs, more…everything. We’ve mistaken complexity for success and expansion for ambition. It’s the corporate equivalent of supersizing your order and calling it nutrition. But here’s the truth they won’t put on a TEDx stage or in a unicorn pitch deck: the real flex is scaling down. Do fewer things. Do them exponentially better. Depth over breadth. Mastery over mediocrity. Clarity over chaos.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
Let me guess: your calendar looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, your Slack channels are more crowded than a Times Square Apple Store launch, and you’re in five group chats debating which AI tool is going to change the world (again). Congratulations. You’re busy. You’re scaling. You’re building. And, statistically speaking, you’re drowning. Because somewhere along the line, “scaling up” became the fetish of modern work. We glorified bloat.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
Let’s be clear: perfection is a branding exercise. It’s what you put on your LinkedIn profile, your TEDx talk, or the 5 a.m. gym selfie with a caption like “no days off.” It’s a narrative. A highlight reel. And it’s bullshit. Leadership isn’t about looking flawless under fluorescent lights. It’s about showing up when it’s inconvenient, uncertain, and hard. We don’t need perfect leaders. We need present ones. We need the ones who take the call when the numbers look bad.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
In a culture addicted to shortcuts, where “good enough” is good enough and everyone’s looking to automate their way out of effort, one man still believes in something old-school, almost blasphemous in its purity: doing your best. All the time. No exceptions. That man is Nick Saban, and his mantra — “Nothing is acceptable but your best” — should be carved into the foundation of every locker room, boardroom, and bedroom of anyone who wants to matter. Saban doesn’t coach football. He coaches standards.
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1 month ago | 
thebrianfink.medium.com | Brian Fink
We’ve become a culture obsessed with titles. VP of This. Director of That. Chief Everything Officer. But the truth is, most people with management titles aren’t leaders — they’re bureaucrats with calendars. They move meetings, not mountains. So what’s the difference between a manager and a leader? Simple: Managers maintain. Leaders multiply. Managers enforce the rules. Leaders rewrite them. Managers play not to lose. Leaders play to win.
