Adam Gonnerman

In the summer of 1995 I was part of a work crew operating under the Job Training and Partnership Act , traveling between two counties doing maintenance, painting, and lawn work. It was my second year with the program and I was looking forward to it. What I was not looking forward to was what the summer actually became. The team leader, whose name I will change to Mark for the purposes of this piece, was not much of a leader. Within the first two weeks it was clear that he had little interest in working. Off-color jokes were a regular feature of the day. So was sitting around while hours ticked by. I brought my concerns to the regional supervisor, a woman I will call Scarlet. Her response was simple and direct: if I did not like it, I could quit. I did not quit. I stayed because I did not have time to find something else on short notice, and I needed the work. What followed was a long summer of profanity, inappropriate humor, and minimal productivity. And then, predictably, things got...

"Innovation is saying no to a thousand things."  -  Steve Jobs There is a meeting to align on a proposal. Turnout is good, including some fairly senior people. Opinions differ. Time runs out. A follow-up is scheduled, a revised deck will be produced, a pre-read will be distributed before the next alignment meeting. Nothing is blocked. No one has said no. Yet nothing moves. This is what organizational stall actually looks like. Not conflict. Not resistance. Diligence. Leaders often equate consensus with alignment, but they are not the same thing. Consensus means everyone agrees. Alignment means everyone understands the direction and their role in it, even if they would have chosen differently. One is a state of unanimous opinion. The other is a condition for coordinated action. When consensus becomes the goal, progress slows while risk quietly compounds. Consensus optimizes for harmony. It is a room full of nodding heads, objections softened or withdrawn, everyone heard and id...

Not every career advancement is the result of a deliberate plan. Sometimes the right environment finds you at the right moment, and what you do with that opportunity determines everything that follows. After working at Zepinvest, a small New York City startup, I had developed a working foundation in content curation, content management, basic HTML, and the practical realities of keeping a web presence running. It was hands-on, scrappy work, and it prepared me well for what came next. My following role was as a web producer at Condé Nast, a considerably larger stage with considerably higher expectations. I did not know it at the time, but that position would become one of the most formative experiences of my professional life. In my early days as a web producer I sat in conference rooms where conversations about projects, products, and timelines felt like a foreign language. People moved through discussions with a fluency I did not yet have, and I spent more than a few meetings simply...

Not every career follows a straight line. Mine has not come close to one, and I have spent enough time now looking back at the path to say with confidence that nothing along the way was wasted, even the parts that looked like detours at the time. When my family moved to New Jersey in 2005, I was walking away from full-time ministry without a clear idea of what came next. I explored options that ranged from the practical to the improbable. Tree trimming was on the list at one point. What I landed on first was a job teaching English as a Second Language in Newark. The pay was low and there were no benefits, but it was work, and it was work that required me to communicate clearly across significant cultural and linguistic distance every single day. I did not think of it as professional development at the time. Looking back, it was exactly that. Having taken an introductory paralegal course while living in New Mexico, I got the idea of pursuing work at a law firm. Without credentials or ...

There are moments in a program manager's career when following the established process is exactly the right call, and moments when following it blindly leads to serious problems. Knowing the difference is not something any methodology teaches you. It comes from experience, and sometimes from a project that goes sideways before it gets right. I was once tasked with leading an ADA compliance initiative for a company's primary application, covering web, mobile, and Smart TV platforms. Accessibility work is not optional. It is a legal and ethical obligation, and the stakes of getting it wrong extend well beyond a missed deadline. When I assumed the project it had already passed through the hands of two product managers, both of whom had moved on to other opportunities. I was inheriting something that had already lost momentum and institutional memory. I did what any program manager would do in that situation: gathered what information I could, held a structured kickoff meeting, al...

When I was young, meeting someone new was uncomplicated. You saw another kid, asked if they wanted to play, and a friendship began. Growing up in a pre-internet world, the people you knew were largely the people you saw regularly. You had each other's phone numbers, and that was enough. Connection happened through proximity. There was a time, further back in history, when formal letters of introduction served as the mechanism for entering new social and professional circles, but that practice faded long ago. Today, the introduction happens online, often before any in-person meeting ever takes place. About twenty-one years ago I made a trip to New Hampshire. I was a full-time minister at the time and was exploring the possibility of becoming a bivocational minister in that state, with the goal of finding steady work while using my remaining time to plant a Brazilian congregation. When I arrived, I already had a contact: a Brazilian man I had connected with online. He and his Americ...

A little over a month ago we heard about someone at Meta losing a good portion of her email to an AI that went off course. She managed to stop it before it finished, and it apologized, but the damage was done. I was surprised that she posted about it publicly. In any case, it demonstrates the danger presented by giving AI complete control over one's desktop and work.  This situation was presaged humorously by the series Silicon Valley. See below and enjoy!