Adam Gonnerman

In Brazil it's the renewable industry leading the way in building data centers. To find out how and why, check out the video below, or listen on Spotify . 

If you'd asked me a week ago what I knew about private equity, I could have told you about Toys R Us. That company was acquired by private equity and then run into the ground. Now that I've read Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream―An Exposé of Private Equity's Devastating Impact on American Lives, Communities, and the Economy , I could probably tell you a lot more. This book isn't just about Toys R Us, though. The author, Megan Greenwell , deftly weaves the stories of four people together, from before their encounter with private equity, during, and then after as matters resolve. These are tales of retail, newspapers, hospitals, and apartments, all impacted through acquisition by private equity. But what is private equity? "In the simplest terms, 'private equity' describes a system in which a firm bundles money from outside investors—including university endowments, public pension funds, state-owned investment funds, and ultrawea...

The following is adapted from an essay I wrote a few years ago as part of my graduate program at Avila University . Several years ago I attended a church retreat in New Jersey. Some of us were talking in a group one day, and someone I did not know spoke up to say (in the context of the conversation) that his parents had leased out their farm for fracking. We looked at each other uncomfortably, and someone commented "that's not great." As for me, I said, "that's not going to do the groundwater any favors." Within seconds that man was stepping up to me, in an alpha male sort of way, and said something about fracking being perfectly safe. My reply was something along the lines of "not my problem," and I backed away. What Is Fracking? "Fracking is the process of drilling down into the earth before a high-pressure water mixture is directed at the rock to release the gas inside. Water, sand and chemicals are injected into the rock at high pressure ...

The following is adapted from an essay I wrote a few years ago as part of my graduate program at Avila University . Advertising to children is a bit more complicated than it used to be. It's not all about what's on TV any more, and the ability to track children online can raise concerns about manipulation and data collection. Still, I'm not certain the situation is as dire as some would have us believe. Confessions of an '80s Cartoon Kid As a kid growing up in the 1980s without cable television, Saturday morning cartoons were a big deal for me. Every Fall I even made a point of watching the preview shows that aired during prime time on the major networks, introducing the new cartoons coming up for the season. When my family got our first VCR my mother gave me a tape to use, and I carefully programmed it every week to record one of the three networks while I watched one of the other two. Then, during the week, I'd watch an hour or so of cartoons from that tape af...

The following is adapted from an essay I wrote a few years ago as part of my graduate program at Avila University . CEO pay is not a new topic. Both texts I read for this module were written in 2006, and reference is made to as far back as 1992. Still, the political significance of this topic is near the forefront again with the accusations (and in places, embrace) of "socialism." It doesn't take a socialist to be fed up with the sky-high amounts CEOs are paid. Abigail Disney spoke for many of us when she said: "Jesus Christ himself isn't worth 500 times his median worker's pay." — Abigail Disney, filmmaker, Disney heiress, and Patriotic Millionaires member (Edgecliffe-Johnson, 2019) The Numbers Don't Lie Earlier this year USA Today published a list of the top 100 highest paid CEOs at major companies in the United States. The results demonstrate the immensity of the problem. At number 100 was Michael Kaufmann of Cardinal Health, whose most r...

The following is an adaptation of an essay I wrote a few years ago as part of my graduate program at Avila University .  Comparing an article by Milton Friedman written in the 1970s to one by a person in the 2000s seems a stretch, to say the least. The former won a Nobel Prize in Economics and was precise in explaining his ideology, and the attention-grabbing writing of our times doesn't hold up well in comparison, as I see it. And yet, I have to side with Joseph Hart on this one in saying that no, the sole social responsibility of business is not profits. Friedman argues that corporations are not people, and yet years later we are living with the consequences of the US Supreme Court deciding that corporations are people and entitled to all the same rights. Try putting a corporation in prison for any crimes, though, and you'll see the limits of its personhood. He then goes on to describe the purpose of a business to be making profit, and considers any use of funds for any p...

This is the last post in a short series on Uberlândia Development Initiatives (UDI), the nonprofit I helped found to support Estação Vida, a community center in Uberlândia, Brazil. The earlier posts covered the neighborhood UDI exists to serve and the story of getting the organization off the ground back in 2020. A few years have passed since then, and it's worth catching up on what's happened. From startup to established Founding a nonprofit is one thing; keeping it running is another. In December 2020, UDI was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the IRS — the milestone that made every donation to the organization officially deductible for U.S. donors. That was the piece that had been missing the whole time: a legal, secure way for people outside Brazil to support Estação Vida's work. It then took time to build out banking and a reliable transfer process. In April 2023, UDI made its first donation via bank wire to Brazil. Those funds went toward installing a syst...

In my last post I introduced Shopping Park, an under-resourced neighborhood in Uberlândia, Brazil, and Estação Vida, the community center that's been serving its kids since 2004. What I didn't get into is how a graduate school capstone project turned into an actual nonprofit organization. By 2020 I'd spent about 12 years in project management, earned my PMP certification back in 2013, and was working on a Master's in Management. I needed a capstone project, and the pieces lined up: why not use it to build the thing I'd been quietly imagining for years — a U.S.-based organization that could receive donations and channel them to Estação Vida? The problem I was solving was a practical one. Sending money into a Brazilian bank account from abroad is a confusing process if you've never done it, and even once you manage it, the gift isn't tax-deductible for a U.S. donor. Estação Vida had a Portuguese-language site set up to receive local support, but nothing fo...

In 1997 I spent two months in the state of São Paulo on a mission internship, and something about Brazil got under my skin. I learned Portuguese there. A few trips later, in 2001, I moved to the country, got married, and started a family. Brazil has been part of my life ever since. Years later, I found myself living in Uberlândia — a city of more than 680,000 people in Brazil's interior, the fourth largest in that part of the country. It's a place with a genuinely good public bus system, a federal university, and private schools at every level, and it has a distinct character: a blend of urban ambition and rural roots that creates its own particular mix of ideas and culture. Within that city, though, there's a neighborhood that most visitors to Uberlândia would never see: Shopping Park. It's home to roughly 40,000 people, and it's been forming since the 1980s — largely without the basics that most of the city takes for granted. For years, residents had no reliab...

AI is nipping at the heels of outsourced BPO jobs in countries like India and the Philippines. I know people in the Philippines who can attest to the difficulty of finding such work already, before the full effects of AI are felt. The following video does an excellent deep-dive into the reality of BPO work in what may be the dawn of the AI era. 

 There is a pattern I have seen repeat across organizations of different sizes and industries. Teams adopt an Agile framework, populate their calendars with the right ceremonies, use the right vocabulary in standups, and then wonder why delivery feels just as slow and friction-filled as before. This is Agile Theatre: the performance of methodology without the substance of it. SAFe is perhaps the most visible example, a framework so dense with alignment meetings and coordination layers that the overhead of running it can quietly consume the productivity gains it was supposed to create. I have been thinking about this problem lately, and two frameworks have helped me sharpen my thinking: Agile² and DORA. The piece "Agile²" makes an argument worth sitting with. Agile, in its original form, was a correction to a specific failure mode: process worship. The Agile Manifesto pushed back against the idea that following a detailed plan was the same as delivering value. The uncomfortab...

Once I was pulled into an emergency meeting about a project that had stalled six months earlier. The client was asking pointed questions about decisions made during the initial planning phase, and the original project manager had moved to another company. As I sat there watching my colleague scramble through scattered email threads and half-remembered conversations, I was reminded of a practice that has saved me countless times: keeping a daily work blog. I know it sounds excessive, but hear me out. For most of my career, I've maintained what I call my daily project log using Confluence's blog widget. I set it up right in the center of my personal workspace, surrounded by my other project notes and references. Every day, without fail, I spend five minutes documenting anything relatively significant that happened with my projects. This isn't about writing novels or crafting perfect prose. It's about capturing the small but crucial details that slip away: why we chose ven...

Back when I was working at a startup, we brought on two engineering interns for the summer. Steve was personable and well-liked around the office. He had good technical skills and could handle the tasks we assigned him. When things got slow, you'd find him chatting with the team about weekend plans or the latest tech news. Sometimes he'd even catch a quick nap at his desk during those inevitable startup lulls. Isabelle took a completely different approach. She was equally capable with her assigned work, but when the inevitable downtime hit, she had her laptop open learning Ruby on Rails. This was the web application framework our entire product was built on, but it wasn't something we expected interns to master. While Steve socialized or rested, Isabelle was diving deep into documentation, working through tutorials, and even building small practice applications on her own time. I watched this play out over the course of their ten-week internship. Both interns completed thei...

Six weeks before our product launch, the VP of Marketing walked into my office with what she called "a small request." She wanted to add a complete user onboarding flow to our mobile app. Small request. Right. I'd seen this movie before. In my early days as a project manager, I would have smiled, nodded, and quietly absorbed the extra work into our timeline. The team would have worked nights and weekends, quality would have suffered, and I would have spent the launch week putting out fires instead of celebrating a successful delivery. But I'd learned the hard way that scope changes, no matter how they're dressed up, follow the laws of physics. You can't create time and resources out of thin air. The first thing I did was assess the real impact. This wasn't just adding a few screens. The onboarding flow required new API endpoints, database changes, additional testing scenarios, and integration with our analytics platform. My rough estimate put it at three w...

Three weeks before our mobile app launch, I watched our carefully planned timeline crumble in real time during what should have been a routine status meeting. The API team mentioned, almost casually, that they'd hit a snag with the authentication service. "Nothing major," they said. "Maybe a few extra days." That few extra days turned into two weeks, and suddenly our QA cycle compressed from three weeks to one. The marketing team had already locked in their campaign dates. Customer support hadn't finished their training materials. What started as a minor backend hiccup cascaded through every workstream like dominoes falling. I learned something crucial that day about dependency management: it's not just about tracking relationships between tasks. It's about understanding that every delay ripples outward, often in ways you don't anticipate. After that near-disaster, I completely changed how I approach dependencies in project planning. Now I map th...

I still cringe thinking about that executive briefing years ago. Our team was six months into rebuilding the customer portal, and I had prepared what I thought was a thorough status update. I walked into the conference room armed with architecture diagrams, database schemas, and a detailed explanation of our microservices approach. Twenty minutes in, our CTO held up his hand. "Adam, I need to stop you there. Are we on track to launch in Q3 or not?" The room went silent. I had spent the entire presentation talking about technical elegance while completely missing what he actually needed to know: timeline, budget, and business impact. That uncomfortable moment taught me everything about communicating tech status upward. I had fallen into the engineer's trap of leading with mechanics instead of impact. The CTO didn't care about our service mesh implementation. He cared about whether customers would have the new features before the holiday shopping season. Since then, I...

Three months into my first project management role at a software company, I watched a colleague destroy his credibility in thirty seconds. The engineering team was discussing a legacy system bug, and someone cracked a joke about Visual Basic. My fellow PM laughed loudly and nodded knowingly, clearly trying to signal that he was technically savvy enough to get it. The problem was obvious to everyone in the room: he had no idea what they were talking about. The engineers exchanged glances, and I could practically see his authority evaporate. That moment crystallized something I'd been sensing for weeks. Walking into a team of skeptical engineers as a new project manager feels like entering a room where everyone speaks a different language and you're holding a phrase book upside down. These developers had been burned before by PMs who talked a big game but delivered bureaucracy instead of value. Some had been working without any project management oversight and genuinely questione...

Tim Wu has built a career on making complex technology policy accessible to general readers, and The Age of Extraction may be his most urgent work yet. In it, Wu examines how the digital platforms that promised to democratize information and spread prosperity have instead become some of the most powerful wealth-extraction machines in economic history. It is a sobering diagnosis, but Wu delivers it with clarity and a genuine sense of purpose that makes the book feel less like a warning and more like a call to action. Wu grounds his argument in the concept of the "neutral platform," a structural idea with deep historical roots. He traces how platforms ranging from railroads to IBM and AT&T could either catalyze broad economic participation or concentrate power in the hands of a few, depending on how they were governed. This historical framing is one of the book's great strengths. By the time Wu arrives at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft, readers already unders...

Ask someone outside the profession what a project manager does and you'll hear some version of the same answer: they run meetings, update Jira boards, track tasks, and produce status reports. Maybe they build a Gantt chart or two. It's not wrong, exactly. Those things happen. But describing project management that way is like describing an iceberg by what you can see from the deck of a ship. The visible tip is real. The work below the surface is where the job actually lives. Beneath every clean status update is someone who spent the previous 48 hours balancing three competing priorities against a resource pool that couldn't support all of them. Beneath every smooth stakeholder meeting is a PM who quietly diffused a conflict before it ever reached the conference room. The Gantt chart your executives see on Friday reflects decisions, trade-offs, and conversations that never make it into any report. That's not an accident. That's the job. What the profession actuall...

 Late 2012 was a season of massive change. My wife and I had decided to move our family back to her native Brazil, with her and the kids going ahead while I stayed behind for another year to fund their transition and pay down our US debts. In the middle of this life upheaval, I made what seemed like either the worst or best decision possible: I decided to pursue my PMP certification. Conde Nast, my employer at the time, generously paid for my PMP training. I spent several intensive days in a classroom with a coworker and about twenty other aspiring project managers, absorbing the fundamentals. The instructor was solid, the materials comprehensive, and I left feeling oriented to the challenge ahead. What I didn't fully grasp was that the training was just the beginning. For the next two and a half months, I studied with an intensity I'd never matched before or since. My routine became monastic in its discipline. I'd come home from work, decompress over dinner, then dive into...

Before I moved to Brazil in December 2013, locals warned me that foreign workers struggled in Brazilian companies because they "don't understand the culture." I never quite grasped what that meant, but after working at a local tech company for nearly a year, I can share what the reality actually looked like. I had lived in Brazil before and spoke fluent Portuguese, so the language barrier wasn't an issue. After months of job searching while teaching English to pay the bills, one of my students referred me to his company. The interview process itself was my first taste of cultural differences. The HR conversation lasted over 45 minutes and covered territory that would be off-limits in the United States. They asked about my church attendance, my family situation, and other personal topics that would send American HR departments running for their lawyers. But it felt natural enough in the context, more like getting to know a whole person rather than just a professional p...

When I got promoted to associate project manager early in my career, I thought I knew what I was doing. I'd watched other project managers for years and had managed a few small projects myself. But nobody ever sat me down and walked me through the basics. On my first major project, I stared at a blank Excel template for what felt like hours, trying to figure out how to create an actual project plan. I knew the tools existed, I knew templates were available, but I had no idea where to start. That's when I learned the hard way that creating a project plan isn't about mastering software or filling in templates. It's about having the right conversations with the right people in the right order. I started with what seemed obvious at the time but wasn't: I sat down with the project sponsor and key stakeholders for a kickoff conversation. I asked three simple questions that would become my foundation for every project since. What are we trying to achieve? When does it need...