Dave

Dec 29 2025

Systems Over Goals; And New Year’s Resolutions

I’ve followed the work of Scott Adams for years. Decades, actually; as I just found this calendar in a box of stuff I’ve kept.

Flipping through it is actually quite illuminating, as 2000 marked the start of a six-year run at a large insurance brokerage (and human capital consultant) that you’ve heard of. And it’s inside the calendar that I’m finding a ton of evidence to one of Scott’s key messages: “Systems Over Goals.”

Creating the System

My time at Aon started in the human capital consulting arm, then known as Aon Consulting. For a young-ish guy like me, it was a tremendous opportunity: I had the chance to build a system that could best be described as “Marketing Communications.” It was also a system that had somewhat stagnated under my predecessor, and it needed a combination of a clear mandate and some good old fashioned hard work.

And, looking back at my calendar — which looked less like a journal and more like a combination of Post-It notes and birthday reminders and appointments and out-of-town trip summaries — I can see just how effective our “system” was.

Explaining Myself Further

One of the challenges of Systems Thinking vs. Goals Thinking is figuring out why you are building the system in the first place. I mean, it sounds counter-intuitive: you need to know the direction you’re headed and you have to have a general idea of what you’re trying to achieve. BUT…

To use our example, we were trying, as my then-boss was saying, to be “on the shelf of the mind” when companies — specifically, their HR leaders — were looking for an employee benefits consultant. (Back then, pre-ACA, “health and welfare” consulting was our bread-and-butter, with 401(k) consulting and pension actuarial work coming in second; HR outsourcing, a distant third, would take up a large portion of future revenues as the organization’s priorities shifted.)

To do this, we could have come up with any number of goals, but those would have had to change a couple times, at least, while we built the system.

In this case, the system needed to include a few things:

An understanding of the issues that drive buyer behavior
A sense of who in our company could speak to these issues; i.e. “thought leaders”
A full mapping of the products and services that we had in the pipeline that could help clients and prospects
And a cadence of messages — news releases, product brochures, speaking opportunities — airdropped throughout the calendar year.

We Did Pretty Well

I looked back at another Post-It that tells me that our little team actually produced 15 news releases that year; it was a variety that zig-zagged between product announcements and thought leadership pieces tied to a key piece of research that we conducted.

The news releases weren’t all, of course; and none of this was done in a vacuum. The company had a research arm in Ann Arbor, Michigan — the long-since shuttered “Loyalty Institute” — and their research was centered around what kept employees committed to their employer and what employee benefits and HR practices were (and weren’t) drivers of workforce commitment.

So we had research reports to share, and we had brochures that told our prospects how we could help them.

And we also had a bit of a chip on our shoulder; as an underdog, we were acting like a challenger brand. We were fifth- or sixth-largest in the market at the time.

Systems Are Better Than New Year’s Resolutions

There’s a point to this post: I didn’t see any New Year’s Resolutions — I normally don’t do them — and I didn’t see any goals, either.

I did see, however, the beginnings of a System.

The System for you and me today will of course be WAY DIFFERENT than the System I helped to build in 2000. So much has changed no matter the industry.

But my advice for you is to build that System for 2026:

What PROCESSES are you good at creating, or following?
What SKILLS can you use in order to build…A team? A business? An audience?
What TALENTS do you need a little help with?
What are the MARKETS where you can best find success?

You might find that you have a combination of ideas and you may be able to create a System that can set you up for success.

Go get ’em!

Dec 28 2025

What Is ‘Price’s Law’?

This post originally appeared on Dave’s Substack in March 2024. It has been lightly edited and updated.

If you’ve been anywhere around business or business books or hustle culture or anything related to GSD (“Getting Stuff Done”) at work, you’ve heard of the Pareto Principle.

The 80/20 Rule.

80 percent of [THING] will come from 20 percent of [GROUP]. Simple, really: if you sell something, 80 percent of sales will come from 20 percent of your customers. If you take a category — like, for instance, music — you’ll find that 20 percent of the artists produce 80 percent of the songs that actually get listened to.

For a while, this was canon in business and you couldn’t go into a work meeting without trying to use that to sound smart. “Boss, why don’t we fire 80 percent of our clients so we can just sell to the 20 percent that we spend all our time with?”

This ignores…well…EVERYTHING about whatever business you’re in, but points scored for simplification!

Introducing Price’s Law

THE ECONOMY is in weird shape; Note that your job might be at risk if you aren’t deemed to be productive. However you slice that at work — look busy! be at your desk! — at some point you’re gonna start looking around and asking the question: Am I Getting Stuff Done?

Price’s Law is “stupid simple:”

The square root of the number of people in any enterprise will produce 50% of the results.

The credit goes to Derek J. de Solla Price for coming up with this scientific analysis.

Let’s apply this to your (hypothetical) team at work and figure out what that means for you:

If it’s a small team, it of course makes sense: in a team of 4, the square root of 4 — which is 2 — will do half the work. (I was told there would be no math.)

But in a bigger team Price’s law starts to have…bigger impact.

Raising Your Hand At Work

In a (hypothetical) team of 50, let’s call the square root 7. 7 People are getting stuff done, the other 43 are working at roughly 50% capacity. In a sales-driven organization, that doesn’t bode well for the other 43.

Now start to look around: are you one of the 7?

Probably pretty easy to answer that question in a lot of organizations. You have a little success on a project and then you have another project assigned to you. You open the door to sell something to a company and all of a sudden that company asks you to help them solve a different problem. You write a piece for the company blog and it clicks and then management realizes you should do more blog writing.

You are pretty obviously one of the 7.

Making Sure Your Department Is Productive, Too

Your job as “one of the 7” is pretty important when management starts to look to…well, how do we say this…cut the dead weight. These are sometimes the “get me the low performers” discussions, but they, too, are sometimes the “which departments can we do without?” discussions.

Yeah, that’s right. If marketing isn’t producing, marketing can easily be cut. Well, let me edit that: If marketing isn’t seen to be producing, marketing can easily be cut.

Your goal, then, as one of the 7 is to make sure that your department works on — and ONLY on — high-impact projects. If 20 of the other 43 are assigned to the Penske File and all they’re doing is moving the contents to an accordion-style file folder, that’s a low-impact project. If the other 23 are working on monthly TPS reports that don’t go anywhere, that’s a low-impact project.

Your Book of Business

It’s an insurance industry thing: the Book of Business. Or your portfolio. You should have a sense at all times of what that means for your personal situation: what are the clients you’re bringing in and/or responsible for? What are the projects that you are working on and how are they tied to the business and its bottom line?

What is your department doing on those days when they’re not planning or navel-gazing or working on Penske Files and TPS reports?

Your Book of Business should actually be yours. You should be able to discern where you have the most impact, and, if they show you the door, you should be able to say “hey, I was one of the 7 and here’s how.”

Or you should be able to say “here’s what the other 43 were working on, it added no value, I helped with the things over here that did add value, and I’m indispensable.”

You can thank Mr. Price.

Dec 26 2025

The Best Musical Performances from The Late Show with David Letterman

We’re talking music on the blog today. Give this Gen-Xer a chance to get nostalgic for a bit, please.

There is no question in my mind that David Letterman was loads better than his competition at getting the best musical guests on his show. No question. Most of this was because of Paul Shaffer, the music director, bandleader, and man with his finger on the pulse of the musical zeitgeist.

In honor of Boxing Day, I thought I’d share some of my favorite musical guest moments from the show’s 23-year history.

This post has nothing to do with Boxing Day. But I’m posting some videos anyway.

Pearl Jam, “Hail, Hail” (1996)

Dave chose to do a show “Sponsor Free.” Though, if memory serves, there were still sponsored segments somewhere within the show, while it didn’t break for commercial. How they sold that to the affiliates? I don’t know.

Bloc Party, “Banquet” (2004)

Something about the way this one gets rolling. I’m a big fan of drums — so, too, was Dave; see below — and Matt Tong is on fire at the start of this song.

Phoenix, “1901” (2009)

French band Phoenix has been rather successful in the Indie and Alternative space during its career — they pretty much held a concert at the Closing Ceremony for the Paris Olympics — and they made their US network television debut in 2009 on the show.

Come for the all-time-banger. Stay for the mic drop.

Mark Ronson + The Business Intl., “Bang Bang Bang” (2010)

Any musical project that involves Q-Tip gets my attention.

The National, “Afraid of Everyone” (2010)

I gotta admit, this might be my all-time favorite Letterman performance. Maybe it’s the song itself — chilling, haunting; stunning baritone from Matt Berninger — maybe it’s Dave’s reaction at the end.

The fact that this song served as my eldest’s introduction to The National makes me happy.

Special shout out to “The Audio Perv,” who had a knack for uploading these recording in as high quality as you’d find anywhere…long before the shows themselves understood the power of YouTube.

Neil Peart, “Drum Solo” (2011)

Only Dave could have “Drum Solo Week” and pull it off.

And only Neil Peart could perform the finale of Drum Solo Week. (RIP Neil.)

Future Islands, “Seasons (Waiting For You)” (2014)

And then there’s a performance that the show’s team thought was one of its most memorable.

Most of the viewers were likely left with a big dose of… What. Was. That?

If this served as your introduction to Future Islands, you were darn fortunate. Lead singer Samuel Herring knows what he’s doing in front of an audience.

Folks, thanks for helping me keep my content streak going. This is DAY 26. It’s been a December to Remember.

Be sure to check out my Substack and sign up for The Saturday List while you’re here; that’s where I’ll see ya tomorrow.

Dec 25 2025

The Christmas Message

It’s Christmas 2025.

In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, things are returning to normal this year. The past two Christmases, there were no traditional processions, no celebrations of Christmas; the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 made that impossible.

War continued. Christians, who are in the minority even in Bethlehem itself, would celebrate Christmas quietly.

Bethlehem has nearly 30,000 residents, and nearly all of them rely on tourism, especially this time of year. It’s impossible to have measurable tourism income during a war.

At long last, there’s a cease fire in Gaza; the war, hopefully, is coming to an end.

A Christmas Truce

Christmas 1914 was the last time there was a significant war that had a Christmas Truce. World War I — “The Great War,” until another, larger, greater war forced it to adopt a Roman numeral — went on pause for a day. Imagine that: soldiers put differences aside for a day, shared pleasantries, even played soccer together. It sounds unbelievable.

As the Imperial War Museum tells us in this video, it…happened throughout the Western Front.

It seems differences could be put aside, even if it’s only for a day.

‘Unto Us A Child Is Born’

Interestingly, the popular scripture verse is from the Old Testament, from Isaiah Chapter 9, verse 6:

“For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Call it foreshadowing, or prophecy.

In Bethlehem, 2000-plus years ago, the Christ Child arrived in a manger. Shepherds watched over Mother and Child; wise men came from the East with gifts.

In 1914, in Europe, war paused, ever so briefly, with hopes for peace.

Today, in Bethlehem, and throughout the world, may the birth of Christ bring you hope, and may it bring us all peace.

God Bless.

Dec 24 2025

On Christmas Eve

Growing up in Northern Indiana, our Christmas Eve tradition was rather simple. We rotated each year between Grandma’s, Aunt Dorothy’s, and our house. Roll in at around 3 or so and have food and drink and make merry and all that. It was a great tradition that, in retrospect, we were blessed to have; with families getting smaller and people having kids later in life — often after they’ve moved away from where they grew up — for many, those days may already be gone.

Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Dick had six kids; because of an 11-year age gap between Dad and Dorothy, my youngest cousin had several years on my brothers and me. But there were six of them, and they were the only cousins in town in the 70s. (We had other cousins on Dad’s side in Florida; and, on Mom’s side, some out of town and some that would arrive in the early 80s.)

Six kids, plus the three of us, plus aunts and uncles, plus Grandma. 14 by my count, though there may have been a cousin’s girlfriend or boyfriend in the mix somewhere.

I can’t tell you the order of things — did we go from Grandma’s to Aunt Dorothy’s to our house then begin the rota again? — but I can tell you that the 1978 edition was at our house, because I have vivid memories of a placekicker named Mike Michel for the Philadelphia Eagles missing a field goal attempt and the Eagles losing to the Atlanta Falcons in the NFL playoffs. (I felt bad for the guy; and this is before I grew up and learned about how Philadelphia treats its sports figures when they make a mistake. I have since learned that he was also the punter and was ill-suited for the placekicking job, but when one of the Mike-Mayer brothers gets hurt, you do what you have to.)

I digress.

This Christmas Eve tradition started during my Santa-believing days, so the festivities served as the precursor to the whole coming-down-the-chimney routine; the festivities — and the rota — continued until Grandma passed away in 1985, so we had a decent run.

Our House

Hosting on home turf was, at the time, sorta special. I would spend all day anticipating everyone’s arrival. Once they got to our house, we could eat — mostly some sort of heavy appetizer, if I recall correctly, but there wasn’t really a main course — and there would be inevitable card games that would not involve the kids. Wiezen? Sure, kid, when you’re older. (Once we figured out Euchre, though, all bets were off.)

Aunt Dorothy’s House

Aunt Dorothy’s house was fun because it was packed with activity that can only come with middle- and high-schoolers; add the fact that five of the six were boys — boys who had an annual tradition of fashioning some sort of super-bike out of multiple bicycles, thus necessitating a ladder to get on the seat and it has to be seen to be believed — and my brothers and I were usually in awe.

Grandma Was the Glue

Christmas Eve at Grandma’s, though, was the most memorable.

I can still tell you the layout of her house, inch-by-inch. There was always the “davenport” that we’d sit on — never a couch, always a davenport — and there was that hexagonal side table, the one my younger brother could fit inside of. (He put himself there, we did not roll him into a ball and put him there.)

There was the recliner — Grandpa’s chair, the one he loved, the one he died in months before I was born — and it could lean so far back the Craftmatic people were jealous.

There were the encyclopedias — the ones I asked for when Grandma passed away — with letters and newspaper clippings tucked inside. (I still have them.) There was that music box thing that had the string you pulled and it played a song that I can’t name…but if I heard it, I’d know it.

There was also that mystery factor: did my Dad actually LIVE HERE? Yes, when he was a kid. Wait, he slept in THAT room? It was pretty small. And so on; questions that are sensible when you’re 8, and then you kinda understand how things work, not worth discussing.

Grandma’s Tree

BUT, really, the standout was the tree. Grandma’s Tree. Bold, italics, all caps.

A small, ceramic tree, but worthy of its stature.

It would be the centerpiece of the living room. It would plug in and light up and we would put what few gifts there were under that tree; Grandma liked to give out envelopes of cold, hard cash — WE LOVED THAT — and the only other gifts exchanged were between my parents and Grandma, my Aunt and Uncle and Grandma, and anyone with a godparent in the family (thus excluding my older brother, whose godparents were Dad’s buddy from growing up and his wife).

So the tree served its purpose. And it was glorious.

Turns Out…

I’m pretty good with details, but wasn’t 100% on this one: Mom had taken a ceramics class and learned how to make things like…miniature Christmas trees. So she made this particular tree as a gift for Grandma — whose December 2nd birthday kicked off our birthday month — and that meant she wouldn’t have to worry about putting together a large plastic one like ours.

And where is it today?

Mom’s house. Serving as the centerpiece.

Flash Forward A Few Years

When my own kids were growing up, our Christmas Eve traditions were different and much more random; the Methodists didn’t hold services on Christmas Day, so Christmas Eve it was. Younger kids would enjoy the live animals at the earlier service; when the kids got older and we were in town, we’d hit the later service.

Now, things are even more random just about everywhere: Gen Xers like us might have a kid or two home, a kid or two in college, and have to juggle multiple things. A kid or two may work Christmas Eve — nothing wrong with time-and-a-half — and last-minute shopping has given rise to stores staying open later than we remember. (Or is it the other way around?)

My Hope for Christmas Eve 2025

Grandma’s house also had another staple: a little curio thingy that looked like a book that was permanently opened to a page that read:

“Make new friends, Keep the old. One is silver, The other gold.”

As we build new traditions, move from job to job, town to town; or as we find ourselves looking around and wondering where the traditions went, and how to build new ones…

May you find Grandma’s Tree. Or something like it, something that you can hold onto and that can bring you joy.

God Bless.