Jake LaCaze

Efficiency isn’t always the goal. (Any consultant or private equity bros reading my blog just scoffed and clicked away to something else.) Efficiency is worth pursuing, but we shouldn’t strive to be ruthlessly efficient in all things. Such emphasis is bound to lead to a lack of quality.

In American business, efficiency typically emphasizes two points: 1. Do something as cheaply as possible. 2. Do something as quickly as possible. Quality is often an afterthought, if it’s a consideration at all. So, I ask: Where does quality fit into the American efficiency equation? This question has been

In the movie T2 Trainspotting, Mark Renton tells Spud: You’re an addict! So be addicted! Be addicted to something else. There’s something freeing about this admission. In a perfect world, we’d all be able to cure our tendencies for addiction. But for those of us who can’

Why do insecure people believe things they know not to be true? Why do they listen to that nasty voice in their head telling them they’re not good enough? These questions are just some I’m digging into as I’m on the fast track to middle age. Recently

How much is any one item worth? The simple answer: It’s worth whatever someone will pay for it. But what gives art value, whether that value be monetary or otherwise? Uniqueness can’t be the answer, because very little in the world is truly unique. Unique means something is

Details are like salt. A dash adds flavor. But too much kills the dish. Any time there’s confusion, the answer may seem to be more detail. But more details doesn’t guarantee clarity. In fact, more detail may lead to more confusion. Every detail is one more thing for

Time was on Twitter’s side back in the network’s early days. Microblogging was novel and unestablished. And Twitter’s more ‘open’ approach in encouraging users to connect with strangers was a nice alternative to Facebook’s more closed approach of connecting with people you already knew offline. Twitter

Business communication is broken. We send so much time talking and writing (emails, text messages, Slack and Teams, etc.) but we don’t really communicate; we don’t transfer information. How do we solve this? Through tech? We’ve kind of tried that. First, we revolutionized written communication with email,

On this blog, I recently made the case for why writers should kill more trees. That sentiment doesn’t apply only to writers. It applies to artists too. Drawers. Sketchers. Whoever. Art can connect. Art can heal. Art can save. So we need more of it. And we need it