Adam Gonnerman

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...

I've spent much of my career working inside the media industry, and even with that background, this video filled in gaps I didn't know I had. It traces Hollywood's full arc from the founding of the major studios in the early 1900s through the seismic legal and cultural disruptions that reshaped the industry at every turn, all the way to the streaming wars redefining entertainment today. It covers the consolidation plays, the regulatory battles, the unlikely moguls, and the acquisitions that quietly concentrated enormous cultural power into very few hands. And here is Evan Shapiro's most recent map of the media universe , to help give you some perspective on the actual size of these companies.

There are books that explain an industry and books that indict one. Darren Cross's No One Planned This: How Platforms Rewired Entertainment attempts both, and largely succeeds at the first. Tracing the arc of digital entertainment from Netflix's streaming pivot in 2004 through the rise and internal contradictions of the creator economy, Cross builds a compelling historical account of how the business of entertainment got rewired, often without anyone fully intending the outcome. The book's central argument is that the platforms which promised to democratize entertainment ultimately optimized for something narrower: time spent. Discovery, Cross contends, is broken. Algorithmic sameness rewards the familiar over the original. The creator middle class that the internet seemed to promise turned out to be largely a myth, and independence from traditional media structures came with its own costs. This is not a new critique, but Cross assembles it with enough historical texture a...

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...