Adam Gonnerman

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...

"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...