High Expectations as an Invitation (9-23-26)

Last week was about the magic of vulnerability. This week is about using high expectations as an invitation to strive for something greater.

Tori Brown is a Sr VP in CMH, and is another leader who spoke during our insights conference. Her fireside chat was moderated by Becky Sturman, CMH Market Research Leader. From the moment the conversation started, Tori was dropping knowledge like class was in session. She talked about how insights are critical to driving the business forward. The best insights professionals are consistent, factual, and trustworthy. She shouted out researchers for challenging her and keeping her honest. She kept it real and said that innovation is “over used and under done.” She continually reiterated that the insights function is the keeper of truth for our customers. I was in the audience snapping like a poetry slam.

My favorite comments came when Tori was talking about speed and the pressure to move faster than ever. She explained that no one is ever going to be able to do things at the speed of business and that’s okay. Our goal should be to strive to get better and move faster because our patients deserve that from us. This was my favorite comment, because it created a subtle shift. Instead of moving faster being a stick to punish with, moving faster became a noble goal to strive toward because people are counting on us. I’ve since had people comment that they could almost feel the weight of this be lifted off their shoulders. I know I felt that way. I was pumped and ready to suit up in armor to go slay dragons.

Let’s connect some dots. Have you ever felt beat down because of the world’s desire to move faster? I know I have. I’ve felt this like a measuring stick that was there to always tell me I was failing. Tori’s reframe gave me permission to be human AND the encouragement to strive for something better for myself and for the people counting on me. On top of reframing speed for me, Tori’s comments challenged me to reflect as a leader. As leaders, we have to be able to hold high standards. At the same time, we need to hold and express those standards in a way that invites people to ascend and not in a way that beats them down. This is the difficult thin line we must walk.

The challenge- How will you turn high expectations into an invitation to strive for something greater?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Choosing How to Use Failure (8-19-26)

Last week was about failure, perspective, and avoiding downward spirals. We are going to build on that by reflecting on how we choose to use failure.

I lifted weights this past weekend. I had a goal number of reps I was trying to hit for each exercise. Things were going great, until they weren’t. Suddenly, I couldn’t hit my rep goals anymore, and I fell short on my last few exercises. At this point, I had failed, and I could use this failure in two different ways. I could take this failure and use it as conclusive proof that I was a weak sauce loser. The other option would be to use the failure as fuel, admit I had missed today, and come back ready to triumph. I chose the latter. As I left the workout, I was proud of everything I had accomplished AND fired up to push myself harder.

Let’s make some connections to work. No one is perfect. If you are setting a high bar for yourself then falling short is inevitable. I’ve shared before that my high bar for my role is to deliver magic, to crush all my goals and make it look effortless. There are some places where I’ve delivered this level of magic. There are others where I’ve fallen short of my goals. In those shortcomings I can see how I could have done things differently or better. I could use these failures and shortcomings in two different ways. I could use these as evidence that I’m a horrible at my job and should give up. (I’ve been down that rabbit hole. Have you? It’s not fun.) I can also use these failures and shortcomings as learnings and as motivation to do things differently and do better.

Now take a moment to think about your work. The last time you made a mistake, did you allow it to eat you alive, or did you use it as fuel? No matter who you are failure is inevitable. How we choose to use that failure is up to each of us.

The challenge: How will you choose to use failure?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Harvesting Failure (8-5-26)

Happy Wednesday,

Last week was about failures and premortems. This week is about harvesting failure.

Pretend for a minute that you are a farmer. Pretend that you were supposed to plant a field full of corn. The crops start growing you and notice something interesting. You have a lot of corn, but you also have potatoes. You weren’t trying to grow potatoes. They just showed up.

At this point, you’ve failed to plant a field full of corn. With that said, when it’s harvest time what will you do? Will you only harvest the corn, leaving the potatoes to rot and fall apart? Will you harvest the potatoes too and see what you can do with them? Will you spend time analyzing the soil to see what happened?

What does this have to do with failure? This week’s analogy is all about learning from and making the most of what happened. I would hope that even though you didn’t plant the potatoes, you’d still harvest them and do something with them. I hope you would spend time analyzing the soil to see what happened.

We talk all the time about being okay with failure. We say how we should fail forward and that we should celebrate failure. What we don’t spend enough time thinking about is how we should harvest failure. Rather than failing and trying to forget it, what learnings can we bring forward with us? I’m not happy that I failed in various points in my career, but I am thankful for what I’ve taken from that to make me better.

The challenge: What will you harvest from failure?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Taking Time to Soak It All In (7-20-26)

This is a bonus blog about taking time to soak in where you are and what you’ve done.

Last Friday, my boss sent me some recognition about something I recently delivered. Within a few seconds I had read the email, thought “that’s nice”, sent a quick reply, filed it away into a folder where I keep the recognition I get, and started to move to the next thing. The email was already sorted into the folder when I paused for a second. I decided to stop rushing to the next thing. I sat there for a moment and let myself absorb what I had delivered, the feedback, and the recognition I had received. I allowed myself to feel proud and accomplished. I slowed down and spent a few seconds taking it all in and felt all the better for it. Then, and only then, did I move to the next task.

Let’s connect dots. Has anything like this ever happened to you? Have you ever been so lost in the grind that you just keep moving from thing to thing? Are you ever so lost in the grind that you don’t let the achievement and recognition sink in?

If this has happened to you before, I’m sure you can also attest to how exhausting and mentally draining this is. It’s so easy to get lost in all of this. Sometimes, we just need to slow down. Sometimes, we need to take a deep breath, look around, and be proud of where we are and how we got here.

The challenge: Will you take a moment to soak in what you’ve achieved and what you’ve done?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

What would cause me to miss achieving my goals? (1-28-26)

This week will be the last in our series about questions we should ask ourselves at the beginning of the year. This week I want us to ask ourselves, “What would cause me to miss my goals?”

In January we spend time outlining goals and objectives. We focus our efforts on identifying what winning looks like. It’s easy to assume that things will go well, but the chances of everything going well is slim to none.

Recently, I asked myself, “What would cause me to miss my goals? What would cause me to lose?” I quickly identified a few things. I will miss my goals if I don’t invest my time in the right things. I’ll miss if I don’t carve out the time to do the right things. I’ll miss if I’m not being intentional about orchestrating change management efforts. I’ll miss if I don’t get certain projects moving in Q1.

After identifying the things that would make me lose, I took a second to look at my plan for the week. I quickly realized that I had been caught in the swirl. I was doing a lot of things, but they likely weren’t the right things. They were a distraction. As a result, I moved a few things around on the calendar, blocked time for key work, and I gave myself permission to be slow and non-responsive on a few other things. Ultimately, I was able to make good progress on things that mattered. Looking forward, I’m already blocking time and thinking about other things I can do to minimize my chance of missing and increase my chance of being successful.

How does this connect to work? The world moves fast. If we aren’t intentional about things we might end up participating in behaviors that will lead to us not reaching our goals. Spending time doing a pre-mortem and identifying the key things that go wrong brings awareness and gives us a chance to gameplan on how we will handle these things. Be honest. Take a look at this month. How much time did you spend on things that will lead to you being successful vs how much time did you spend on things that will result in you missing? What is getting in the way of you making progress?

The challenge: Will you identify what would cause you to miss your goals and then take action?

Bonus- You can apply this thinking to your personal life. Something that will make me miss my physical health goals is pushing myself too hard too fast. My shoulders aren’t what they used to be, and after pushing them too hard with weight that was heavier than I should have been doing I needed to take a few weeks off for them to heal. I’ll go a lot slower from here on out.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

I hope we are all like the Grinch (12-10-25)

This will be the last blog of 2025. If you’ve been on this distribution list for a while, you might recognize that I usually end the year with this entry. I feel it is just as relevant now as it was in years past. Besides, we watch the same holiday specials every year, so we can revisit the same holiday themed blogs, right? 😉 For our final blog of the year we will look at How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

During this holiday season I hope we are all like the Grinch. Pretty strange thing to say, right? Let me explain why I feel this way. You may know the story of the Grinch. He is a grumpy creature who decides he will try to steal Christmas from the Whos. He concocts an elaborate scheme and then steals all of the presents, decorations, etc. in an effort to ruin their holiday. This negative attitude is what we often associate with the Grinch, but this isn’t the end of his story. The Grinch grows as a character, and life is all about growing, changing, and becoming better.

The Grinch has stolen the gifts, and then he hears the Whos singing. Suddenly, it hits him right as his sleigh full of gifts starts to go over the cliff. “And what happened, then? Well, in Whoville they say – that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day. And then – the true meaning of Christmas came through, and the Grinch found the strength of *ten* Grinches, plus two!” He saves the gifts from falling over the cliff, rides into Whoville, and serves the roast beast at the feast.

The reason I hope we are all like the Grinch this year is because he grows and becomes a better person. He begins filled with apathy, malice, and grumpiness, and then he allows love in and it fundamentally changes him. How have you changed and grown this year? Wherever you are right now, we have the chance to be better. Imagine how different the world be if all of our hearts grew like the Grinch’s. Here is to all of us knowing what it feels like when our hearts grow three sizes in a day.

As always, thanks so much for reading. Your reading and encouragement throughout the year is the best gift I could ever ask for. Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and happy holidays for anything you might be celebrating! I hope you disconnect and recharge. I hope you find peace, love, and fulfillment.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Time, Perspective, and Type 2 Fun (9-22-25)

A bottle of white liquid pouring out of a dropper

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Happy Monday!

You’re getting a blog on Monday, because I’m going to do a few things for work this morning, and then I’m taking the rest of the week off. Last week was about making the most of a situation. This week is about time, perspective, and type 2 fun.

Recap: Diane and a 4-month-old Alice are living with my parents. It’s chaos. My wife is looking at potential houses to buy, which is totally stressing her out. My dad goes with my wife to check out houses to help out with Alice. Anyway, they go to a house and long story short, my dad knocks over the bottle of Alice’s milk and gets it all over the dining room table in the house. This takes an already stressful situation and makes it worse. They are frantically cleaning it up, and Diane is worried about potentially ruining someone’s table and is feeling more overwhelmed than ever. Ultimately, everything is okay. Fast forward a few hours, and the milk spilling incident has turned from super stressful to hilarious. They tell the story to my mom when she comes home, and everyone is laughing. Fast forward to today, and the milk spilling incident is one of our favorite stories to tell.

Let’s connect some dots. When you read the story above, I hope you smiled or chuckled a bit. It’s kind of funny. It’s also a situation we can all relate to. Maybe you didn’t spill milk, but we’ve all made a mess which turned a stressful situation into something even worse. However, with a little time and perspective, we can begin to see the humor in the moment. My family calls these kinds of things type 2 fun, a phrase we learned from a friend. Type 1 fun is when the situation is enjoyable and funny as it happens. Type 2 fun is when the situation is bad at the moment, but later on you see the joy and humor in it. As I get older, I’ve learned that most initially stressful situations in life end up as Type 2 fun.

The challenge: When you run into something tough/stressful/bad will you be able to create the distance and perspective to see the joy and humor?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Mario Kart and Choosing the Right Set up for the Task (8-13-25)

Mario Kart 8 Kart Customization

Happy Wednesday,

Recently, my family and I have got back into playing Mario Kart 8 on Switch, which is the inspiration behind this blog series. Our first entry will be about choosing the right set up for the task in front of you.

In case you’re not familiar with Mario Kart, here is how it works. You choose from a collection of Super Mario characters along with a variety of vehicle, tire, and glider options. These choices impact your speed, acceleration, weight, handling, and off-road capabilities. Here was my predicament. Typically, I would choose characters and set ups that were higher on speed and not so much on acceleration. This was great at the lower difficulty levels. Then, once I got to 200cc, I was no longer able to have success with this set up. I slid off courses, struggled, and ultimately lost. As I reflected, I realized that 200cc is more about stopping and going vs staying at a continual top speed. My builds focused on speed may have worked in previous situations, but now I was facing a different challenge. I needed to adapt. Maxing out speed was no longer serving me. Instead, I needed to choose characters, carts, tires, and gliders that would give me high acceleration. Once I switched to this new set up, I started winning!

Making connections. Work is a lot like Mario Kart. We have different options of tools and skillsets we can use to solve problems. Over time, we find set ups that we become comfortable with that we can use over and over again. This serves us well, until things change. Then, our tried and true methods are no longer effective. Has this ever happened to you? You better believe it’s happened to me. From time to time, we need to take a step back to understand the problem we are solving for. From time to time, we need to take a step back and ask whether our current tools and skills are the right ones to solve this problem.

The challenge: Will you be willing to switch your set up when the environment and challenges around you change?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

AI and Being Brave Enough to “Fail Fast” and “Fail Forward” 4-2-25

This week is about AI and being brave enough to “fail fast” and “fail forward”. I dedicate this to Jax Penso and our tech team.

A few months ago, Jax approached me with an idea. She had a complicated dataset filled with quant and qual data. She wanted to explore if AI could help dissect, analyze, and make connections faster and more effectively than humans could. I loved the vision and the willingness to experiment.

I told Jax that what she was asking was going to be incredibly difficult, and no one (in our company or beyond) had quite figured out how to do this with AI yet. Jax wasn’t phased. She was willing to explore, so we got a team together and started working. The team acknowledged that what we were setting out to do would be incredibly difficult. We knew that there was a good chance that things would not work out perfectly. We also knew that by pushing the boundaries of what was possible we would learn a lot. In the end, our prototype didn’t meet our lofty expectations. HOWEVER, we gathered a lot of learnings along the way.

Let’s make connections. How often do you hear people talk about being brave enough to “fail fast” or “fail forward”? I’m sure you hear it a lot. Those are some of the all-time most popular corporate buzz words. Now, how often do you see people who are truly brave enough to fail fast or fail forward? That’s a rarity. It would have been easy for Jax and the team to decide not to pursue the project, once they understood that the chances of perfect success was slim to none. It would have been easier, BUT it would not have been as fruitful.

Imagine how different work would be if more folks acted like Jax and the team? At the end of the day, the team didn’t fail. They learned. The team didn’t fail, they created a new foundation. Pursuing the impossible led us to exploring new technologies and approaches. It also challenged us to rethink and better embrace the Agile mentality. We didn’t make it to the summit, but other folks will be able to leverage our learnings to get them a head start.

The challenge: Are you brave enough to explore, even when you’re not 100% sure how it will turn out? Are you one of the rare people brave enough to “fail fast” or “fail forward”?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Your Brand Is Not for Everyone… and That’s Okay (4-17-24)

Last week was about exploring the problems your personal brand uniquely solves. This week is about understanding you and your brand aren’t for everyone… and that’s okay!

I was in an interview once and they asked me what one of my favorite brands was. I explained that it was Sprecher Root Beer. I enjoy a high-quality root beer, and that’s exactly what Sprecher stands for. It’s root beer made with Wisconsin honey giving it a smooth taste. It comes in thick glass bottles. You only put things in glass bottles if they are worth something, and we all know beverages from glass bottles are always better than beverages from cans or plastic. Restaurants and places that carry Sprecher root beer show me that they care about quality and about doing things a little differently.

I imagine that most of you reading the blog this week don’t care much about root beer. You probably read the above paragraph and was like, “That’s nice… I guess.” You won’t think about root beer again or you’ll say to yourself, “A+W and MUG root beer are just fine.” All of this is okay. At the end of the day Sprecher is NOT a brand for everybody. It’s a brand for people who enjoy high quality root beer, and not everyone can be as awesome as me 😉

What does this have to do with personal branding? As humans, I think we naturally feel the pressure to please everyone, and as a result we want a personal brand that is liked by EVERYONE. I know I feel this way sometimes (or a lot of times). When this thought kicks in, I try to remember two things. First, pleasing everyone is impossible. Second, attempting to please everyone would require you to water down so much of who you are that you wouldn’t be you anymore. Much like Sprecher root beer, if your brand is truly built on you and who you are, then your brand shouldn’t be for everyone and for every situation. There is power in embracing this. Just because my brand doesn’t work for you and for a situation doesn’t mean it’s bad or I’m bad. It just means the situation isn’t the right fit, and having the right fit is more important than force fitting something.

The challenge: Can you accept that your brand isn’t for everyone and every situation? (Per previous challenges- Who and what situation is YOUR brand for?)

Bonus deep thought/confession: I’d argue that reflecting to define your brand is relatively easy. The harder thing is deciding to accept yourself (and your brand) for who you are, what you do, and how you do things. Earlier in my career I had this weird love/hate relationship with being known as this inclusive storyteller poet guy. (Truth be told, this love/hate relationship still continues sometimes, but it was fierce and brutal when I was younger). I had decided that “the world” only rewards people who are seen as “technically smart” in certain areas and often doesn’t appreciate “soft skills”. As a result, I had this inner battle and sometimes outward flinching even when people were giving me compliments about my inclusion and storytelling skills. It’s like I’d get irritated at them for seeing me for who I was, because I didn’t think who I was would be valued by the organization. People would give me compliments and I’d essentially be like, “Yeah, but nobody cares about that stuff. I need to do and be X.” Does that make sense to anybody? Have you ever felt that way? I often felt that I was less than and not good enough. Over time, I’ve come to realize and embrace that my inclusive nature and storytelling skills are superpowers that make me unique and enable me to make a difference wherever I am. If you ever go through something similar, I hope you ultimately stumble into this understanding and peace as well. (Side note, Tori Brown, if you are reading this, I know you’re smiling/laughing/smirking after having this convo with me a few times in my career. At least this shows I heard you 😉. Along those lines, I hope you all have a Tori Brown in your life who helps you realize you are just totally wrong and blind for not embracing yourself.)

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry