Read or subscribe at michaelwmchugh.com No. 317 | January 30, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start your weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week While most of the U.S. treads through winter, New Orleans is doing the opposite—it gets louder. Music is the […]
Friday Five — Power Over Mind, Leverage, and the Illusion of Control Read More »
The best product doesn’t always win. Power belongs to the person who controls distribution, access, and relationships. The Formula highlights three Bernie Ecclestone business lessons from his tenure at F1: control the game, not the participants; leverage beats authority; and the world revolves around relationships. He mastered all three. Bernie Eccelstone figured that out early—long
Bernie Ecclestone Business Lessons: From the Man Who Controlled Formula One Read More »
Read or subscribe at michaelwmchugh.com No. 317 | January 23, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start your weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Chris Stapleton is a widely respected singer-songwriter and guitarist from Kentucky. He’s won multiple Grammy Awards, Academy of Country
Friday Five — Power Over Mind, Conquering Yourself, See Clearly Read More »
Big gains in performance don’t come from piling on more inputs. They come from a focus on the variable you can control and likely overlook. The ones that others are unwilling to test, or simply don’t understand. Formula One looks like a sport about speed, money, and horsepower. That’s the surface story. Beneath it, the
Focus on the Variable You Can Control: Adrian Newey, Colin Chapman, and Formula One Read More »
Read or subscribe at michaelwmchugh.com No. 316 | January 16, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start your weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Danny Barker was a New Orleans jazz musician, vocalist, and author. Born into a family of musicians, Barker first
Friday Five — Power Over Mind, Find Strength, Don’t Waste Time Read More »
Repetition leads to mastery, but only if you’re repeating the right questions. It’s one of the quieter Tony Hsieh Zappos lessons in Delivering Happiness. At Zappos, repetition showed up as asking why again and again. Hsieh wanted to understand why they were building what they were building. Another lesson Tony Hsieh emphasized was deceptively simple:
Ask Why, Then Wow Customers: Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons Read More »
The Zappos business model, selling shoes online, looks obvious in hindsight. But the real Tony Hsieh Zappos lessons come from how it was actually built—through iteration, mistakes, and deliberate choices. Founder Tony Hsieh learned a few lessons building Zappos. One: learn by doing, not overplanning. Two: never outsource your core competency. Three: invest time, money,
Tony Hsieh Zappos Lessons: How Zappos Was Built Read More »
Read or subscribe to the Friday Five at michaelwmchugh.com No. 315 | January 9, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start the weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Led Zeppelin was an English rock band formed in the late 1960s by Robert Plant
Friday Five — Quit Talking, Begin Doing, What Stands in the Way Becomes the Way Read More »
Tony Hsieh founded Zappos, an online shoe company that Amazon eventually bought for over a billion dollars. Before that, he co-founded Link Exchange, an ad network Microsoft bought outright. Somewhere between these two exits, Hsieh arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: happiness before success mattered more to him than anything else. Delivering Happiness is deceptively simple
Happiness Before Success: What Zappos’ Tony Hsieh Taught Me About Freedom Read More »
Read or subscribe at michaelwmchugh.com No. 314 | January 2, 2026 Welcome to this week’s Friday Five—a short dose of insights, inspiration, and favorites to start the weekend with clarity and focus. Music of the Week Rebirth Brass Band, a New Orleans group, was founded in the early 1980s by Phillip Frazier, his brother Keith,