Cody Hofmockel

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The team is called into the conference room to pitch ideas on how to solve the company’s latest problem. There’s some silence, a few questions, and finally, someone tosses out a bold idea. Everyone perks up like a card shark just went all-in at the poker table. Then a colleague mentions the budget won’t cover … Read more

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It was the mid-sixties, in a concert hall in Stockholm, Sweden. The young pianist was deep into one of the best nights of the tour. The band was locked in. The teenage drummer was on fire and the saxophone was flat-out screaming. Then, during the trumpet player’s solo, the pianist landed on a chord so … Read more

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Grit it out. Grind harder. Push through. Be bulletproof. Look at the language we’ve built around good professional work. Nearly all of it is borrowed from war or from pain. We tell each other to be warriors, to have the mental toughness of a Navy SEAL, to crush the numbers and to grind until it … Read more

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The story of the Endurance and Ernest Shackleton is one of the greatest and most told leadership stories. But I want to focus on a specific detail that had nothing to do with food or shelter, but may have mattered as much as either. In 1915, the British explorer’s attempt to cross the continent ended … Read more

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I’ve been deep in research lately for Co-Flow, my next book about creative collaboration. A big part of that work involves unlearning (so I can help unteach) one of the most stubborn ideas in our culture: the myth of the lone genius. We grow up on stories of solitary brilliance, the inventor alone in the … Read more

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In October 1947, a 24-year-old test pilot named Chuck Yeager climbed into a bright orange rocket plane with two broken ribs he had hidden from his bosses. Over the California desert, he flew the Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound, something many engineers of the era believed might tear an aircraft apart. It … Read more

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Recently, I signed up for an improv comedy workshop. It was “heuristic” research (where the researcher becomes part of the experiment) for my forthcoming book, Co-Flow. I’ve improvised on the guitar in jazz clubs for decades. Improvising one-liners in front of strangers, it turns out, is an entirely different animal. I was nervous. Eight of … Read more

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There’s a principle in jazz that every business leader and professional should know about. It’s called comping. It’s short for “accompanying,” but that doesn’t quite do it justice. Comping is the active, improvised, responsive work a rhythm section does to shape the solo above it: the chords the pianist chooses, the notes the bassist leaves … Read more

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There’s a term tossed around Silicon Valley that I love: non-consensus. It’s basically doing the unorthodox, unexpected thing instead of the obvious thing that everyone else gravitates to. Unfortunately, the term is more often ignored than embraced due to herd mentality. Investors look at a new pitch and try to figure out what successful company … Read more

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Before my next meeting, sales pitch, dinner with my family, or the next email I’m about to send, I’ve started asking myself a question. Who’s showing up? We’ve all heard of the concept of our “best selves,” but there aren’t a lot of tools to turn that concept into a tangible reality. One that I’ve … Read more