To Whom It May Concern
A letter to my post-LinkedIn professional network, including a career update, a preview of 2025, and highlights from the most interesting interview I watched last week
It’s been nearly a year since I deleted my LinkedIn account and a couple of months since I started reconnecting with my professional network through my new Substack at LevJanashvili.Substack.com. In this email, I bring you a career update, a preview of what you might see on this blog in 2025, and a couple of highlights from the most interesting business-related interview I watched last week.
I’ll start with the career update I discussed at length in To Whom It May Concern. The key point here is that I shifted from marketing subscription-based services to exclusively pursuing full-time engagements. Whether they last a day, a week, a month, a year or more, full-time engagements allow me to work at my best, focusing on one client at a time. This service update also includes my four-part general answer to the question: why hire me?
Part 1 - Achieve better problems through the art of decontamination.
Part 2 - Use Media as Medicine (MaM) to lean into the future of work.
Part 3 - In response to the Innovator’s Dilemma, dance with the new order of things.
Part 4 - Discover new pathways to victory: naming the problem, naming the remedy, naming the price.
Based on my view of the problems to which I can offer uniquely fruitful responses, here’s how I’d like to use this blog in 2025.
Q1: So far, I have posted the basics – my resume, media placements, highlights of my consulting experience, publications related to influence with integrity and mispriced risk, and my DEEL Model for story-driven problem-solving.
Q2: The theme for Q2 is case studies, starting with my case study on cause-driven marketing based on my experience at GMI Ratings.
Q3: Assuming I find partners in dialogue, I'd like to publish at least two podcast episodes focused on the two themes of my career: influence with integrity and mispriced risk.
Q4: More than a decade since I published my opinion piece on obsolete accounting standards, I'd like to revisit the subject.
Since this is technically a newsletter, it should include more than just my own news and links. So, here are a couple of highlights from the most interesting business-related interview I watched last week.
Highlights
“Business is entertaining, but most of the effort in business is dedicated to pretending that it isn’t. Business tends to promote and reward deterministic thinking, which basically makes business formulaic and tedious. Whereas, of course, business is probabilistic. It’s a casino. It’s competing bets on different visions of the future.”
“What we cherish in the business world is a kind of pseudo-science of fake determinism — pretending that things are quantifiable when they are not, pretending that things are formulaic and predictable when they’re anything but.”
If this email made you think of someone whose needs might align with my services, please ask them to subscribe at LevJanashvili.Substack.com. If you’d like to schedule a video meeting, use the link below.