It’s Easter Sunday and I’m building things. Not egg baskets — products, prototypes, the kind of work where the inspiration and energy don’t pause politely for holidays. What I feel is momentum — the particular forward motion that comes when you’ve been circling an idea long enough and something finally clicks into place.
This isn’t the first Easter I’ve lost to building. Fifteen years ago, I rented a floor sander and found myself only halfway through the job when brunch was supposed to start. The family carried on without me. And I finished the floor. I’m not advocating for missing time with the people you love. But I do think creative work sometimes demands a kind of surrender that doesn’t check the calendar first. Maya Angelou rented hotel rooms in every city she lived in — stripped the art from the walls, refused to let housekeeping change the sheets, and wrote lying across the bed until her elbow was rough with calluses (her story). Georgia O’Keeffe spent years restoring a compound in the New Mexico desert that became inseparable from her art. Thoreau went to Walden Pond.
The work has its own clock. So this week, instead of my usual exploration, I want to point you toward three things created by others that are worth your time…while I get back to building. Onward!
What to Read, Watch, and Listen to This Week
🎧 Listen: Lenny’s Podcast — Anthropic’s $1B to $19B Growth Run with Amol Avasare, Head of Growth at Anthropic
There’s too much in this conversation to summarize, but one thread particularly caught my attention: how Anthropic scaled from $1 billion to over $19 billion in ARR in just fourteen months while remaining mission-driven. That’s the tension most companies claim they care about and quietly abandon under growth pressure. Daniel Aronson might call this “surfacing submerged value” — the discipline of seeing what compounds beneath the surface while everyone else is fixated on the visible numbers. Worth the full listen.
📖 Read: Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation by Linda A. Hill, Emily Tedards, and Jason Wild (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2026)
I’m early in this book and already marking it up. Linda Hill and her co-authors — including Jason Wild, former Global VP of CEO Co-Innovation at Microsoft — identify three roles leaders play in driving innovation at scale: architect, bridger, and catalyst. Chapter 1 alone surfaces lessons that echo patterns Dean Carignan and I documented in The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft: that innovation is not invention, that the words leaders choose create conditions for what’s possible, that collaboration is not consensus, even “bridgers”, some of you might recognize, are “boundary crossers.” Hill’s research gives these ideas new empirical grounding and global scope. I’ll have more to say about this book in a future piece.
📺 Watch: Baltimore Bridge Collapse — PBS NOVA and Key Bridge Disaster: Reflect, Recover, Rebuild — MPT/PBS
These struck my engineering chords. The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse wasn’t just a structural failure — it was a systems failure, the kind that reveals how much we rely on infrastructure we never examine until it’s gone. The NOVA episode digs into why the bridge failed so catastrophically and how many bridges worldwide share the same vulnerabilities. The MPT documentary tells the human story — the first responders, the longshoremen, the community of Turner Station, and the long road to rebuilding. Together, they illustrate something I think about constantly in my own work: we don’t build resilient systems. We build systems, and then we’re surprised when they aren’t resilient. The regenerative data center, the geopolitics-resilient food system, the crash-ready bridge — these solutions exist but don’t get moved forward until the fire is already burning. Or, in this case, until the bridge has already fallen down. That’s part of why I’m not at brunch — some of these things need someone to close the door and build them.
Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft:
Pattern #1: Innovating Every Day — Innovation is a discipline, not an event. The same applies to building. The floor sander didn’t know it was Easter.
Pattern #3: Innovating with Everyone — Hill’s “bridger” role maps to what we call “boundary crossers” in Innovation at Microsoft. Her research finds the pattern across a wide variety of global organizations; our book goes deeper into the practices, tools, and disciplines that make it work. The two books are natural companions — Genius at Scale as the leadership narrative, Innovation at Microsoft as the practitioner’s workbook.
The Key Bridge and systems resilience — The book’s case studies repeatedly show that organizations wait for crisis before investing in systemic innovation. The bridge collapse is no different.
About the AI in this piece: I use AI as a writing and research partner throughout the Innovating Out Loud series. The observations, opinions, and editorial choices are mine.
