REVIEW: All That We Burn by Marisa Billions (4.5-stars)

 All That We Burn — A  (Sapphic) Thriller for Readers Who Don’t Usually Read Thrillers

I don’t usually read thrillers. My default genre is science fiction, where suspension of disbelief comes easily because the world isn’t meant to resemble my own. When a story takes place on another planet, in a future society, or in a reality with different rules, I don’t expect the worldbuilding to match my lived experience. I’m willing to accept the unfamiliar as long as the internal logic holds. Contemporary thrillers, on the other hand, often ask me to believe that ordinary people behave in extraordinary ways without giving me the psychological scaffolding to buy into it. That’s usually where the genre loses me.

But Marisa Billions keeps pulling me in anyway. All That We Burn is the clearest example of why her work is growing on me. It’s marketed as a thriller, but what makes it compelling isn’t the danger or the twists. It’s the way she writes about people who are desperate to be seen and equally desperate to hide the parts of themselves they fear will be rejected. That emotional architecture is what makes the story believable, even when the plot takes sharp turns. She builds her world from the inside out, through psychology rather than geography, and that’s a kind of worldbuilding I can trust.

The three central women in this story are all performing versions of themselves. Parker, the hyper‑competent lawyer with the trademark pompadour and bespoke suits, projects absolute control. She wins every case, commands every room, and maintains a polished exterior that leaves no room for doubt. Underneath, though, she’s terrified of vulnerability. Her competence is a shield, and the moment someone threatens her emotional equilibrium, she collapses in ways she never would professionally.

Calypso, with her dark hair and distinct golden eyes, is a Katrina refugee who rebuilt her life into something curated and artistic. She owns a tattoo shop, lives in a loft that feels like an artist's sanctuary, and has created a world where she can finally breathe. But her stability is built on escape. She’s reinvented herself so thoroughly that the past feels like a ghost she can outrun, until it catches up with her in the form of Macy.

Macy is the redheaded cop who is always fumbling, always dropping the ball, always trying to be someone she isn’t. Off duty, she dresses in boho and hippie clothing, projecting a softness and free‑spirited ease that she can’t sustain. She’s petite, fiery, and emotionally volatile, and she’s been carrying a torch for Parker for years. That unrequited longing becomes the fuse that ignites the entire story. Macy’s jealousy, insecurity, and desperation drive her to fabricate a New Orleans case file accusing Calypso of crimes she never committed. It’s a lie built on Parker’s deepest fears, and Parker falls for it instantly. The woman who never loses a case doesn’t even fact‑check the file. Her emotional blind spots undo her in a way no opposing counsel ever could.

The unraveling that follows is messy and human. Calypso flees. Macy attacks her in a remote Washington cabin. No body is found. Parker spirals between guilt and denial. Javier, one of Calypso’s clients, steps in with a kind of ambiguous menace that Billions handles beautifully. Javier is always performing a version of himself too. Maybe he’s involved in sex trafficking. Maybe he’s killed someone. Maybe he hasn’t. The point is that he plays the role of the dangerous man so convincingly that when the moment comes, he delivers exactly the version of himself he’s been selling all along.

Around these three women orbit characters who add texture and grounding. Xander and Xochitl are the stable straight couple, the emotionally functional pair who quietly support Calypso without needing to perform anything. They’re the ballast in a story full of people who are constantly shape‑shifting to survive. Parker’s assistants, too, become crucial; they’re the ones who finally uncover Macy’s lies and force Parker to confront the truth she was too afraid to see.

What makes the book work isn’t just the plot, though the twists are well‑timed and satisfying. It’s the worldbuilding—not in the sci‑fi sense of constructing a new reality, but in the psychological sense of making the characters’ choices feel inevitable. Calypso’s tattoo shop feels lived‑in. Parker’s legal world is crisp and sterile, mirroring her emotional defenses. Macy’s police work is chaotic and full of self‑inflicted wounds. Even the intimacy scenes are handled with restraint and emotional intelligence. They’re sensual without being anatomical, grounded in tension and proximity rather than explicit detail. It’s adult without being clinical, which is rare in queer thrillers.

By the time I finished the book, I found myself wanting to Google “Calypso Boudreaux” to see if she had a backstory website. That’s how vivid she is. And that’s ultimately why Marisa Billions’ work is growing on me. She writes thrillers that feel like character studies with a pulse. Her stories are about the cost of vulnerability, the masks we wear, and the danger of being truly known. Even if thrillers aren’t your usual genre, All That We Burn has the depth, tension, and psychological nuance to pull you in.

REVIEW: All That We Burn by Marisa Billions

RATING: 4.5-stars

REVIEW: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews (4-Stars)

 

I’m not a romantasy reader — I’m a sci‑fi reader who noticed this book when it was on NetGalley because the premise had promise. And it turns out the book isn’t romantasy at all. It’s a competence fantasy wrapped in ancient technology and identity reconstruction.

- or - 

A story about competence, arrested development, and the long road back to choosing yourself.

I didn’t expect This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me to be a book about identity reconstruction, but that’s exactly what it is. Maggie isn’t a chosen one; she’s a woman whose life stalled at sixteen after a catastrophic breakup, who spent the next nine years drifting through the gig economy, undervaluing herself, and quietly shrinking from her own potential. When she’s dropped into Rellas, she doesn’t suddenly become magical — she becomes competent, and the world responds to that competence like it’s a superpower.

That’s the real magic of Book 1.

Maggie negotiates with mercenaries, frees enslaved children, recruits one of the deadliest knights in the kingdom, and disposes of bodies in what might be a river monster or might be a piece of ancient biological waste‑processing tech. She thwarts a serial killer. She dies — repeatedly — and is resurrected by whatever ancient system is still running under the skin of this world, a “magic” that feels more like automated repair protocols than divine intervention. She builds a household from nothing. She makes allies. She makes enemies. She survives. And she does all of this while still thinking of herself as “average,” “plain,” “middling.” She hasn’t caught up to the fact that she’s the protagonist of her own life.

And in the middle of all this, the book keeps dropping in these fabulous square pastries — flaky, sweet, portable — and Maggie, being from Austin, immediately recognizes the vibe. They’re kolaches by another name. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s doing real work: it grounds her, reminds her (and us) that she had a life before Rellas, and that she’s carrying pieces of that life with her even as she’s forced to reinvent herself. It’s one of the few sensory bridges between the world she left and the world she’s trying to survive.

The book knows this. The world knows this. Maggie doesn’t — not yet.

And that’s where the men come in.

Because yes, the men are absurdly good‑looking. Comically good‑looking. Ramond, Reynald, Solentine, Severin — every one of them is described with the kind of detail usually reserved for the cover model of a romantasy paperback. Meanwhile, the women are framed entirely differently — not as objects of desire, but as fully realized adults with mastery. Clover is tall and “average,” sure, but she’s also an elite lady’s maid, costurier, hair and makeup artist, etiquette encyclopedia, and household COO rolled into one. Shana is a former knight who can swing a mace, command a kitchen, and produce pastries that could probably start a small religion. These women aren’t decorative; they’re the backbone of the world. They’re what competence looks like when it’s lived, not fantasized.

This isn’t male gaze. It’s a narrative trick.

The men aren’t romantic prizes. They’re archetypes — masks, roles, life paths. They’re the versions of adulthood Maggie never chose for herself. Each one represents a different future she could have had if she’d ever believed she deserved one. The fact that they’re beautiful is almost beside the point; it’s shorthand for “this is a fantasy of possibility,” not “this is a fantasy of romance.”

And the masks matter. Book 1 ends with a cascade of unmaskings: Ramond revealing his intentions, Reynald revealing his emotional investment, Solentine revealing his lineage and long game, Severin revealing his leverage and ruthlessness. Everyone has been pretending to be someone else. Everyone except Maggie, who still hasn’t learned how to pretend — or how to choose.

Her kidnapping at the end isn’t a romantic twist; it’s the culmination of her reactive nature. She still sacrifices herself for others. She still doesn’t see her own value. She still hasn’t claimed her agency. Book 2 is going to force that reckoning.

And then there’s the magic — or rather, the “magic.”

Rellas is a four‑millennia‑old society sitting on top of ancient systems it no longer understands. The Eight Families’ powers behave like genetic access keys. The Strelka behaves like a biotech guardian. The river creature that eats bodies behaves like a maintenance system. The mage blasting a meteorite with a laser is not fantasy; it’s physics. The world is running on decayed infrastructure, and the people inside it have mythologized the user interface.

Book 1 only shows us six of the Eight Great Families. We get the warrior families — Arvel’s Enduring Flame, Everard’s Fatefire, Bors’ Rageglow, Savaric’s Exultant Call — and two non‑warrior families, Hreban’s Mirror Heart and Yolenta’s Gold Glean. The other two Great Families are conspicuously absent, and that absence is not an oversight. It’s a promise. Their magic is either subtle, dangerous, or plot‑critical, and the authors are saving them for when Maggie is ready to understand them.

Which brings me back to Maggie.

Book 1 isn’t about romance, or magic, or even politics. It’s about a woman who has been emotionally frozen for nearly a decade suddenly being forced into motion. It’s about competence rediscovered. It’s about the world responding to her as if she matters long before she believes she does. It’s about the slow, painful, necessary process of reimagining a self you abandoned years ago.

The men are beautiful. The magic is ancient tech. The pastries taste like home. The women are competence incarnate. The society is old and brittle. But the heart of the book is Maggie learning, step by step, that she is allowed to choose her own life.

Book 1 is survival. Book 2 will be agency.

And I’m here for that journey. REVIEW: This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

RATING: 4-Stars

Personal Branding Without the Costume

 (Gender, public space, law enforcement, and why my cats have a better Instagram presence than I do)

Most conversations about “personal branding” still assume that identity is something you perform. A curated aesthetic. A polished narrative. A set of signals designed to make you legible to others. A lifestyle you’re supposed to package and distribute.

But some of us never opted into that contract.

I’ve spent my entire life being misread by people who rely on gender performance as their primary sorting mechanism. If you don’t present the way they expect, they fill in the blanks with whatever story makes them most comfortable. And they’ll defend that story even when the facts contradict it.

What’s interesting is how different the world looks when you stop treating gender as unpaid labor. When you stop decorating yourself to be “readable.” When you stop performing a role you never auditioned for.

The people who matter don’t need the costume

The people who actually see you — colleagues, friends, the ones who pay attention — don’t need the performance. My stepdad Tony had an entire online WebTV community in the 90s who knew him for his humor, curiosity, and generosity. None of them knew he used a wheelchair. They knew him, not the packaging. They knew his mind, not his body. They knew his presence, not his performance.

That’s the version of personal branding I believe in: competence, clarity, curiosity, and contribution. Not aesthetics. Not performance. Not compliance.

Gender policing doesn’t stop at gender — it bleeds into public space and law enforcement

One of the things people don’t talk about enough is how gender nonconformity affects your experience with the law — not just police, but the informal “law” of public space: who gets to stand where, who gets shoved aside, who gets interrogated, who gets treated as out of place. Geography doesn’t protect you from gender policing. Visibility doesn’t protect you. Neighborhood doesn’t protect you. Compliance — or perceived compliance — is the only thing that protects you, and even that is conditional.

A few years ago, I was out with two friends — Matt and Matthew — standing at the corner of 18th & Castro waiting to cross the street. Possibly the gayest intersection in America. I was right behind them, wearing textile motorcycle pants, a very dirty hi‑viz jacket, and carrying my helmet in a messenger bag slung over my shoulder.

There was zero space between me and the Matts. And yet a man — shorter than me, dressed in a Marlon Brando leather jacket and studded cap — started physically shoving me, trying to wedge himself into a space that did not exist. He told me I was taking up too much space (we were standing there first, he approached me). Then he escalated into yelling misogynistic slurs at me and trying to haul me off the curb to stand behind my friends.

To my right was a utility pole. There was nowhere to go. The light changed. We started crossing. He kept shoving and yelling.

And then something remarkable happened: Three guys in plaid madras shorts, boat shoes, and long-sleeve button-downs — very 80s preppy — stopped, turned in unison, and the one in the middle pointed and said, loudly and incredulously:

“IS SOMEONE GETTING QUEER-BASHED IN THE GAYEST INTERSECTION IN AMERICA?”

They started jeering at him, calling out his behavior, and he bolted.

Obliviousness is its own kind of privilege

What still stands out to me about that day isn’t just the man who shoved me and called me misogynistic slurs. It’s that the two people I was with — Matt and Matthew — were completely oblivious to what was happening inches behind them.

Later, when we discussed this incident, their response was the same one I’ve heard my entire life: “You must’ve done something.”

These are married gay men. They know what it’s like to be targeted. They know what it’s like to be shoved, insulted, or threatened for existing. But they were still so insulated by their own gender legibility — two men who look like men, performing masculinity in a way that reads as “normal” — that they couldn’t see misogyny even when it was happening in physical contact range.

They didn’t see the dynamic. They didn’t see the gender policing. They didn’t see the entitlement. They didn’t see the hostility directed at me for being:

• a woman not performing femininity

• a motorcyclist in gear

• taller than the man who targeted me

• not visually “readable” to him

To them, it was just “some guy being weird.” To me, it was a pattern I’ve lived with for decades.

This is the part people don’t understand: If you’ve never been targeted for your gender presentation, you don’t see it happening to others — even when it’s happening right next to you.

And when you don’t see it, you default to the easiest narrative: “You must’ve done something.”

People protect their worldview before they protect each other.

I’m not feminine or masculine. I’m not a brand archetype. I’m not a curated persona.

I’m just a person who likes building things, learning things, and giving people space to help. I don’t need to be pretty or attractive to be valuable. Not believing I’m attractive doesn’t mean I have a self‑esteem issue. It means my self‑esteem isn’t built on appearance.

People seem to have lost the ability to laugh at themselves. There’s so much cultural investment in “pretty/attractive = good” that any deviation from that script gets treated like a crisis. For me, it’s simple: I don’t need to be attractive to be valuable. And frankly, it’s none of my business what you think about my appearance. Just don’t let me walk around with food on my face.

Even on Instagram — the platform built around image — I don’t curate a lifestyle or present a polished version of myself. I mostly share my cats’ lives: their routines, their personalities, the small moments that make me laugh. It’s not a brand. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s not a performance. It’s just the part of my world that’s fun to document.

I don’t share my life. I share their lives. They’re the ones with the curated feed.

The unpaid labor of gender

I’ve had people my whole life try to conscript me into gender performance. Strangers commenting on my face when I was ten. Teenagers in the 80s who couldn’t handle a girl who didn’t do big hair and heavy makeup. A boyfriend’s mother who kept trying to “fix” me with skirts and ruffles. People who assume that if I’m not performing femininity, something must be wrong.

My trans women friends don’t do that. They understand something the others don’t: gender expression is personal, not compulsory. They know what it costs to perform gender. They know what it costs not to. They know what it means to choose.

Work is where this matters most

And for the record: if you hire me, I will happily wear any corporate‑identity polo shirt you hand me. I’ll show up, do the work, collaborate, build, troubleshoot, lead, and deliver.

But you cannot pay me enough to dress “girly” and also expect me to feel comfortable. And if I don’t feel comfortable, I don’t do my best work.

My work is the value. Not the costume. Not the performance. Not the aesthetic. Just the work.

Ultimately it comes down to "my gender is nobody's business." I refuse the unpaid labor of gender. I’m opting out of the job description. I’m rejecting the idea that I owe anyone a performance. I’m rejecting the idea that branding requires a costume. I’m rejecting the idea that identity must be decorative.

I’m just a person. And that’s enough.

REVIEW: My Dumpling, Your Dumpling by KE Bartlet (4-stars)

  A Distinctive Debut: Competence, Youth, and a New Lens on Military Fiction

I picked up My Dumpling, Your Dumpling because I wanted a challenge. I think it’s important to read outside my usual genre preferences — not for escapism, but because good fiction offers a particular worldview. When an author succeeds, you’re not just reading a story; you’re trying on a different cognitive framework. That’s the part I find interesting.

My academic background is in Spanish and Sociology, and most of my undergraduate literary training was in the Boom period — Cortázar, García Márquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa. Those writers taught me to treat fiction as a tool for exploring how minds work. Rayuela forces you to construct the narrative yourself. Cien años de soledad operates on cyclical time and mythic logic. Borges turns stories into philosophical puzzles. That training shaped how I read: I look for the worldview behind the text.

Later, when I finally read Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, I was struck by their observational precision — the way they capture interior life, social nuance, and micro‑interactions with almost anthropological clarity. I spent years catching up on 19th‑ and early‑20th‑century English literature because it represented a completely different cognitive tradition. None of this is my entire reading history, of course, but it illustrates the pattern: I read fiction to understand how people think.

K.E. Bartlet’s debut fits into that pattern in a surprising way. My Dumpling, Your Dumpling presents a worldview shaped by military and intelligence environments: procedural, compartmentalized, time‑stamped, emotionally masked, and mission‑driven. Each chapter opens with a location/time/character header — essentially a SITREP. The action is often procedural and easy to miss if you don’t have that background. Operators will fill in the blanks; civilian readers may need a film adaptation to visualize certain sequences. That’s not a flaw — it’s a structural choice that protects both the reader and the author. It keeps the violence non‑graphic and keeps the operational details appropriately abstract.

What I appreciated most is how confidently Bartlet writes smart, competent young people, especially young women. There’s no gendered commentary, no harassment, no “woman in a man’s world” framing. It’s a parallel universe where women can operate at full capacity without misogyny as background radiation. That alone makes the book refreshing.

The interpersonal dynamics are subtle, especially the slow‑burn trust arc between Eliza and Melody. Bartlet writes emotional connection the way it forms in high‑risk environments: quietly, professionally, and under layers of structure. It’s not a romance that interrupts the plot; it’s a bond that grows inside it. Eliza’s pep talks and her ability to read her team under pressure show a level of empathy and leadership that makes her a compelling protagonist.

As a debut from a 28‑year‑old author, this is impressive work. The voice is distinctive, the worldbuilding is grounded in real strategic thinking, and the characters feel like people who could exist in the modern intelligence community. I’m curious to see how Bartlet’s craft evolves — and how these characters develop — in the rest of the series.

REVIEW: Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf (3-stars)

A Practical Book for Leaders Moving Beyond Industrial‑Age Thinking

Most business books either bury you in abstract frameworks or force you through a fictional executive’s personal life to make a point. Sense and Respond doesn’t do that. It stays grounded in real examples and focuses on the mechanics of modern work: feedback loops, adaptive planning, and the shift from industrial‑age certainty to software‑age change. That alone puts it ahead of a lot of what’s out there.

Industrial‑Age Planning vs. Software Reality

One of the strongest parts of the book is the way it explains why traditional planning models don’t translate into software. It’s not because industrial planning is outdated or wrong. It’s because it was built for a completely different category of problems.

If you’re building a bridge, you’re working with fixed materials, established safety requirements, and environmental conditions that are mostly knowable. The physics don’t change halfway through the project. You can plan that work with confidence because the domain is stable.

Software is the opposite. The problem space shifts while you’re working. User needs evolve. Market conditions change. Technology capabilities expand. You discover constraints as you go. The environment is fluid, and the cost of change is low enough that learning as you build isn’t just possible — it’s necessary.

That’s the core point the book gets right: industrial planning is built for certainty; software work happens inside uncertainty.

Experiments as a Normal Operating Rhythm

The book pushes hard on the idea that experimentation shouldn’t be a special event. It’s not a one‑off discovery sprint or a quarterly research push. It’s part of the regular operating rhythm. The author suggests talking to customers every six weeks. In 2026, that’s slow, but the principle holds: if you’re not in regular conversation with your users, you’re not building a product. You’re building a guess.

Small experiments, quick tests, and ongoing validation are still the most reliable way to reduce risk in software.

Parallel‑Track Agile That Actually Works

One of the most practical ideas in the book is the separation of discovery and delivery. Expecting a single team to “innovate” and hit delivery deadlines at the same time is unrealistic. A parallel‑track model — one track focused on figuring out how to solve the hard problems, the other focused on shipping — is cleaner and more humane. It reflects how real teams actually work when they’re not being forced into fantasy timelines.

Give Teams Problems, Not Requirements

Another point that still holds up: developers should be given problems to solve, not a list of requirements to execute. When you hand a team a pre‑defined set of tasks, you’re not using their expertise. You’re treating them like a feature factory. And you’re cutting them off from the feedback that tells them whether their work mattered. Teams need visibility into outcomes, not just velocity charts.

Who This Book Is Actually For

It’s also important to acknowledge the book’s age. Written in 2017, it predates a lot of what defines modern product work today. If you’ve spent years in Agile environments, worked on design systems, or led empathy‑first projects, much of the book will feel obvious. Not wrong — just foundational. And in 2026, with AI reshaping delivery and late‑stage consolidation changing how teams operate, the examples don’t fully match the complexity of what teams face now.

But that doesn’t make it irrelevant.

The book is genuinely useful for people who are early in their leadership journey or who are coming from traditional command‑and‑control environments. It gives them a clear contrast between two modes of working and concrete examples that make the shift understandable. It’s a better starting point than dropping someone straight into a stack of Marty Cagan books. It gives them anchor points before they dive into deeper product thinking.

The VUCA Reality (Even Though the Book Never Uses the Term)

The author never uses the term VUCA, but he describes it constantly. Software, marketing, and consumer‑product work all operate in environments that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. User behavior changes quickly. Competitors move fast. Information is incomplete. Signals are messy. You can’t manage that kind of work with planning models built for stable, predictable domains.

The book doesn’t name VUCA, but it circles the idea over and over: you need continuous sensing, iterative response, and teams empowered to solve problems because the environment demands it.

If You Want a Next Step

If you want to go deeper into why planning models must match the problem domain, How Big Things Get Done is a good follow‑on. It comes from a completely different world, but it helps clarify why software can’t be managed like the Golden Gate Bridge.

After that, Marty Cagan’s books are the natural extension. They go much further into empowered teams and outcome‑driven product leadership. But they can also feel impossible to implement in traditional command‑and‑control environments. For leaders who are still operating inside those structures, the gap between Cagan’s ideal state and their current reality can feel too wide to cross.

That’s where Turn This Ship Around fits in. It offers a clear, concrete example of how to shift from a culture of followers to a culture of leaders, and it does it in a way that’s easy to understand even without a military background. It shows what distributed authority looks like in practice and how to build competence and ownership at every level. For many leaders, it’s a more accessible bridge between industrial‑age habits and the kind of empowered teams Cagan describes. 

REVIEW: Sense and Respond by Jeff Gothelf

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars (2006) by Patrick Lencioni (3-stars)

I’ll be honest: I’m not usually a fan of the “business fable” format, and this one has all the classic early‑2000s fable tropes. The personal‑life padding, the pregnancy storyline, the protagonist’s wife designing his logo — none of that adds anything. It feels dated and unnecessary, like the book is trying to make the protagonist “relatable” in a very specific, very last‑century way. But in 2006, people often needed these ideas wrapped in a story to actually absorb them. The fable structure made the message feel safe enough for leaders who would have tuned out a more direct approach.

And despite the saccharine framing, the book has a can‑do energy that, for a moment, made me wonder whether going freelance as a consultant was a viable option. It’s written to make you feel like you can walk into a messy organization, diagnose the dysfunction, and rally people around a shared purpose. That tone is part of why the book works, even if the personal‑life filler is something we could all do without.

The moment that actually matters: listening

The strongest part of the book isn’t the crisis or the characters or the manufactured drama. It’s the moment the protagonist realizes he actually has to listen to people. Not the performative “I hear you” version, but the real “tell me what you think the problem is” version. That’s the turning point. He stops trying to impose a solution and starts trying to understand the motivations, fears, and incentives of the people involved. Once he does that, he can help them find a common cause that isn’t just “stop being political” or “work better together.” People don’t align because someone tells them to. They align when they see themselves in the problem and the solution.

Workshops that actually work

Another part of the book that lands well is the use of workshops. Breaking people into groups, giving them space to talk, and letting them surface the real issues is simple but powerful. It reminded me immediately of how a group director organized our team at a large software company that was transitioning from traditional off‑the‑shelf products to cloud‑based SaaS. He didn’t lecture at us or hand down a vision from a podium. He put us into groups, gave us real problems to solve, and let us figure out the patterns ourselves. It worked. We saw real, recognized success because people were engaged, aligned, and actually talking to each other.

And then the team was split up because the organization insisted on grouping people by role. Program managers with program managers, designers with designers. The exact opposite of what had been working. The book captures that dynamic perfectly. Cross‑functional collaboration works, but organizations keep reorganizing themselves away from it.

The environments that suffer most are the ones where people are just mean

One thing Lencioni does well is highlight how much damage people do when they rely on stereotypes, reductionist labels, or just plain meanness. The environments that suffer the most in the book aren’t the ones with the biggest strategic problems. They’re the ones where people stop seeing each other as human beings and start treating each other like caricatures. That part felt very real.

You can have the best strategy in the world, but if people are dismissive, snide, territorial, or operating from assumptions about “those people over in that department,” nothing moves. The fictional drama exaggerates it, but the underlying pattern is familiar to anyone who has worked in a large organization.

And this is where Sense and Respond quietly overlaps. Even though it’s a very different kind of book, the author stresses the importance of people getting along socially and actually connecting. Not in a forced team‑building way, but in the sense that teams who like and respect each other simply work better. They share information. They surface problems earlier. They don’t default to defensiveness. Both books, in their own ways, point to the same thing: the social fabric of an organization matters more than the process diagrams.

The part the book doesn’t say out loud: communication skills are the real issue

Here’s where I diverge from the book. The story resolves because the protagonist listens, empathizes, and helps people articulate their needs. But the book never names the actual skill set behind that shift. This is where Nonviolent Communication comes in.

If more people in corporate environments understood how to express their needs clearly, hear other people’s needs without defensiveness, separate observations from interpretations, and navigate conflict without escalation, a lot of the so‑called silos and politics would evaporate. Not all of it, because incentives and structures still matter, but the day‑to‑day friction would drop dramatically.

Most organizational gridlock isn’t caused by strategy. It’s caused by miscommunication, assumptions, and emotional reactivity that no one has the tools to name or address. The book hints at this through the story, but it never says it directly. The real lesson isn’t “create a rallying cry.” It’s “learn how to communicate like an adult.”

Why the book still works

Even with the storytelling format (which I still think is unnecessary), the book works because it taps into something real. People want to fix broken systems. They want to feel connected to a purpose bigger than their department. They want to contribute without getting caught in territorial nonsense. The book isn’t a manual for organizational design and it’s not a deep dive into incentives or systems thinking, but it is a reminder that people want to work in environments where they feel heard and aligned.

Sometimes a story is enough to get someone to see that.

Where to go next

If someone finishes this book and wants to go deeper into the part that actually matters -- the human part -- I’d point them toward Nonviolent Communication. Not the corporate‑sanitized version found in many books, but the real thing. It’s the best framework I’ve seen that gives people a usable way to express needs, hear other people’s needs without spiraling, and navigate conflict without turning it into a referendum on someone’s character.

Both Silos and Sense and Respond hint at this. They show the symptoms. NVC gives you the underlying mechanics. It’s the difference between “we need to break down silos” and “here’s how to talk to each other in a way that doesn’t create them in the first place.”

If more people in corporate environments had even a basic grounding in NVC, a lot of the friction, misinterpretation, and territorial behavior that slows organizations down would disappear. Not all of it — incentives and structures still matter — but enough that the work would move faster and the culture would feel less like a minefield.

It’s not a magic fix. It’s just the part we keep skipping. I also kept thinking about how many people insist on keeping their “work life” and “personal life” completely separate, as if those two selves don’t influence each other. If someone is rigidly compartmentalized in their own life, they will bring that same separation into the workplace. And I don’t need to know the details of someone’s cancer treatment or their partner’s high‑risk pregnancy to understand that people need space and time to handle the realities of their lives. The point isn’t the specifics. The point is recognizing that people are whole humans, and organizations function better when they acknowledge that instead of pretending everyone is a blank, interchangeable worker during business hours.

REVIEW: Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars (2006) by Patrick Lencioni

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (3-stars)

 Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) is a sharp, bleak portrait of dissociation that reminded me at different moments of Less Than Zero, Slaves of New York, and even a very dark, sedated version of Bridget Jones’s Diary. It’s a novel about a young woman trying to chemically erase herself, and a city that barely notices.

The unnamed narrator moves through early‑2000s Manhattan with a kind of anesthetized privilege. She gets an art‑gallery job not because she cares about art, but because she looks like someone who should be standing behind a white desk in black clothes. The gallery’s instructions — don’t show the price sheet too quickly, memorize the artists’ faces, no sleeping on the job — tell you everything about the ecosystem she’s drifting through. She’s valued for the silhouette she cuts, not for anything she thinks or feels.

Trevor, the on‑again/off‑again boyfriend, is a perfect example of that dynamic. He behaves like an early social‑media influencer before the platforms existed — someone who curates a lifestyle instead of a personality (or boundaries, or morals). Everything about him is surface: the parties, the vacations, the women he cycles through for validation. When the narrator calls him repeatedly threatening suicide in graphic, bloody terms, he leaves his girlfriend Claudia to come over — not out of concern, but because it fits his pattern of using women as emotional and sexual pit stops. She takes a cocktail of drugs, gets into bed naked fully expecting him to show up (or not), and regains consciousness while she’s giving him oral sex. He then drops off a DVD player as if he’s doing her a favor, announcing that VCRs are “on the way out.” He’s not malicious; he’s just shallow in a way that feels almost archetypal for that era. And the narrator accepts this treatment because she’s already dissociated from her own worth.

Dr. Tuttle, her psychiatrist, feels like she wandered in from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — the spiritual cousin of Hunter S. Thompson’s “as your lawyer/as your doctor” companion who encourages every bad idea. She dispenses pills with crackpot confidence, and half the medications seem invented. It’s funny, but also unsettling: the narrator’s entire self‑destruction is enabled by someone who should be helping her, and instead treats her like a walking prescription pad.

Ping Xi, the artist who uses her unconscious body for a project, is one of the strangest and most revealing figures in the book. He exploits her, yes, but he also treats her with a sideways politeness — apologizing via sticky note for leaving a burrito wrapper in her apartment, buying her a white fox‑fur coat that must have cost a fortune. He sees her exactly the way the art world sees her: a beautiful cipher with more cultural capital than selfhood. She eventually gives the coat away, along with almost everything else she owns, as if shedding the identities other people keep trying to hand her.

Reva, her best friend, is the emotional counterweight. Reva is striving, anxious, constantly performing competence and friendliness. Her abandoned food and exercise journal — discovered after her mother’s death — is the saddest artifact in the book. It’s the inverse of the narrator’s pill‑counting: one woman trying to control her life into submission, the other trying to erase hers entirely.

Reading this, I kept thinking about people I’ve known who used pills or alcohol to check out — friends who believed they had “earned” the right to disappear for a weekend, or who drank their free time away because it felt safer than being present. The novel captures the fear underneath that impulse: the fear of feeling anything, the fear of being seen, the fear of being unworthy of love. The narrator’s dissociation isn’t glamorous or rebellious; it’s a defense mechanism that’s calcified into a worldview.

Her relationship to her parents is one of the most telling threads. She never names them, just as she never names herself. She keeps their house because it represents, in her mind, the idea that she was once loved — even though her mother was critical, controlling, and emotionally distant. She clings to the house as a symbol of a love she doesn’t actually believe she deserved. That sense of unworthiness runs under everything she does.

By the end, she’s more adrift than when she started. Her fixation on the footage of a woman falling from the World Trade Center — possibly Reva, possibly not — is macabre and telling. She projects a fantasy of “freedom” onto a moment that was pure terror. It’s dissociation dressed up as interpretation, a new obsession replacing the old ones. The experiment didn’t give her clarity; it just hollowed her out further.

Moshfegh’s writing is sharp and often darkly funny, and the psychological detail is precise. But the emotional arc left me cold — intentionally, I think, but still cold. The book is compelling, unsettling, and smart, and it’s also a near‑perfect illustration of anomie in the classical sense: a person cut loose from any real social or emotional structure, drifting through a world where modern consumer capitalism offers only surfaces, transactions, and distractions. The narrator’s dissociation isn’t just personal; it’s structural. It’s what happens when nothing around you feels meaningful enough to hold you in place. For me, a solid 3‑star read: memorable, well‑crafted, and deeply bleak, but not something I connected with beyond the intellectual and observational level. 

REVIEW: My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman (3-stars)

I recently finished Liz Wiseman’s 2025 book, Multipliers, and while I appreciate the intent behind the framework, I walked away feeling like I’d read a well‑packaged version of ideas that have been circulating in leadership circles for years. It’s not that the book is wrong — it’s that it’s not new. And in some cases, it oversimplifies the very real complexity of how people and organizations actually work.

Research to Support a Framework: My training in sociology makes me suspicious of repeated claims of quantification of things like "productivity."  Wiseman repeatedly cites percentages of “productivity” people report under different types of leaders. But the more I read, the more I wondered: How exactly are we measuring this?

The appendices describe structured interviews and multiple rounds of coding, but the core data is still self‑reported perception, not actual productivity. And in knowledge work, “productivity” is a slippery concept. Some of the best thinking happens:

• in the shower
• on a walk
• during a commute
• while knitting or exercising
• in the quiet space between meetings

If someone says they’re operating at “70% of their capability,” what does that even mean? It certainly doesn’t map cleanly to output. Insight doesn’t happen on a clock, and the brain’s default mode network  (the part responsible for creative leaps) activates when we’re not visibly “producing.” So if you're always "busy" -- can you actually be productive or are you just following the ruts in the road?

So the numbers make for good storytelling, but they’re not metrics. They’re sentiment.

The more I read, the more it felt like Wiseman started with the Multiplier/Diminisher idea and then went out to collect stories that fit the model. There’s nothing wrong with that, and most leadership books do it, but it’s different from discovering a pattern organically.

Once you’ve worked inside large organizations, you’ve seen dozens of these frameworks come and go. At Abbott, for example, we had the “in the box / out of the box” model -- another metaphor wrapped around basic human behavior.

Some of Wiseman’s recommendations are genuinely solid:

• run 30‑day experiments
• give people ownership
• ask better questions
• encourage people to bring solutions, not just problems

But these aren’t new ideas. They’re foundational leadership practices. They show up in Agile, Lean, design thinking, and every decent management training program of the last 30 years.

The User Manual Trap: One section encourages leaders to identify their “native strengths” and create a personal user manual so others know how to work with them. In theory, this is great. In practice, it can go very wrong.

I once worked with a CMO who had a user manual that was… memorable. Snarky, rigid, demanding, and completely inflexible. Instead of creating clarity, it broadcasted:

“Here are all the ways I refuse to adapt. Please adjust yourselves accordingly.”

A tool is only as healthy as the person using it. And a user manual can reveal more about a leader’s blind spots than their strengths.

Culture is the real missing ingredient in this book, and this is the part most leadership frameworks gloss over.

You can teach people any model you want: Multipliers, Radical Candor, Situational Leadership, “in the box,” “above the line,” whatever the flavor of the year is — but unless the organization has:

• psychological safety
• aligned incentives
• leaders who model the behaviors
• trust
• clarity
• and buy‑in at every level

…nothing changes.

Frameworks don’t transform organizations. People create culture, and there are many conditions required for cultural shifts.  Rarely are culture changes top-down. Without the right environment, a leadership model becomes vocabulary, not behavior.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

If someone wants a leadership book that actually grapples with complexity, I’d recommend:

• David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around - a true operating model for distributed decision-making (see my review http://www.livegreenwearblack.com/2017/12/review-turn-ship-around-true-story-of.html) 
• Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code - a grounded look at psychological safety, belonging, and high‑performing teams (see my review http://www.livegreenwearblack.com/2018/02/review-culture-code-secrets-of-highly.html)

Both authors understand that leadership isn’t a set of behaviors you adopt, it’s a system you design.

Multipliers isn’t a bad book. It’s just not a deep one. It offers a tidy framework, some useful language, and a handful of practices that can help leaders reflect on their impact. But the real work of leadership - the messy, human, systemic work - lives far beyond any model. If you want to change an organization, you don’t start with a framework. You start with culture, safety, and trust. Everything else is just packaging.

Why I Won’t Be Paying $20/Month for OttnoAI — Even Though I’m Glad I Tested It

 After three sessions with OttnoAI — one long session, one that disappeared when I closed the tab, and a third that produced a long set of recommendations — I’ve come away with a clear sense of what this tool is, what it isn’t, and why I’m not going to subscribe at $20/month.

This isn’t a negative review. I’m genuinely glad I tested it. I think the founder is building something interesting, and I appreciate the privacy‑first stance. But the product, as it exists today, isn’t something I can justify paying for — especially when the core value should be built directly into Garmin Connect or even MyFitnessPal.

Here’s why:

1. Every session starts from zero — no memory, no continuity, no way to save

OttnoAI has no way to:

• save a chat

• resume a session

• pick up where you left off

• maintain context across conversations

If you close the tab, the entire session is gone. My second session — which included a long, detailed back‑and‑forth — simply vanished.

This means you have to:

• copy/paste everything into Word or Notes

• re‑explain your context every time

• get very good at prompt engineering

• manually reconstruct your own history

For a tool that’s supposed to help interpret long‑term health data, starting from zero every time is a major limitation.

This alone makes it hard to justify a subscription. I get the same level of service from the post-Amazon acquisition One Medical level of care by physician assistants acting as primary care practitioners.

2. The trial banner never updated — the UI feels unfinished

For three days straight, the banner at the top of the screen said:

“3 days left in your trial.”

It never updated unless I manually refreshed the window.

It’s a small thing, but it signals that the UI is still early and not fully wired up. Combined with the typing lag and occasional freezing, it reinforces the sense that the product is still in a prototype phase.

3. The hallucinations are frequent, and sometimes stubborn

I expect hallucinations from any LLM — that’s not the issue. The issue is the type of hallucinations and the fact that some persisted even after correction.

Examples:

• It told me to “contain the cats” (as if that’s ever happening).

• It invented a “coursework intensity timeline” out of thin air.

• It repeatedly insisted my L4‑5 spinal fusion was causing ongoing pain — even after I corrected it multiple times and explained that the surgery solved the problem completely.

• It assumed my midterm project was an “exam day” and blocked it out as a rest day.

• It confidently told me it didn’t have my 30‑day data… until I uploaded the CSV… at which point it said, “Oh yes, I do.”

These aren’t edge cases. They happened in every session.

The model did correct itself when prompted, but the fact that it needed repeated correction — especially about the spinal fusion — is a sign that the grounding and guardrails aren’t strong enough yet.

4. It overreaches into medical interpretation

This is where I get cautious.

OttnoAI drifted into:

• diagnosing causes of heel pain

• predicting recovery timelines

• interpreting autoimmune interactions

• prescribing caloric deficits

• making claims about hormonal patterns

• giving sleep‑architecture interpretations that sounded authoritative but weren’t grounded in my actual data

I understand the founder’s intent that this is meant to be a supportive tool, not a medical device. But the model’s tone sometimes crosses that line, and users may not always know when it’s guessing.

This is exactly why I think this kind of tool needs stronger constraints before it’s ready for a paid tier.

5. The helpful recommendations were good — but not $20/month good

To be fair, I did get a few genuinely useful insights:

• Stop taking melatonin every night as it’s more disruptive than helpful

• Add brown noise to my nightly routine

• Take progesterone at the same time every night (8:30–9pm) and give it 60–90 minutes to work

• Try a 5‑minute box breathing exercise after driving

• Warm the bed with the heated mattress pad, then turn it off when I get in

These are small, actionable, grounded suggestions which are exactly the kind of thing Garmin should be surfacing.

But here’s the thing:

These insights came after hours of prompting, correcting, and steering the model back on track. They weren’t the default output. They were the result of me doing the heavy lifting.

That’s not a $20/month experience.

6. This functionality belongs inside Garmin Connect (or MyFitnessPal), not as a standalone subscription

Garmin already has:

• the data

• the sensors

• the long‑term history

• the stress and HRV models

• the sleep architecture

• the recovery algorithms

What they don’t have is the interpretation layer — the connective tissue that helps people understand why their sleep tanked, why their stress spiked, or why their heel hurts after certain activities.

OttnoAI is trying to build that layer. But it shouldn’t require:

• exporting CSVs

• manually uploading files

• re‑explaining your context every session

• paying $20/month for something Garmin could integrate natively

This is the kind of functionality that should be built into Garmin Connect or MyFitnessPal as part of the existing ecosystem, not a separate subscription.

7. I’m glad I tested it — but it’s not ready for me to pay for

OttnoAI is ambitious. It’s privacy‑first. It’s trying to solve a real problem. And I genuinely appreciate the founder’s approach.

But the product today:

• loses sessions

• hallucinates frequently

• overreaches medically

• misinterprets context

• lacks grounding

• has no memory

• requires constant correction

• feels like a prototype

• and doesn’t yet deliver $20/month of value

I’m rooting for it. I want it to succeed. But right now, it’s not something I can justify paying for — especially when the core value should be built directly into the platforms that already hold my data.

Testing OttnoAI: Early AI Health Tools, Hallucinations, and the Future I Wish Garmin Would Build

I’ve been spending the last few days testing OttnoAI, a new health‑analytics tool built by a solo founder who promises something rare in the AI space: no training on user data, no retention, and no personalization.

As someone who lives inside Garmin Connect, sleep metrics, and recovery data — and who cares deeply about privacy — that promise alone made me curious enough to dive in.

And honestly, it’s exciting to see a tool this early in its lifecycle already doing so much right. But like any early AI product, especially one trying to interpret messy real‑world data, it also shows the classic signs of an LLM that needs stronger grounding and clearer guardrails.

This post isn’t a teardown. It’s a snapshot of what’s possible, what’s rough around the edges, and what I hope the future of AI‑powered health analytics will look like.

I’m not coming to this as someone who’s new to AI. I completed Northeastern’s AI Applications graduate certificate in 2025, where we spent a lot of time on the limits and ethical use of LLMs as tools to support human tasks. I’m now in an MSIS program that continues to push on those same questions — how to use AI responsibly, how to keep humans in the loop, and how to design systems that don’t overreach.

So when I test an early AI product, I’m looking at it through both lenses: the everyday user who wants insight into their health data, and the practitioner who understands how easily models can hallucinate, drift outside their domain, or misinterpret context without strong guardrails.

What OttnoAI Already Does Well

OttnoAI reads wearable data with surprising nuance. It can interpret Garmin data across steps, heart rate, sleep, stress, and activity types. It spotted patterns in my cycling intensity, sleep variability, and body battery trends that were genuinely useful.

It also tries to connect dots across domains. It doesn’t just say “your steps were low.” Once I told it, “I’ve been having pain in my heel,” it could then say:

• your heel pain is affecting your step count

• which affects your calorie burn

• which affects your weight‑loss goals

• which affects your sleep and recovery

That kind of multi‑factor reasoning is exactly what people want from AI health tools. But it’s important to note: I had to tell it about the heel pain. Garmin doesn’t know when I’m in pain, and OttnoAI can’t infer that without me explicitly stating it.

It’s also conversational and adaptive. When I corrected it (“I swim and cycle — step counts don’t tell the whole story”), it adjusted quickly and re‑anchored its analysis.

And the privacy stance is refreshing: no training on user data, no retention, no personalization beyond the session. In a world where most AI tools quietly hoover up everything, this is a breath of fresh air.

Where OttnoAI Shows Its Early‑Stage Edges

Some of the issues I ran into are classic LLM behavior.

Hallucinated timelines and invented domains. At one point, OttnoAI created a “coursework intensity timeline” for me. There is no coursework in my Garmin data. It invented an entire domain because I casually mentioned I’m in an MSIS program and have midterm assignments coming due. That’s domain drift.

Over‑interpreting casual statements. When I said, “We have midterms due March 1,” it decided that meant March 1 was an exam day, and therefore a rest day, and blocked it out on my activity timeline. This is the model treating context as structured data.

Confidently incorrect statements about missing data. It told me it didn’t have my 30‑day history… until I uploaded the CSV… at which point it said, “Oh yes, I do.” This is the LLM equivalent of patting its pockets and saying, “I swear I had my keys.”

Reaching into medical interpretation. It occasionally drifted into diagnosing heel pain, predicting recovery timelines, prescribing caloric deficits, or interpreting autoimmune interactions. This is where early AI tools need the strongest guardrails. Users trust confident language even when the model is guessing.

UI sluggishness and freezing. Typing lag and occasional lockups suggest the frontend is blocking on large model responses. Not unusual for early products, but noticeable.

Why This Matters for Garmin Users

I’ve been wondering for years when Garmin Connect would integrate a safe, privacy‑respecting AI layer to help users make sense of their data.

Garmin collects every step, every heartbeat, every sleep stage, every stress spike, every workout, and every recovery metric. But the moment you try to export your full history, you realize something important: your entire Garmin dataset is big enough to choke most LLMs.

OttnoAI is the first tool I’ve used that even attempts to interpret multi‑month or multi‑year Garmin data in a conversational way.

And that’s why the hallucinations matter — not because they’re embarrassing, but because they highlight the complexity of the problem Garmin itself has not yet solved: grounding AI in real sensor data, avoiding overreach, respecting privacy, staying within the domain, and giving users insight without inventing stories.

OttnoAI is trying to do something Garmin hasn’t done yet. And that alone makes it worth paying attention to.

What Garmin Still Can’t See

One important nuance: Garmin has no idea when my heel hurts. Pain isn’t a sensor. It’s not in the data. It’s something I would have to manually log.

Garmin can see that my steps dropped, that my cycling and swimming increased, that my HRV dipped, that my stress spiked, that my sleep fragmented, and that my body battery tanked — but it can’t connect those dots to the reason unless I tell it.

OttnoAI tried to infer the cause from the pattern, which is impressive for an early tool, but also where the hallucinations and overreach showed up. It guessed at mechanisms it couldn’t possibly know.

This is exactly why Garmin needs an AI layer — not to diagnose or prescribe, but to help users interpret patterns and log the missing context that makes the data meaningful.

The Small, Actionable Insights That Actually Helped

Even with its rough edges, OttnoAI surfaced a few simple, grounded suggestions that Garmin could easily make if it had an AI layer:

• A five‑minute box breathing session after driving. Driving reliably spikes my stress. Garmin sees that pattern but never comments on it because it doesn't know that I am driving my car (it could probably tell based on speeds).

• Backing off nightly melatonin. Not medical advice — just pattern recognition: melatonin wasn’t improving my deep sleep and linked to studies related to what it is supposed to do.

• Using my heated mattress pad to warm the bed, then turning it off when I get in. Garmin tracks sleep temperature deviations but doesn’t interpret them. Ottnoai gave links to studies about temperature and sleep, and looked at fluctuations in my body temperature during sleep.

• Trying brown noise instead of white noise. Garmin knows when my sleep is disrupted, but doesn’t identify patterns, ask for additional details nor suggest alternatives.

These are small nudges, not medical directives, and exactly the kind of thing Garmin could safely offer if it built a grounded, domain‑specific AI layer.

How OttnoAI Describes Itself

OttnoAI’s About page makes a few things clear: it’s built by a solo founder intentionally avoiding the “big tech AI” model; it promises no training on user data, no retention, and no personalization beyond the session; and it positions itself as a privacy‑first, human‑centered tool meant to help people understand their own data, not diagnose anything.

That framing matters. It sets expectations: OttnoAI is intentionally lightweight, intentionally private, and intentionally not a medical device. But that same privacy‑first approach also means the model needs stronger guardrails to stay grounded in the data it does have.

The hallucinations and over‑reach aren’t flaws. They’re the natural tension between privacy (don’t store anything), utility (give meaningful insights), and LLM limitations (don’t hallucinate). OttnoAI is trying to thread a needle that even the big players haven’t solved yet.

Why I’m Still Rooting for This Tool

This is exactly what early‑stage AI should look like: ambitious, imperfect, transparent about its goals, willing to ship early and learn, and built by someone who cares about user privacy.

The hallucinations aren’t a failure — they’re a roadmap. The over‑reach isn’t a flaw — it’s a signal of where guardrails need to be added. And the value is already visible: OttnoAI helped me see patterns in my sleep, stress, and activity that I hadn’t connected on my own.

That’s the promise of AI health tools — not replacing clinicians, but helping humans better understand their health data and make meaningful changes in their lives.

Final Thought

Testing early AI products is like watching a musician rehearse: you see the raw talent, the rough edges, and the potential all at once. OttnoAI is already useful. With a bit more transparency and tighter grounding to the actual data, it could become something genuinely powerful — maybe even the AI layer Garmin users have been waiting for.