Start here.
A short tour of the site, written for the person who just arrived.
This is a small library of plain-language tools for the people who run small and medium businesses. If you’re trying to build a workplace that actually works, you’re in the right place.
If you’re here, something at work probably isn’t working.
You don’t end up on a site like this when everything’s going well.
Maybe the same problem keeps coming back, in a slightly different shape, every six months. Maybe a good person just resigned and the reason they gave wasn’t the real reason. Maybe the meeting where the truth was supposed to come out, didn’t. Maybe you’re working harder than ever, and it still isn’t enough.
If any of that lands, this site was built for you. Not to make you feel better. To help you see what’s actually broken — and to give you the language to talk about it with the people you work with.
What this site is — and what it isn’t.
This is a research-backed reading library. That’s it.
It isn’t consulting. There are no service pages, no packages, no calls to book. Everything here is free to read, and the articles are written so a non-graduate can follow them on a Sunday morning with a coffee.
What you’ll find:
A library of articles — short pieces, usually 1,200 to 1,800 words, on one workplace problem at a time. Six frameworks — longer pages explaining the underlying ideas in plain English. These are the tools you’ll find yourself coming back to. And an About page — who I am, what I researched, and why I built this.
The ideas come from my PhD on small business culture, the work of researchers like Chris Argyris and W. Edwards Deming, and years spent watching what actually works inside small teams. The writing tries to keep the depth and lose the jargon.
Who it’s for.
Small and medium business owners.
People who sign the wages, who carry the worry home, who already know that fixing a business isn’t the same as fixing a process. If your company sits somewhere between 5 and 200 people, you’re in the audience this site is written for.
You don’t need an HR department. You don’t need a degree in management. You don’t need to have read any of the books in the footnotes.
If you’re an executive at a large corporate, a consultant looking for slides, or a postgraduate researching frameworks — you’re welcome to read, but the writing’s pitched somewhere else.
Three places to start.
Three quick descriptions. Pick the one that sounds most like your business right now.
If your team has stopped telling you the truth
You probably noticed it slowly. Meetings got quieter. Bad news started arriving late, or from the wrong person. People nod along when you say something, then do something different once you’ve left the room.
This isn’t a personality problem. It’s a pattern — a way of communicating that protects everyone from being wrong, and slowly hollows out the team.
Start with: Model I vs Model II Communication — a framework from Chris Argyris that explains why otherwise-honest people stop telling the truth at work, and what changes that.
Then read: anything in the Communication & Trust stream.
If the same problem keeps coming back
You fix something. Six months later it’s back, just wearing different clothes. You add a process; the process gets worked around. You hire someone new; the dynamic survives them.
The issue usually isn’t the thing you’re trying to fix. It’s the way the team is set up to learn from what happened the last time.
Start with: Single-Loop vs Double-Loop Learning — the difference between fixing the symptom and fixing the assumption underneath it.
Then read: anything in the Learning & Improvement stream.
If the work feels heavy, and people seem checked out
The team is still hitting the numbers, but nobody seems alive at work. Engagement scores look fine and somehow that doesn’t match what you see in the corridor. You’re not even sure what people would do if they didn’t have the job.
This one’s older than business books. W. Edwards Deming wrote about it in the 1980s and called it joy at work — the simple condition under which good people do good work. It’s the easiest thing to lose and the hardest thing to fake.
Start with: Joy at Work — what Deming meant, and what it looks like in a small business in 2026.
Then read: anything in the Purpose & Engagement stream.
How to use the site.
There’s no membership, no signup wall, no course hidden behind your email. Read in any order.
If you have ten minutes, pick one article. Each one is self-contained — read it, take one idea into Monday, see if it changes something.
If you have an hour, read one framework. The frameworks are the load-bearing pieces of the site. Once you have them, the articles make a lot more sense.
If you want to know whose work this is, the About page explains who I am and what I researched.
If you find something useful, send it to whoever else needs to read it. There’s no paywall, and there isn’t going to be one.
A note from me.
I built this site because the ideas that helped me most — as a researcher and as someone who’s worked inside small businesses — were locked behind academic writing nobody outside a university would ever read.
The mission is simple. Give the people who run small businesses the keys to doing things right, so the people who work in those businesses can actually enjoy work.
If something here changes how you see what’s happening on your team, the site has done its job. If there’s a topic you wish was here, the contact page is open.
Welcome.
— Jose Medina, PhD