NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Your Best Employees Are Always in Play. Another Retention Bonus Won’t Keep Them

The single most corrosive sentence you’ll hear from a talented person is that they have no idea of what their future is at the company.

 

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @TULLMAN

Every successful business builder I know brags about his passionate and dedicated team. Deep talent, contagious commitment, and lifetime loyalty. But when key players pick up and abruptly leave, the owners and managers are still shocked. This isn’t a new occurrence. For decades, just when a company started to hit its stride and grow, the first folks who showed up weren’t more customers. They were recruiters.

Even your best employees aren’t wholly resistant to the sometimes-bogus blandishments and promises of big bucks being constantly whispered in their ears. While eager entrepreneurs may think their company is one big family, their employees know it’s a business like any other and that, while they may love the company, it rarely loves them back. Just ask the 25 percent of Microsoft employees—60,000 individuals worldwide—who just got buyout offers last week.

And with the constantly mounting pressure today to find qualified A.I. experts and senior technical people in general, and lots of stupid VC cash floating around, many businesses are finding that poaching is a lot better, faster, and even cheaper in the long run than waiting years while they try to grow their own in-house skill sets. In physical labor, the best workers are twice as productive as the ordinary ones, but in creative work and building the future, the best people are ten times more valuable than the average ones. One rabbit beats a dozen turtles.

To be perfectly honest, you can’t outlaw poaching, you can’t shame it out of existence, and you can’t keep trying to paper over it with another one-off retention bonus. If your team leaders are getting picked off, that’s a lagging indicator that you waited too long to work on and keep upping the ante on the basics: trust, transparency, development, and real opportunity. Retaining key employees isn’t robbing the bank to pay them or building a higher wall to keep them. It’s about building a better place.

Retention isn’t a periodic emergency—it’s got to be a daily discipline and a central part of your overall business plan. Your best people are always in play. They
are visible, valuable, and constantly being told by outsiders how under-appreciated they must be. You can’t kill the conversations, but you can try your best to make staying with you the smartest, safest, and most satisfying choice for your key employees.

Here’s how I would work to actually move the needle in your direction.

Step 1: Plan and document a progress path for each team member

The single most corrosive sentence you’ll hear from a talented person is that they have no idea of what their future is at the company. The moment they’re worried about that, they’re already halfway out the door. Every key player needs a written, specific progress path. Not a generic career ladder pasted off an HR site, but a real plan with names, dates, and milestones. What new responsibilities do they take on in the next 6–12–18 months? What skills do they need to build? What has to be true for them to move from where they are to the next level of impact and compensation?

A written path does three powerful things. First, it proves you’re paying attention. Second, it creates a shared scoreboard you can both point to. Third, it forces you to decide who are actually “key” players.

No one should have to guess what “good” looks like or where they could be in two years if they keep delivering. If you haven’t mapped that with them, someone else is already doing it for you.

Step 2: Share the vision, what it will take, and why it’s worth it

High performers want three answers: Where are we going? What will it really take to get there? And why should I care enough to give you my best years?
Your key people want specifics. What does the next phase of this business actually look like? How hard is it going to be? What trade-offs are we really making? And where do they personally fit into that story?

You also have to explain why it’s worth it in concrete terms that matter to them: the kind of company they’ll help build, the customers they’ll impact, the skills, equity, and credibility they’ll walk away with.

If your story is constantly shifting, and the recruiter’s story is sharp, simple, and compelling, you lose. Retention is a narrative contest. The company with the clearest and most honest story about the future usually wins. The irony is that telling the truth—even when it’s tough—actually helps. Saying that this next year is going to be brutal, but if we nail it, here’s what changes for the company and for you is dramatically more attractive to serious talent than pretending everything is easy.

Step 3: Provide the tools, training, and resources they need to succeed

Nothing burns people out faster than being held accountable for outcomes without the tools to achieve them. Your best people are naturally hard on themselves. They don’t need you to pile on. What they do need is for you to arm them properly. That means current hardware and software, current data, access to decision-makers, and the authority to actually fix what they’re responsible for.

It also means real training. Not once-a-year compliance theater, but targeted skill-building that matches their progress paths. If you say someone is on a path to run a larger team, what leadership and management training are they getting now? If you say they’re being groomed to own a product line, what financial, market, and strategic exposure are you giving them?

The people who are most frustrated by lousy tools and broken processes are your highest performers. Mediocre players can live with mess. Great people cannot. If you don’t fix the friction, someone else will invite them to go do great work on a cleaner playing field.

Step 4: Monitor and measure progress and provide regular feedback

A written path and a shared vision are only useful if you keep coming back to them. You need a simple, visible system for monitoring progress and giving real-time feedback. The cadence has to be regular and predictable. Monthly or at least quarterly, you sit down one-on-one and look at the path you documented together. What’s on track, what’s behind, what got in the way, and what needs to change on both sides?

The feedback has to be specific and bilateral. You tell them exactly what they’re doing that is making a difference, what’s not acceptable, and what “better” looks like. And then—and this is where most managers fail—you ask them what they need from you and from the company to move faster.

High performers crave clarity. They don’t want to be surprised when you finally confess that you’ve been unhappy with their performance. They want the early warning, the coaching, and the chance to fix it. If your strongest people only hear from you when there’s a fire drill or when you need a favor, they’ll eventually conclude that their growth is not a priority.

Step 5: Recognize and reward the best—and boot the rest

This is the step where most leaders drop the ball because they’re conflict avoiders. You can’t retain A players in a system that tolerates C behavior. Recognition is comparative. Your best people are always running their own internal scorecard. They’re watching who gets promoted, who gets the stretch assignments, who gets the raises and options, and yes, who never seems to face consequences for chronic under-performance.

You need visible, meaningful rewards for top performance: faster advancement, more autonomy, richer learning opportunities, real economic participation in the value they create. This means real differentiation. Your message has to be unmistakable: excellence is noticed here and paid for here.

On the other hand, you have to be willing to move out the chronic low performers, the cultural terrorists, and the coasters. Keeping them around to avoid conflict is one of the most expensive retention mistakes you can make. Nothing drives stars away faster than being forced to carry people who don’t care and won’t change.
“Boot the rest” doesn’t mean heartless, impulsive firing. It means honest performance management, tight standards, clear expectations, and real consequences. When your best people see that you’re serious about who gets to stay on the bus, they’re far more likely to keep betting on you.

Richard Branson said it best and it’s still the most succinct formula for success: “Train people well enough so they can leave; treat them well enough so they don’t want to”. To which I’d add: “Be a place that keeps its promises” and the rest will take care of itself.

 

Heather

 November 7, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

13 hours ago

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In his victory speech on November 3, after winning a U.S. Senate seat in the previously Republican-dominated state of Texas, Senator-elect James Talarico redefined the modern United States by recalling an older era when Americans worked together to defend their country against those who would take all its wealth and power for themselves.

His words were especially piercing in Texas, where billionaire Elon Musk spent at least $225 million in the midterm elections to keep the state government in the hands of Republicans. And yet, voters elected a Democratic governor, a Democratic lieutenant governor, a Democratic attorney general, and a Democratic state house anyway.

“We just took back Texas,” Talarico told the cheering crowd. “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas. We just showed that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love. And we just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor, every corrupt defender of this broken political system in this state, in this country. Power belongs to the people.”

Leaning into his religious faith and his own history as a middle-school teacher of underprivileged students and as the son of a single mother, he told the crowd: “Scripture has taught me, my own life has taught me, always bet on the underdog.”

“We were the underdogs in this race,” he said. “We went up against nearly 40 years of doubt and disillusionment. We went up against more than $300 million, more than any Senate campaign in American history. We went up against all the negative ads, smear campaigns, foreign bots, and AI deep fakes that money can buy. Those attacks were the final howls of a dying establishment, the death rattle of a status quo that knows its days are numbered.

“They played dirty because they were desperate. But we never lost hope. We never lost faith. And against big money and long odds, we took our power back. Always, always, bet on the underdog.

“We built a movement unlike any this state has ever seen. We united Texans from all backgrounds and beliefs onto one team to take on this broken, corrupt political system: first time voters, three time Trump voters, working people from every corner of this state who are fed up and ready for change. This win is for every underdog who’s been counted out and left behind. This win is for every teacher and every nurse, for every farmer and every rancher. For every young person who’s trying to buy a home. For every parent who’s trying to put food on the table.

“This win is for every Texan who’s ever wondered if anyone is listening. I heard you. We heard you, and tonight the world hears you.”

Talarico identified the moment the nation is in as monumental. “This win is not about the Democratic party or the Republican party,” he said. “It’s much bigger than that. There is something broken in America. Our economic system is broken. Our political system is broken. Even our relationships with each other feel broken. That’s because the most powerful people in the world want it that way.”

Talarico rooted his political beliefs in his belief in the commandments to “love God and love neighbor” and noted that “despite our differences, we all want the same things. A safe neighborhood, a good job, a high-quality, well-funded public school, and the ability to see a doctor when we need one.

“But the billionaires who own the social media algorithms, who own the cable news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens, they want us at each other’s throats. They want us focused on how we’re different instead of on how we’re the same. They want us looking left and right at each other instead of looking up at them. The real fight in this country is not left versus right. It is top versus bottom.

“The people at the top work so hard to keep us angry and divided because our unity is a threat to their wealth and their power,” he said. “We saw it in this race. We saw it in every billionaire-funded attack ad. The people at the top divide us by party, by race, by gender, by religion, by culture, so we don’t notice that they are picking our pockets, that they are defunding our schools, that they are gutting our healthcare, that they are raising taxes on all of us while they cut taxes for themselves. It is the oldest strategy in the world, divide and conquer. But tonight we sent a crystal clear message to the people at the top. We will not be conquered.”

“[W]e are tired of being pitted against each other,” Talarico continued. “We are tired of being told to hate each other. It has been 10 years of this kind of politics. Politics as blood sport. Politics as trolling and owning. Politics as professional wrestling. It tears families apart. It ends friendships. And it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.”

He explained how Democrats had won Texas: “We mobilized our 60,000 volunteers in every corner of the state, and together we delivered bottled water to Sand Branch, a community south of Dallas with no running water. We donated school supplies to an elementary school in El Cenizo, a small town on the border. We collected more than 20,000 pounds of groceries for families in Fort Worth who are struggling under the high cost of living. Before the world changes in ways you see on TV or read about in newspapers, the world changes person to person, neighbor to neighbor.”

“[W]e know how to get there,” he said. “We must get big money out of our politics so no billionaire or trillionaire can buy our elections. We must unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1%. We must pass universal health care so no one goes bankrupt just because they get sick. We must invest in our teachers and our students so every underdog has a fighting chance. We must end these corrupt forever wars that are driving up prices and killing our brave men and women in uniform.

“And,” he continued, “we must heal the deep spiritual corruption at the root of all of these crises. We must bridge the divides between us and repair the ties that bind us. We forged a new kind of politics here in the Lone Star State. An answer to this decade of division. We showed that when working people come together across every dividing line, we can do extraordinary things. We won this race because people who are desperate for change now are going to get change.

“That old politics is dying,” he told the crowd, “and a new politics is being born through each of us.”

Talarico, who won his race by an astonishing 12 points, accurately identified the extraordinary importance of local and relational organizing to create communities that would elect Democratic candidates in 2026.

He also accurately identified the threat this kind of politics poses to establishment politics, especially to MAGA. President Trump today reinforced his need for division and hatred by offering the job of White House press secretary to Dana White, the chief executive officer of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, whom he described as a “violent Fighter and Warrior.” Trump encouraged White to take the job and bring along a number of his UFC fighters.

“We need these people to defend us against the Lunatic Left,” Trump posted.

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE 

 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

 

 

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Why the Best Growth Move for Your Small Business Right Now May Be to Stop Expanding

Hunkering down and holding on tight to what you have is often the best way to survive a hurricane.

BY Howard Tullman

Nov 3, 2026

I spoke recently to a select group of small business owners and operators with revenues under $10 million who were looking for suggestions and some guidance on how they should grow their businesses in the next 18 to 24 months. I think that many of them expected an aggressive endorsement of rapid expansion and a host of tips on how to quickly and cost-effectively pull off that modest miracle. These are anxious times for all of us and entrepreneurs clearly have a bias for action, especially as a cure for anxiety. They clearly believe that doing anything is far better than doing nothing. And they feel that to reach the next level, they need to add people, structure and additional resources to their companies to support the growth that they’re hoping is just around the corner. The truth is that hope is a lousy strategy. You get what you work for, not what you wish for.

Today, the best way to secure and save the business that you currently have may be to slow down. Having lived and suffered through the pandemic with dozens of businesses; having endured the ups-and-downs of more bubbles than I care to recall; and facing the next two years with the likely prospect that the political and economic situation will be even more abrupt, uncertain, irrational and inconsistent given our demented, immoral and corrupt government, I just didn’t have the heart to urge them on to greater heights, more serious commitments and expenditures, and larger challenges at this point.

And while I have often said that you can’t save your way to success and that the greatest opportunities for market expansion are often found in the worst of times, I believe that we as entrepreneurs and new business builders in a country that’s been roughly turned upside down may have never faced such an unclear, risky and perilous time. I’m not sure right now that any of us is looking for more change or disruption. Hunkering down and holding on tight to what you have is often the best way to survive a hurricane.

And actually, at the moment, there are plenty of things that you can do which will be additive and productive for your business but racing off in some direction just for the sake of keeping busy isn’t one of them. Busy-ness isn’t good business. So, here are a few rules and suggestions about what not to do to help save you and your business from yourself and your best/worst instincts.

Go deep, not wide

Understand that the lowest-hanging fruit and the most likely avenues for additional revenues are your existing customers. Don’t take them for granted and don’t assume that there’s not more money to be found and extracted. Even your best salespeople tend to be looking for the next sale rather than securing and building on current relationships, using their present knowledge of and connections to their customers to offer further products and services responsive to their particular needs, and actively operating to grow with their users and clients rather than having them go elsewhere when their needs and requirements change. Conquest marketing is expensive, land and expand efforts are right in front of you.

Make sure the whole team is telling the same simple story

Stick to your knitting and make sure that your people aren’t overpromising, changing the basic terms and conditions of delivery, or—worst of all—trying to customize your offerings to close a sale and ending up committing to some unique and bespoke and costly version of your product or service. Complexity is the enemy of execution. You can tell when a startup has begun to mature and that’s when every sale doesn’t have to be completed and closed by the CEO. Your company will never scale successfully if every deal is a one-off variation. Focus, do a few things really well, and don’t be tempted to change your program to suit someone who may not even be a serious prospect. Save me time or money, make me more productive, or help me make better decisions and I’ll love you forever. Nothing else really matters.

Don’t try to do things cheaply that you shouldn’t do at all

The best business builders that I know say “No” all day long to all kinds of offers, invitations, tempting shortcuts, and cosmetic changes which might even make folks feel better in the short run, but which are painful and costly deflections which can cripple your company down the road. You don’t want to get a reputation—inside or outside your walls—for compromising, cutting corners, settling for less than you should, or doing a halfway job. Don’t waste your team’s time and resources by saying “Maybe” when you know you want to say “No.” “No” is a complete sentence and doesn’t require explanations, excuses, or made-up justifications. It’s easy when cash is tight and the choices are complicated to try putting lipstick on a pig. But the pig still looks like a pig, and you look like an idiot.

Use A.I. tools to streamline and improve your processes and to augment, not eliminate, your people

In case it’s not obvious, to date, we have seen almost no increases in productivity or reductions in headcount in the vast majority of U.S. businesses because every competent management team has concluded that you still need a human link in any and every A.I. decision and implementation chain unless you want some random or rogue machine to blow up your business or blow off your customers. Use A.I. tools to help your people get better and smarter about what they’re doing instead of thinking that you’re going to get rid of some of them because you spent a lot of time and money building your team, they’re experienced and loyal, and they know a great deal about the nuts and bolts of your operations. Putting A.I. beside talented people with substantial domain expertise is the way to produce the best results for now.

Don’t fall for the warehousing fallacy – Don’t hire for the future now

Yes, sometime in the future, if and when your business grows, you’ll need some HR help, you’ll need to grow your back office, you’ll definitely need to get some additional tech talent and you might even need a strong CFO to tell you to your face that what you’re planning to do and spend money on makes no sense. Every good business needs both an accelerator and a brake. But you don’t need to hire now for the future even if you are seeing terrifically talented people walking around. Entrepreneurs think that they can hire good people and then find important work for them to do—I call this the warehousing fallacy—and it almost always results in costly failures. Not just in dollars and cents, but also in company morale and momentum, and in damage to the culture of trust and loyalty that you’re trying to build. Lateral hires are really hard—startup cultures are both more fragile and more resistant to change than anyone imagines. And having expensive people sitting around on the sidelines while everyone’s waiting for the company to really need their talents and services is a bad bet for all concerned. In many cases, those very people leave of their own volition because they see better and more immediate opportunities elsewhere. Try to grow your own talent before you start looking elsewhere.

 

RAT POISON

This election isn’t about choosing what flavor of ice cream you like. It’s about choosing between ice cream and rat poison.

SLEAZECAKE

 

THE ART OF THE SELF-DEAL

 

The Art of the Self-Deal

Thoughts on how Trump-era corruption is affecting Americans as a people.

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By

Peggy Noonan

Aug. 20, 2026 6:19 pm ET

 

I’m thinking about the deeper effects of governmental corruption in the Trump era, and why it leaves many not only indignant but uneasy. I suspect it’s doing something to us as a people. The thoughts were prompted by a poll this week from Reuters/Ipsos, which Reuters headlined “Most Americans Believe Trump Has Inappropriately Profited Since Returning to Power.” It reported that 69% of respondents see his personal business interests as influencing presidential decisions. Two-thirds of independents, half of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats shared that view.

Republicans, God bless them, were split on whether graft under Mr. Trump has gotten worse or better or stayed the same, which makes that polling question a case study in how bright people are capable of not seeing what they don’t want to see.

We’ll quickly posit what we mean by Trump-era corruption. I see two general areas, personal enrichment and the use of government to satisfy private goals.

The personal-enrichment part is suggested by recent and frequent reports showing that Mr. Trump’s net worth, and that of his family, has surged dramatically in his second term. This isn’t just wealthy folks seeing their stocks go up: Trump businesses have developed positions in industries over which the administration exercises power.

Some were in cryptocurrency, and there is the $Trump meme coin, some of the largest buyers of which have been given access to the president, some at a dinner at one of his golf clubs. A Washington Post analysis suggests roughly half may be foreign-based. The Journal has reported that representatives of Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi agreed to purchase 49% of a Trump crypto entity for $500 million. Sheikh Tahnoun is not only a businessman but a senior member of the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family and its national-security adviser. This newspaper also reports that Mr. Trump made many millions licensing his name to overseas property developers, including developers in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Oman.

These are items in a longer possible list, but are representative of the administration’s general approach. The size and means of this enrichment would seem . . . dubious? Careless of appearances? Appalling?

As to the use of governmental power to achieve not public but personal goals, including revenge and punishing enemies, there have been numerous reports—it feels like a new one every day—of bending, testing or getting around the law to make the administration’s friends happy and enemies sad. This has included paying people in Mr. Trump’s orbit to lobby for presidential pardons—this newspaper has done great work there—launching strange investigations, and muscling law firms and media companies.

Republicans seem generally not to have found the last alarming, which is alarming. You don’t like Jimmy Kimmel? I don’t like Jimmy Kimmel; he’s boorish, crude, tinnily self-valorizing. But defending speech when it’s muscled by government? Yes, of course. Governments are worse than networks because the former have the power to crush you, and you only get one at a time, and you can’t change the channel except every four years. Be on the side of the information flow, even when it’s full of sludge. Be on the side of the voice, not the big crushing thing. Conservatives used to know to fear government, and beat it back.

An odd thing about all this is the absence of furor. There is no broad public outcry. Why? Because corruption is a constant and “the other side is dirty too.” Because the scandal threshold has skyrocketed. President Trump walked into history dragging a long tail of litigation, accusation and lawsuits behind him. He never sold himself as a man of moral rectitude, and most supporters didn’t think that’s what they were buying. Jimmy Carter’s shaking down the system to see what coins fall out would have been news, Donald Trump’s doing the same is Tuesday.

And there’s the sheer scale: The extraordinary becomes ordinary through repetition; scandals add up and become a blur, not a call to action. But the country pays a cost for all this. Institutionally, everything happening today sets a precedent. Every abuse we accept widens the range of possible misbehavior for the next administration.

Corruption is more dangerous, has a more deteriorating effect, than bad policy. Bad policy can be reversed. Corruption works its way into a system and changes its nature.

Suppose a Republican president leaves office having established that a president can use regulatory powers against antagonistic institutions, exert pressures on companies needing government approval, and demand personal loyalty throughout the executive branch, all with no lasting repercussions. The next administration, disposed in other ideological directions, inherits the precedents. It says turnabout is fair play.

An Ocasio-Cortez administration wouldn’t have meme coins and golf resorts, it would look much cleaner! Progressives usually aren’t set on personal cash, they’re set on institutional power. They would privately thank Mr. Trump for proving restraints on executive power are weaker than previously thought, and publicly claim that finally we have a president who advances the public interest.

But I suppose the larger threat of governmental corruption is that it hurts the public’s morale, its sense of seeing itself as a moral actor to whom politicians have to answer. Our entire system of government assumes a citizenry that polices its politicians, that says “You can’t do that, this office isn’t yours, your powers were lent to you for public purposes.” If the public shrugs and looks away, Americans will lose the habit of thinking of themselves as entitled to a clean government. And they’ll have to admit they surrendered their own views to the views of the tribe.

It is the public’s role to uphold republican standards. In the past, a politician caught selling an office, taking money from interested parties, using governmental machinery for personal revenge was supposed to fear not only legal action but disgrace.

Citizens derive a certain dignity from believing that we enforce the rules. It reminds them who’s in charge: them. You’re giving up a lot when you give that up.

In times of corruption, good people who might run for office, don’t. They think they can’t survive in that world. Bad people, those with limited internal ethical and moral structures, are encouraged: Politics is a way to get rich and famous, to push people around. They are elected, govern badly, corruptly, and the cycle continues.

Unchecked corruption tells cynics not that they have an uninteresting flaw but that they are realists. Never tell cynics that. It gives them license.

As always, the whole world is watching. What it has seen lowers the esteem in which it formally (if grudgingly) held Americans. It embarrasses us before the world. It hurts our heart a little. We were the morally rectitudinous Doughboy GI Marshall Planning JFK and Ronnie People who made the wall come down. We did our best each generation to be equal to our reputation, or at least to have some class. There are foreign-policy implications to all this. Some day we’ll need friends and see only the satisfied spite of the previously jealous.

Nothing good comes from this. When corruption is allowed, it governs not today but tomorrow too.