What must change when your team becomes too large to know everyone by name. Gabriella Vacca and I studied computer engineering together in Turin, where she was the more dedicated student, and she built an international career: Olivetti, Omnitel, Bouygues Telecom, Cingular and AT&T, ESPN Mobile, Gogo, ten years at Comcast and five years as CTO of Sky Italia until last July 2025. She left Italy with two suitcases and a plan to be home within a year and, thirty years later, she is based in Philadelphia leading a strategic advisory portfolio.The spine of the episode is that leading 200 people and leading 2,000 are two very different jobs, and the second one only works if you design the organization intentionally, with clear purpose. Values become infrastructure. When your organization has fewer than roughly 300 people, you know everyone, and the why can travel through you. As she put it, "it is easier to inspire your team with the why, rather than only the what and the how." Above that size, the why must be built into the organization. She uses the Gartner pyramid, adding a foundational values layer underneath and KPIs that serve both the tech org and the business.Transparency, defined properly, does not mean handing the business every report you produce. . That level of detail is too specific to be meaningful outside the organization. Her analogy is a visit to the doctor: do you need someone simply to read your lab scores; you need interpretation, empathy and a clear explanation of what the scores mean. Are you fine? Can you improve? Is there something serious to worry about? She put that value to the test in a meeting with lawyers present, when her own team admitted that it had chosen not to disclose a data point. She stopped the meeting and told the business stakeholders: "Please forgive for failing to uphold our commitment to transparency." A value becomes real the first time defending it publicly costs you something.Crossing the forest. Intended change is like crossing a forest you have never entered before, without survival training. You keep the destination in sight, bring the right equipment, surround yourself with people who have skills you do not have, act with humility, and clearly say what you know and what you do not. Knowing your own limits becomes part of the operation you lead. She needs seven hours of sleep, and during COVID at Comcast, while moving call centres and thousands of people to remote work, that fact shaped the plan: work shifts from day one and a designated backup for every team member, including herself, to keep operations running 24/7 if anyone became unavailable.“Live operations” (or ON SCREEN?) changes the discipline. In media, "the damage is already done. It's real time. You are on screen." At Sky that meant tracking near-miss KPIs, because once a failure has occurred, it can’t be undone; the near misses help prevent the next one. The 92% conversation. Growing up near Turin meant being measured against the best of the best, and learning that risk is personal, so failure feels personal too. Moving to the States rewrote that mindset into four words: "Movement is life. Movement is learning." Take calculated risk, and learn to be satisfied with 90% or 92%, because investing 100% of your energy on a single destination leaves every other opportunity unexplored.A swimmer, not a diver. She can dive deep when needed but doing so costs her the broader view. The role of a senior job is to make sense of complexity so other leaders can make sound decisions, including recognizing when the right technology decision is the wrong decision for the company.The reality of women at work. Gabriella hosts a nine-episode series of that name on the EveCareers Podcast Network. She defines luck as readiness plus opportunity plus the ability to say yes. Her view on where women stand in the workplace is shaped by two factors: the company culture and what each individual is willing to do within it. .

The Ex-LinkedIn now Shake Content CCO on the platform's credibility shift, why athletes are finally moving in, and why the person now carries the brandFor episode 58 of A Guy With A Scarf, summer edition, I spoke with Dani Markovits. Dani joined LinkedIn in 2021 as one of its first creator managers and stayed four years. Now he is CCO at Shake Content, a LinkedIn agency. Few people have watched the platform change from the inside and the outside the way he has.His headline point lands fast. LinkedIn stopped being the place you open only when you want a job. Ten years ago almost everyone logged in to hire or to be hired. Today people scroll it on the bus like TikTok. It became a mix of social feed, job market, and the room where professional conversations happen.The word Dani kept using was intention. People arrive ready to connect and talk business, which is why direct messages work there and fall flat on Instagram. Trust sits underneath all of it.On personality, his take is that you earn the right to go off-topic. Keep your expertise as the anchor, then let the human side show. "If you only share memes, if you only talk about music or about food, I don't think that's a recipe for success."Sport is arriving late, and that is the opportunity. When Dani pushed sport at LinkedIn, colleagues doubted the fit and athletes said the platform was "for boring people." That has flipped. Athletes want to invest, sit on boards, back causes. LinkedIn is where the audience wants to hear about the life beyond the pitch. They "don't wanna be known only as the tennis guy or as the football lady." And here they read their own comments, because they are speaking straight to decision-makers.I saw this in a bar in Torino. Alex Del Piero sat in front of me, talking for hours about family, business, investments, and cinema. Close to zero football. That is the version athletes bring to LinkedIn.Reach is not the metric. "You don't need a huge audience," Dani said. What matters is who you get in front of. He has seen athletes with small followings do very well.The biggest recent change is that LinkedIn now measures who is posting, alongside what they post. It judges whether the author has the credibility to speak on a topic. One football post, word for word, should travel further from me than from him. "It matters the credentials, it matters the earned experience." Reach can drop while engagement holds or improves, which means the matching is working.LinkedIn is finally serving creators too. A native creator marketplace, video monetization, a call-out feature. Brands now see that creators and experts drive the decisions, and in B2B they all live on LinkedIn.Shake Content puts the person ahead of the company page. The share of people who actually post on LinkedIn is in the low single digits, so the room to stand out is wide open. Dani works with founders, executives, and athletes on credibility and visibility, with the person first and the company page second.On the corporate side, the old fear that employees build their own brand at the company's expense is the wrong lens. Companies gain from association. Four years ago firms blocked employees from posting. Now they push them and hire on the strength of their LinkedIn activity. "The best people suited to speak about your company is your own employees." Cheaper, and more impactful. His caveat: anybody can do this. Not everybody should. There is no shortcut.Dani also launched his newsletter, "LinkedIn/actually," after years of telling everyone else to do the same.My position is clear. LinkedIn rewarding credibility over raw reach is the healthiest move it has made in years. It favors people who know their subject and show up as themselves.

The Microshifter's Guide to Fragmented WorkWelcome to our discussion on Microshifting: the new rhythm of work that aims to make your professional life "shorter, sharper, and more human". This practice is gaining traction, especially among solo professionals and Gen Z, and has been called the next evolution of flexible work.What is Microshifting?Microshifting is defined as the art and occasional struggle of working in shorter, intentional blocks of time, typically under six hours, instead of continuous stretches. It involves breaking the day into fragments, creating a "mosaic" rather than the linear 9-to-5 schedule of the past.For independent workers—creators, advisors, and thinkers—microshifting is often necessary for survival. It allows professionals to build around peaks of inspiration and align their work with personal rhythms, energy levels, and creativity, rather than against real life. This approach is seen by some as liberation, though others view it as fragmentation.The concept fits neatly into the new modular economy and the creator economy, where work involves short cycles, quick releases, and frequent recalibration. It signifies a cultural shift toward customizing work to fit the human, instead of forcing the human to fit the clock.The Choreography of FragmentationMicroshifting is not chaos; it is choreography. The author of the accompanying guide realized they were a Microshifter when they began working in bursts—a few hours of intense focus, a pause, another window of deep work, and sometimes a late block of writing.In this model, days are designed like a musical score with movements and pauses. Each block of time has its own specific start, end, and purpose, such as a creative block in the morning or a communication block in the early afternoon.The Freedom Trap and the Need for EdgesWhile the freedom is seductive, it presents a danger: flexibility, when unmanaged, becomes erosion. Without fixed corporate schedules, there is a risk of stretching time infinitely, leading to 15-hour days spent across five different tasks and four different moods.The key insight is that flexibility is not the opposite of structure; it needs structure to survive. Microshifting must involve "framed fragments," meaning that you must fiercely defend the edges where each work block begins and ends.A core challenge is the Cost of Fragmentation. Splitting the day requires extra effort to reconnect the dots, potentially fracturing the sense of flow and making the Microshifter feel perpetually "halfway through" everything. This risk means one might become incredibly responsive but slowly lose the ability to go deep, which requires time, boredom, and friction. To mature as a Microshifter, one must move from being merely flexible to being intentional.What the Science SaysThe principles underpinning Microshifting are supported by research on focus and recovery.• Productivity Peaks are Short: Behavioral data suggests that most people sustain true high-focus work for only about 2 to 3 hours per day, supporting the use of short, high-intensity blocks.• Breaks Improve Well-being: Studies indicate that micro-breaks (typically under 10 minutes) significantly reduce fatigue and increase vigor. Active micro-breaks, such as stretching or walking, can improve mental well-being and reduce musculoskeletal pain.• Autonomy is Key: The ability to take breaks and have control over one's time and rhythms is vital for sustainable performance.However, the science also presents warnings about excessive fragmentation:• Cognitive Load: Switching tasks frequently, even within short blocks, incurs a measurable switching cost, potentially consuming 10–20% of working time as the brain reorients.• Overwork Risk: When individuals have high control but low boundaries (like working flexible hours from home), they tend to work longer overall and struggle to detach, potentially leading to higher fatigue.