On compression

Preparing a presentation forces you to find out what your maximum level of aggregation currently is. You can write a paper at whatever altitude you naturally inhabit. A presentation doesn't give you that luxury. You have a room, a clock, and an audience that will either follow you or lose you, and the moment you lose them, you’ll know. Snoring is a harsh yet genuine type of feedback. This is a practice, and one that we need in our daily work outside of academia. Every round of compression and decompression (every presentation, every conversation with a smart non-specialist, every time you pitch something in under three minutes) raises the ceiling of what you can hold. You practice distilling, and slowly, your maximum level of aggregation rises – it's like altitude training for thinking but try not to get high on the thin air. Which brings us to the importance of staying grounded.

On staying grounded, and the question that keeps you there

Trap # 267 of theoretical work: The higher you climb in abstraction, the easier it is to forget that the model needs to explain something that is actually happening, somewhere, to someone who isn't you. The question that prevents this from happening is simple: why should we care?

Not "why is this interesting to me." Not "why does this fill a gap in the literature." Not “how does this help me to scratch my own itch.” Why. Should. We. Care. The “we” meaning: academic community, practitioners, family business owners, advisors, the people whose reality your research is, in some small or large way, supposed to illuminate. That question keeps models honest and forces you to ask what reality your construct is actually pointing at, and whether anyone who lives in that reality would recognize it.

On mastodons who make mistakes – and what that teaches you

I'll admit: I came to Naples with a quiet awe for certain names in the room: people who, in my imagination, existed somewhere above the level of uncertainty I was still swimming in and did more than marking their territory in academia, they created this territory in the first place. Then I watched them openly admit, mid-discussion, that they didn't know the answer to a question. Laugh at themselves for an assumption that hadn't held. Invite someone else to correct them and genuinely look delighted when they did. It was probably more instructive than any paper I read there: You do not become less of an academic by not knowing something. You become less of one by pretending otherwise. The mastodons in the room modelled more than theories: they role-modelled intellectual seriousness and intellectual humility, as well as freedom and integrity.

Being in a room where people are simultaneously your harshest critics and your colleagues, where they will find the gap in your thinking with surgical precision and then shake your hand and ask where you're having dinner, that is a specific kind of connectedness and trust. For this you have to be in the room, presenting, exposed, with your logic on the line – with your whole self on the line. That feedback, taken head-on, is a gift, even when it stings. Especially when it stings.

On choosing your pack – and what Seth Godin has to do with nepotism research

Seth Godin talks about the smallest viable audience. The core idea: don't try to reach everyone. Choose who your work is for – specifically, deliberately – and then delight them so thoroughly that they spread the word to people like themselves. You have to choose your customers – who's it for and what's it for. You also have to choose your competitors. Together, they will largely define your reality. This applies to research. I chose family-owned businesses. Not as a default, not because someone handed me the topic – but because I find them genuinely fascinating, because they sit at the intersection of the personal and the institutional in a way that no other organizational form does, and because the practitioners I work with every day are navigating exactly the tensions that the research describes. Plus, a special delight of mine: because they think REALLY long-term. The mere thought of this makes me briefly visit nirvana.

Yet, there is more: Family businesses are, among other things, families. And families have a specific logic. Pack schlägt sich, pack verträgt sich – they fight, they forgive. Then they fight again, and underneath all of it is a loyalty that outlasts the conflict. IFERA, as a research community, operates on a version of this same logic. It is a field that knows itself, that has its own stories and debates and lineages – and that is, precisely because of its specificity, extraordinarily good at self-correction.

When you choose your arena – your smallest viable audience, your field, your community of practice – you are also choosing your competitors and your customers. In research, these often overlap: the person most likely to push back hard on your work is also the person most likely to cite it if it holds up. That combination is not a contradiction – it’s a motivation to go all in.

Looking forward to the gala tonight – still digesting. Still ruminating. Still amazed and already looking forward to the next year, IFERA. Same pack, new harbour.