Five pieces this week landed on the same failure from five different directions. Somewhere inside each story an organization was running on a statement nobody had gone back and checked.
On Wednesday the third of September, Jeff Green emailed everyone at The Trade Desk to say the company would be about fifteen percent smaller the following day. Individual notices followed within fifteen minutes. The message reached the public through The Current, a trade publication The Trade Desk owns, and no press release accompanied it. Most of the email argued that the reduction was a matter of focus, citing the balance sheet to rule out financial distress, and on that narrow point Green is right. Roughly $1.5 billion in cash and no debt both hold up against the filings.
What it leaves out is the part a reader needs. No functional breakdown, no regional split, no restructuring charge, no headcount figure, which is why the reported 575 to 585 roles is derived from the last annual report and not disclosed. Nor does it mention that guidance issued four weeks earlier points to the first year-on-year revenue decline in the company's history as a public entity.
That is this week's through-line arriving as a single event. Five articles found the same failure in five different rooms: a cost estimate nobody refreshed, a delegation argument about volume when the answer was decision type, an office norm converted into a price, a layoff cause asserted and never established, and the months after a handover that no plan accounts for. In each one the organization's stated version of itself had gone unchecked long enough to become the operating reality.
My position. The Trade Desk is subdividing into smaller pods, having removed one in seven people, with a senior team largely appointed inside the last year. Three simultaneous changes to how information moves through the building, made at the moment the research says it already moves worst. The balance sheet was never the thing to worry about.
On a band director who lent me his own trombone, and the part of it I did not understand for thirty years
Updated September 13, 2026, after Chuck's celebration of life. The update is at the end of this piece.
It was a sweltering August afternoon in 1991 when I walked into the band room for the first time to meet the band director. I had played trombone for nearly three years by then and was not noticeably better than the day I started. He was twenty seven, and he seemed far more grown than most twenty seven year olds I meet now. He had a direct way of speaking that never came across as unkind. He seemed to understand, without working at it, how to say a thing so that people actually heard it.
I do not remember much else about that day. There was some kind of evaluation to sort out who would be serviceable enough for the marching band. All of it was new to me. I had started playing at a very small school in a remote part of Hardin County, and my father's work with the government moved us around for years after that. I played in a larger school in Utah, then a genuinely big one in Texas, and then landed back in Kentucky for high school.
Elizabethtown was the preeminent school in the county in those days. An absurd share of my graduating class went on to own businesses, run companies from the executive suite, sit on boards, practice medicine and law at a high level. A few became authors and social media personalities, and one or two ended up in the political machinery of Washington. I think about the education I got there more often than you might expect. Most of the teachers were good, which I was in no position to appreciate at the time. A few made a mark out of all proportion to the hours involved. Chuck Smith was one of those.
Band camp started a few weeks later, and I turned up without an instrument. Every school I had attended kept loaners and handed them out. Elizabethtown did not. Chuck looked confused, and then he looked annoyed, and then he put me to work. I spent that first day on fundamentals in the parking lot, learning to walk and mark time and execute turns and facing movements, holding my hands up in front of my face and pretending there was a horn between them. Most of the band was doing the same thing, since we were learning to move as one object and the instruments would only have been in the way.
That could not last. Thirteen hour days, starting around half past seven and running until the light went, for two weeks, in Kentucky, in late August. The humidity did not let up once. We had a good time anyway, which I still cannot fully explain.
On the second day he pulled me aside and handed me the most beaten up instrument case I had ever seen. He had a serious look on his face. "Go ahead, open it." Inside was technically a trombone. The lacquer had peeled off in patches, it was plainly old, and it carried a couple of dents. I looked back at him with what must have been an obvious question on my face. He gave me a tight lipped smile.
"That's my personal trombone. I'm letting you borrow it until your parents get you one. Take care of it, please, and learn to play it."
The F attachment had no finish left on it at all, and over the following two years the web between my thumb and index finger turned faintly green from brass and sweat. I got a lot better. I played nearly every day. By my junior year I was slated for second chair, my parents bought me a new instrument, and I gave his back with more gratitude than I had the vocabulary for. He got a kick out of inspecting the new one and admired the rose tinting on the bell.
He never let up on me. He pushed every day, and most of the time I came away feeling I had let him down. Every so often there was a look, or a nod, that suggested otherwise.
My first season we had a genuinely good group and took third at the state finals. The next year ran much the same way. Everyone performed, and something was still missing from it. Then my junior year arrived and we went through the competition like a tornado. Chuck was a man on fire that season, absolutely set on taking the state title. When the announcement came the noise was deafening. What I felt was not really joy. It was the particular kind of pride that only shows up when a thing you named two years earlier finally arrives. All of it counted toward that. The heat and the sweat, the fundamentals repeated past the point of tedium, the shivering later in the season, the hand warmers, the mouthpiece freezing to your lip.
It took me years to work out that it had been paying off the entire time. I had become a different person somewhere in there without noticing. I understood that achievement runs on goals you actually name, that mastery of anything gets built by practicing the basics until they go automatic, and that leadership asks more of you than telling people what to do. It asks you to hand over something of your own to the people you are hoping will follow you.
Here is the part I want anyone who leads anything to sit with.
Chuck and I never had the bond I watched him build with other students. He had his favorites and I was not among them. I knew that then and it did not especially bother me, and I know it now with thirty years of distance. And yet I never once doubted that the man cared about me. He cared enough to push me when it would have been easier to leave me alone. He cared enough to tell me I could be better than I thought I could be. He cared enough to hand a fourteen year old his own trombone and let him keep it for two years.
What he was doing had nothing to do with whether he enjoyed my company. Most leaders I have worked with since cannot separate those two things. Their investment tracks their affinity, and the people they warm to get the coaching, the stretch assignment, the honest correction that costs something to deliver. Everyone else gets managed. Chuck ran it the other way around, and the proof is that I am sitting here at midnight writing about a man I only knew for four years over thirty years ago who did not count me among his favorites.
The same instinct showed up in how he handled the band as a whole. We did not sort ourselves by grade, which is unusual in a high school and almost unheard of anywhere else. I had close friends in every year from sixth grade through twelfth for the entire four years I was there. That came from him. I never once heard him say that a senior ought to be better at something by now. Grade levels did not appear to interest him. He took each person from wherever they actually were and worked on moving them forward from there.
Chuck Smith died on the second of September. He was sixty two. I never saw him again after 1995, but I will carry what he taught me for the rest of my life. Every class I teach, every talk I give, every coaching conversation I sit in, rests on a foundation he poured over two weeks in a parking lot in August.
Thank you, Chuck. "Take care of it, please, and learn to play it." I have been trying to ever since.
Chuck's family and friends held a celebration of his life tonight in the gym at Lafayette High School in Lexington, the last school where he taught. Hundreds of people came. About thirty of them were from my own classes at Elizabethtown, the years when he was cutting his teeth as a band director.
Someone had set out the memorabilia from his life along a row of tables, and the very first thing in that order, the first thing I saw when I walked in, was his trombone. The case sat across two white stools in front of the first table, every bit as beaten up as I remembered. I had not seen it in more than thirty years. I still do not have good words for what that did to me.
Later in the evening, talking with the other trombone players from those years, I found out I was not the only one. Several of them had played that horn at some point too. Hearing it raised him in my estimation. Lending your own instrument to one kid is a kindness. He kept on doing it for whichever trombone player needed it, which means that at some point he had decided anything he owned was available to his students, and a habit like that cannot depend on who you happen to like. It fits the argument I made here last week better than my own story did.
The rest of the room had their own versions. People kept bringing up the guest educators he brought in to teach us something specific, a style of playing or how to handle a particular rhythm, and the specialists who came to teach us to march better and to move from one formation to the next with real precision.
One phrase of his came back to me in the middle of all that. I have said "practice performance" to so many people over the last three and a half decades that I had nearly forgotten where I first heard it. He meant that you walked into every rehearsal and executed as though it were a performance with a judge watching.
That habit is the reason I became one of the best briefers when I worked in intelligence, and one of the best instructors everywhere I have taught since. It followed me into powerlifting too, later in life. In the training block before I hit a 550 pound squat, I recorded my sessions. My walkout and stance were so consistent from set to set, and the lifts so alike, that I could edit out the setups and string five sets of five together into one clip. The only thing that gave it away was the sunlight shifting through the window. Other than that, it was impossible to tell I had done five separate sets and not one long set of twenty five.
It was a sad reason to see people I had not seen in many years, and a good reminder of what is probably the greatest legacy he left. Service to others is the highest calling, and he did it with passion and excellence.
Chuck's family has asked that any gifts in his memory go to local band programs rather than flowers. The Elizabethtown Band Boosters, the program he built while I was there, can be reached at account.venmo.com/u/ElizabethtownBandBoosters. The Lafayette Band Association and the Harrison County Band Association are also carrying donations.
This week's episode was Professor Jeff Willie, and the title is the argument: Be a River, Not a Reservoir. He makes the case for pouring what you know into other people while you still can, which reads differently once you have watched leaders hoard expertise as job security. Worth forty minutes if you have anyone coming up behind you.
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Join us →Monday's piece on the estimate nobody refreshed sits right on top of Chapter 1 of Agile Sucks! (When You Do It Wrong), where James and I go after what we call successful failure: organizations reporting healthy metrics while producing no business outcome anyone can point to. Around seventy percent of Agile organizations tell that story about themselves. The chapter is about how the reporting gets that far from the work.
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