About
Welcome to LeadDon’tCtrl
This is where leadership stops being corporate-speak and starts being honest.
If you’re tired of polished PowerPoints, hollow platitudes, and meetings that feel like ritualized suffering, you’re in the right place. This site exists for people who know something is off but can’t quite articulate it until now.
I’m Nick Mullins. I’ve been in sticky tech leadership trenches, I’ve seen the playbooks that don’t work, and I’ve learned what happens when the what actually works is never written down.
Here, we don’t pretend the system is fine. We talk about why it isn’t, and how to actually fix things without pretending you own the universe.
Start Here
These are the concepts that define what LeadDon’tCtrl is about:
Leadership in the real world
- Leadership Reality — what it actually feels like to lead people when no one taught you how
- Agile Fails — when agile stops being a method and starts being a meeting factory
- Broken Processes — systems that look impressive on slides but collapse in execution
Other Themes You’ll Find Here
Explore the hard truths most leadership posts won’t touch:
Culture and work life
- Burnout — not tips. Real experiences and how people survive them
- Anti-Corporate — why the playbook doesn’t work and what people actually experience
- Career Survival — how to last in a tech career without selling your soul
- Workplace Myths — popular lies leadership swears by
Things that waste your time
- Meetings — a direct look at how gatherings hide more problems than they solve
- Remote Work — real takes on distributed work without the clichés
Longer reflections
- Essays — deep, unabashed thinking about leadership, work, systems, and culture
More Ways to Connect
Lead Don’t Ctrl Podcast
We talk with builders, leaders, and people who live the reality most leadership content ignores.
Social
Thanks for showing up here.
Not because it’s cool.
But because you’re done pretending everything is fine.