Peter Kang

I’m writing this after a full week away from work. My family took a trip a few hours north and stayed at an Airbnb, exploring the local towns and parks. While a vacation with two young children–especially with one who’s going through a sleep regression–wasn’t necessarily relaxing, I enjoyed the opportunity to take my mind off of work and to create some nice memories. Additionally, it was very rewarding to know that the business was […]

I’m pretty certain that when I’m an old man looking back on my time as an agency business owner, the thing that’ll matter most won’t be how much money I made or the prestige of the clients we worked for. The actual work we did for clients will also largely be forgotten. What will matter to me the most, by far, will be the relationships I had with the people I worked with as well […]

Incorporating Reading Into Our Planning Meetings At the start of each quarter, the four Barrel partners meet for an all-day planning meeting. The format of this meeting used to focus heavily on identifying various issues in the business and putting our heads together to see if we could resolve them. The goal of each planning meeting was to come away with a solid slate of key initiatives to accomplish over the next 90 days. Four […]

“If you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, ‘What will I think at that time?’ it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion.” – Jeff Bezos, on his Regret Minimization Framework Bezos recalls how he made the decision to leave his cushy hedge fund job to start Amazon. He used what he called the “Regret Minimization Framework” to think of himself at age 80 and imagine […]

“The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.” “Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy—an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment.” (Will […]

There’s the oft-referenced story from Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland, taken from the section on “Perfection”: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure […]

“Deliver quality work and the client will be happy” is something I used to tell myself and our team members at Barrel over the years. Upon deeper reflection, this isn’t necessarily true. In recent years, we’ve talked more and more about the “client experience” – what it looks and feels like from the client’s perspective to work with an agency like Barrel. Do they feel like they’re taken care of? Are the cadence of communication and […]

I’d like to think that I live a happy and blessed life. And on most days, I feel pretty good. However, I would be lying if I said things were always smooth sailing. Like most others, I have my darker moments and they come at unexpected times. I wanted to catalog some of these (along with how they spiral down a darker place) and also share some counters that have been helpful for me to […]

A company’s culture is never a finished product. It continues to evolve with time as new rituals emerge, as the nature of the work changes, as personnel come and go, and world outside of work brings in new influences. I’ve seen the culture at Barrel evolve through the years with its highs and lows. There were moments when things clicked and we felt we were on an unstoppable rocket ship. And then there were times […]