Brian Cariveau

The short version

I've spent 25 years leading data and analytics teams — from small businesses where every dollar counted to Fortune 5 healthcare companies where the stakes are measured in lives. I've had the opportunity to lead a number of different teams across that journey, and with each one, a set of first principles got sharper. Principles about what actually works — not the theory, but the lived version. I wrote a book about it. But the thread underneath all of it was always the same: help people become a better version of themselves, at work and at home.

None of that is why this site exists.

This site exists because my six-year-old daughter walked into my office, saw me on my laptop — doing meaningful, important work — and said: “Dad, you're being a zombie on your computer.”

She learned the word from her mom describing screen time. She turned it back on me. Because to a six-year-old, there's no difference between YouTube and a CDO application. A screen is a screen. Gone is gone.

That moment cracked something open. Not because I was doing anything wrong — but because the right things can make you a zombie too.

How work became personal

Early in my career, I stood on a catwalk above a factory floor and watched work flow through a production system. Raw materials in, finished products out. Every bottleneck visible. Every waste point obvious. That night I couldn't sleep — I realized the analytics team I was leading was a factory too. They just couldn't see it.

That became the foundation of everything I've built professionally: make the invisible visible. Step above the system. See the patterns. Find the waste. Ask whether anyone is actually using what you're building — or if it's just motion disguised as progress.

After my daughter called me a zombie, I realized the same principles apply to life.

Most of us are running factories at home too. Full calendars. Activities nobody audited. Commitments that persist because they started, not because they work. Routines that feel productive but aren't making anyone happier. We're on a treadmill — and the treadmill is going faster every year. And the world keeps turning up the speed.

The principles that transformed my teams — see the system, eliminate the waste, measure what actually matters, ship at 70% confidence and adjust — those same principles helped my family. Not as a corporate framework forced onto personal life. More like gardening. You tend it. You adjust. You pull the weeds. You plant things and see if eyes light up. And you never stop, because the moment you do, the treadmill sets the pace for you.

The why

There's a Mark Twain quote on my office wall: “The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

My why — and I know it sounds idealistic — is to help people become a better version of themselves. Personally and professionally. A mentor at Wells Fargo told me years ago to think about expanding my “halo effect” — the circle of humans I'm genuinely impacting. Week over week. Month over month. Year over year. Widen the circle.

The Auction Block was the professional version of that. Analytics Pitfalls & Principles is the platform. This assessment — the Zombie Score — is the personal version.

We all have treadmills that go too fast sometimes. The world makes them go faster. AI is about to make them go faster still. We all need to be more like gardeners of an ecosystem — tending, adjusting, planting deliberately, making room for what wants to grow — instead of machines trying to optimize our way to a life we never actually chose.

A friend of mine, Dean Furness, taught me to focus on raising my average. Not chasing perfection — just being a little more intentional than yesterday. Owning it. That's what this assessment is for. Not a finish line. A checkpoint. A mirror you can come back to every season and see what's changed.

The background