James Lezcano and the small machinery of a working day

James Lezcano remembers a request tracker with something approaching affection. A manager had built it in SharePoint using InfoPath. Someone submitted a request. A Word document appeared. The communications team wrote the material, changed its status and sent it back for edits. The next person knew when it was their turn. In the considerable history of office technology, this was a modest production. For the people doing the work, it saved hours.

There is a whole career tucked inside that little recollection. Lezcano works with words, but he pays attention to the arrangements that allow words to get written. Who asks for them? Where does the request go? Who has to approve the result? A beautifully constructed sentence can still spend a week waiting for someone to remember which version they were meant to read.

In May 2023, he returned to that old system in a piece about Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate. The toolset had changed. The attraction was familiar: a department could give its requests a route through the building. His enthusiasm was directed at the time people got back. The small administrative victory deserved a little applause.

A journalist before the job titles

Before the communications assignments, there was community journalism. Lezcano began his career as a brand journalist for a land development company. In 2011, while working as a community journalist, he interviewed Bob Graham about Keys to the Kingdom, Graham's novel drawing on subjects he had investigated as chair of the Senate intelligence committee.

Years later, Lezcano remembered the interview and the person across from him. He described Graham's kindness, thoughtfulness and attachment to the community. The recollection concerned a conversation about a book, rather than a communications campaign or a piece of office software. It is a useful place to meet Lezcano: asking questions, listening to somebody explain a complicated subject, then making a feature out of it.

The work subsequently took him into corporate communications. His assignments at Ryder included communications for the IT department, newsletter content, town halls and an employee recognition program. He also recalls securing a TEDx speaking opportunity for CIO Mel Kirk. A writer's working materials now included the institution itself: its technical teams, its leaders and the occasions on which they needed to be heard.

Later came external communications at Independent Purchasing Cooperative, the purchasing organization associated with Subway franchisees. The audience was operators across North America, and the stated purpose was practical: help them run more profitable businesses. A communications career can contain a surprising number of different readers. Lezcano's has included people following a local story, employees listening to a technology executive and franchisees trying to make business decisions.

The company behind the conversations

JJS Consulting Group was founded in 2018. Based in Nashville, it describes its work in terms of change management, executive communications and internal communications. Its services also include content marketing and speechwriting. These are assignments with very different surfaces: a leader speaking aloud, an employee reading an announcement, a team trying to understand a change.

Lezcano's consulting work has included Russell Reynolds Associates and the Construction Specifications Institute. Those names sit alongside the corporate communications jobs in his working history. His career has also taken him to WSP. Consulting and organizational roles both form part of that working history.

JJS gives that experience a business address and a set of services. The podcast gives it a voice. The difference matters to a reader getting to know its founder. A list of assignments tells you where somebody has worked. Listening to the topics they keep returning to tells you what they want to spend time discussing.

Seven minutes, six pieces of advice

One early episode of The JJS Podcast, published in August 2020, offered job interview advice. Its six points were straightforward: prepare talking points, keep the conversation natural, tell the truth, ask questions, research the company and explain the problem you can solve. The episode ran seven minutes. It did not require a three-day retreat.

That final instruction gives the list its direction. An interview offers an opportunity to explain how your work might be useful to the other party. The employer has a problem; the applicant has experience that may help. The advice starts with preparation and ends with a reason for the conversation to continue. It is an economical structure for a subject often burdened with elaborate rituals.

A September 2020 episode turned to speechwriting. It addressed the balance of style and substance in a business presentation or a wedding toast. The settings are different, but both demand words somebody can actually say to other people. Lezcano's teaching moved easily between the professional occasion and the ordinary one. Public speaking, after all, has a way of finding people who never applied for it.

In January 2022, he brought the podcast to YouTube with an introductory episode about his background and JJS's work. Another episode that month argued for the value of an outside consultant's perspective on executive communications. He was making the case for his profession in public, with enough room to explain what he thought the role could contribute.

When the subject became work itself

Lezcano has explained that he began the podcast to help people entering marketing and communications, including professionals who had suddenly acquired those responsibilities. Over time, his attention moved toward the wider circumstances of the knowledge worker. The show became a place to discuss how organizations operate and what workers expect from them.

That interest produced a 2021 episode on side hustles and their possible implications for the labor market. In January 2022, he asked what was happening in the world of work, putting the Great Resignation and the Great Reshuffle into the same conversation. These were questions about the terms of employment as much as the duties inside a job description.

By August 2022, the title was Quiet Quitting or How I Learned to Hate Meetings. His description cheerfully admitted to taking advantage of a fashionable search term. The underlying topic was the contribution of meeting culture to employee disengagement. A consultant who sells communications services was making time to question what happens when the calendar fills up with communication.

In January 2023, The Layoffs Episode pushed the discussion toward a different relationship between employers and workers. Lezcano proposed that holding a full-time job alongside freelance work or a side business should be treated as an ordinary possibility. The episode description carefully clarified his position. He was discussing expectations around work relationships, including the possibility of more than one professional commitment.

His episodes return to a recognizable concern: how much freedom a professional has to arrange a working life. Alongside the practical advice about messages and meetings sits an ongoing discussion about who gets to decide how the work is organized.

A course, a guest and a return to writing

Teaching also took a more formal shape. In September 2022, he announced Strategic Digital Marketing & Communications, an online course. The accompanying podcast episode made his argument that these skills had become central business functions. The course added another format to work he was already doing through short audio lessons and conversations.

He brought another practitioner into the discussion in January 2023, speaking with attorney Kristen Corpion of CORPlaw about managing clients. That subject put the relationship around the work in the foreground: the consultant or adviser has an assignment, but also a person or business to work with. In April, the podcast turned to concerns about artificial intelligence. The range of topics had widened considerably from an interview checklist.

The following month, Lezcano opened a Substack publication. Writing offered a format in which he could develop an idea without producing an entire podcast episode. He described himself as a writer by trade and by nature, and explained that he produced the podcast himself. An episode takes time before a listener ever presses play.

His launch note set out a modest financial proposition: a $5 monthly subscription would help offset the time spent creating the material. He wanted to publish professional guidance and commentary from the perspective of a working knowledge professional. The practical detail about paying for the time is part of the story. Even an argument about the future of work has to find a place in somebody's working day.

“I am a writer by trade and by nature”

James Lezcano, introducing his Substack, May 2023

The request-tracker article appeared in the same month. Here was the larger interest in work brought back to a small, recognizable problem: too many requests moving through a department without a dependable process. A former manager's solution had stayed with him. He wanted to show other professionals how they might build something similar with the tools available to them.

The request tracker brings the different parts of his career together. The community journalist, the corporate communicator, the consultant and the podcast host all have occasions to explain something to somebody else. In Lezcano's account of the tracker, the explanation has a destination and a next step. Someone receives the document. Someone knows what to do. For once, the office machinery is helping.