Pe Teams
Your team's mood is contagious
Affect moves through an organization faster than information does. Leaders who treat mood as a private matter are managing a system they cannot see.
Aug 20265 min read
Insights
The Catalyst
Weekly since 2023. One hundred and twenty-six issues on scaling, leadership, and building organizations that run on systems, indexed by the twelve elements. A curated selection is shown here.
24 insights
Ri Decision making
Decisions are an operating system
When decision-making becomes political, the problem is rarely the politics. It is that nobody designed where decisions are made, by whom, and with what.
Jul 20266 min read
Os Org design
The founder is not the bottleneck. The design is.
Companies that have tripled without redesigning their structure blame the founder for the friction. The founder is only the place where the missing structure becomes visible.
Jun 20267 min read
Ar Learning
You gotta collect 'em all (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
On the difference between accumulating frameworks and building an operating system that uses one.
Aug 20264 min read
Me Communication
The meeting that should be a dashboard (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Status meetings exist because the data is not visible. Make it visible, then reclaim the hour.
Jul 20264 min read
Se Strategy
Strategy is a set of refusals (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
A strategy that cannot be used to say no is a wish list with a budget.
Jul 20265 min read
Va Culture and values
Psychological safety is a design outcome (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Teams do not become safe because they are told to be. They become safe because the system stops punishing candor.
Jun 20266 min read
Rr Org design
Promoted into a title, not a role (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Your best individual contributor is now a manager with no decision rights, no metrics, and no design. What did you expect?
Jun 20265 min read
Ob Strategy
The quarterly plan nobody reopened (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Objectives fail as documents and succeed as systems. The difference is the review rhythm.
May 20264 min read
Os Org design
Why your COO hire did not work (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
A senior hire into an undesigned role inherits the bottleneck they were hired to remove.
May 20266 min read
Pe Self leadership
Leading when you are depleted (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Composure cannot be borrowed. The leader's own operating rhythm is part of the organizational design.
Apr 20265 min read
Sy Org design
The spreadsheet is the org chart (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Where the workflow lives in a spreadsheet, the organization is running on one person. Find the spreadsheet, find the risk.
Apr 20265 min read
Fp Innovation
Innovation needs a budget line (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Unfunded experimentation is a hobby. Fund it, measure it, and stop when it stops paying.
Mar 20264 min read
Ri Communication
Disagree in the room (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
A meeting where everyone agrees and nothing changes afterward was not a meeting. It was a rehearsal for the corridor.
Mar 20264 min read
Fp Strategy
What a buyer sees first (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Diligence teams read key-person risk before they read the revenue. Most founder-led companies fail that page.
Feb 20266 min read
Os Resilience
Resilience is redundancy in the design (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Organizations that survive shocks are not tougher. They have more than one person who can do each critical thing.
Feb 20265 min read
Vi Strategy
The vision test (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Ask each member of the leadership team to describe the vision independently. The variance is your problem statement.
Jan 20263 min read
Ar Learning
Learning loops, not training days (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Capability grows where the system reviews its own work. A training day is a fine way to spend a day.
Jan 20265 min read
Ri Teams
Teams that ship and teams that meet (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
The calendar is the operating system made visible. Read it before you read the strategy deck.
Dec 20255 min read
Va Culture and values
Values you can fire someone for (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
If a value has never cost the organization anything, it is a preference. Real values have a price.
Dec 20254 min read
Sy Innovation
AI belongs in the workflow, not the demo (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
A model that impresses the board and never reaches production is a cost with a good story.
Nov 20256 min read
Me Decision making
The metric you actually steer by (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Forty numbers on a scorecard is a report. Leaders steer by two or three. Find out which, then instrument them.
Nov 20254 min read
Fp Org design
Margin compression is a structure problem (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
Revenue up, margin down, and nobody can say why. The answer is usually in the roles, not the pricing.
Oct 20256 min read
Ri Decision making
Decide once (demo placeholder, returns to the insights note)
A decision that gets relitigated was never recorded. Artifacts are how decisions survive the meeting.
Oct 20253 min read
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