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One of the most expensive mistakes in management is confusing diagnosis with treatment.Imagine going to a doctor with a ...
19/08/2026

One of the most expensive mistakes in management is confusing diagnosis with treatment.

Imagine going to a doctor with a headache.

Without asking a single question, they prescribe surgery.

You’d probably look for another doctor.

Yet we do something remarkably similar at work.

Someone isn’t delivering.

So we prescribe: More pressure, more accountability, more check-ins, or more urgency.

Sometimes that works.

But first, I’d check three things:

Do they understand the job? Not “Did I explain it?” Could they explain back what good looks like?

Can they do the job? Not eventually. Today. Because ambition doesn’t magically manufacture skills.

Do they want the job? This is the uncomfortable one. Plenty of people want the promotion, salary and title. Far fewer want the Tuesday afternoon that comes with it.

Clarity problems need clarity.

Skill problems need development.

Fit problems need an honest conversation.

Treat all three as motivation problems and you slowly create a company that only moves when you push it.

That’s not high performance.

That’s a very expensive dependency.

I unpacked the framework here.

👉 Link in comments.

Managers have a remarkably sophisticated solution to almost every people problem:• Push harder.• Someone misses a de...
17/08/2026

Managers have a remarkably sophisticated solution to almost every people problem:

• Push harder.
• Someone misses a deadline? Push harder.
• Someone isn’t taking enough ownership? Push harder.
• Someone isn’t performing at the level you expected? Push harder.

It’s the management equivalent of fixing every household appliance with a hammer.

The problem is that underperformance usually has three very different causes:

1. They don’t understand what you expect.
2. They don’t yet have the ability to do it.
3. They don’t actually want the job.

And each requires a completely different response.

If they don’t understand, pushing creates confusion. If they can’t do it yet, pushing creates anxiety. If they don’t want to do it, pushing creates... well, mostly more pushing.

The strange thing is that leaders often interpret the resulting lack of progress as proof that they need to apply even more pressure.

Eventually, the founder becomes the engine of the entire company.

Then wonders why everything stops when they stop.

The better question isn’t “How do I get them to work harder?”, but “What problem am I actually trying to solve?”

I wrote more about the three questions I use to figure that out.

👉 Full article in the comments.

“We should be further along by now.”I’ve had this thought more times than I’d like to admit as a leader.You sit in a lea...
12/08/2026

“We should be further along by now.”

I’ve had this thought more times than I’d like to admit as a leader.

You sit in a leadership meeting. Everyone has an update, people are busy, and most things sound positive. Yet the initiative you agreed was important three months ago is still moving painfully slowly.

This is usually when the temptation to intervene kicks in. Push harder. Change ownership. Add a process. Move people around. Buy another tool. And increasingly, throw some AI at the problem.

I’ve made versions of this mistake myself. When progress feels slow, changing something feels productive.

But there’s a harder question worth answering first:

Why are we moving so slowly?

I’m seeing this right now with clients who are:

⚠️ Repositioning in the market, while parts of the team are still confused about the new direction
⚠️ Tightening their sales process to improve win rates, while ex*****on still varies across the team
⚠️ Building a more intentional AI strategy, while struggling to get any measurable impact or ROI.

Different initiatives, same frustration: they should be further along by now.

The danger is guessing at the cause. You change the process, move ownership, add another tool, or put more pressure on the team. A month later, you realize you were working on the wrong problem.

And now another month is gone.

With Q4 getting closer, those months matter.

We're opening five Company Design Diagnostic sessions before Q4 for leaders dealing with this exact situation.

Bring us one important initiative where you keep thinking, “We should be further along by now.”

We’ll spend 90 minutes figuring out what is slowing progress and what I’d focus on next.

If an initiative came to mind while reading this and you'd like to avoid another month or quarter spent solving the wrong problem, send us a message.

The most dangerous person in your next innovation meeting isn't the skeptic.It's the CEO.And usually, they have no idea....
06/08/2026

The most dangerous person in your next innovation meeting isn't the skeptic.

It's the CEO.

And usually, they have no idea.

A term called the HiPPO effect explains it. Highest Paid Person's Opinion.

When the most senior person in the room shares their view, everyone else quietly adjusts. They're told to by nobody. They just do it. Authority bias is wired in. We attribute greater accuracy to high-status voices without meaning to.

The engineer who spotted the flaw goes quiet. The customer success lead who heard something different last week stays quiet. The product manager who had a better idea decides it's not worth the fight.

And the HiPPO's idea moves forward, not because it was best, but because it was the one nobody wanted to argue with.

I've been that HiPPO. Running a 100-person tech company, I had plenty of ideas. Many of them were not that great. And the most expensive thing I could have done was let rank substitute for rigor.

One shift changed it for me: I stopped making statements in meetings and started asking questions instead (I'm still guilty of it sometimes).

David Pereira, coach, speaker, and author of "Untrapping Product Teams," told me he had to make the same change, because even a casual observation from him was being interpreted as a directive.

The fix isn't complicated. But it requires the person at the top to want honest input more than they want to be agreed with.

How many of your best ideas are dying in silence right now?

Check in the comments how you can fix this. 👇👇 👇

Imagine you built a factory.The factory has 60 employees, modern equipment, a strong order book.But every machine requir...
30/07/2026

Imagine you built a factory.

The factory has 60 employees, modern equipment, a strong order book.
But every machine requires your personal PIN code to start.

Every quality check requires you in the room.

Every shipping decision gets routed to your desk before the truck leaves.

You'd call that factory insane.

You'd say whoever designed that system clearly didn't think it through.

And yet.

That's exactly the operating model most founders are running at 50, 80, 100 people. Strategy in their head. Decision rights implicit. The team trained, slowly and without anyone noticing, to wait for the PIN code.

MIT Sloan found only 28% of managers responsible for executing strategy can name the top three priorities they're supposed to be executing. These are not junior employees. These are the people whose job title literally includes the word "ex*****on."

They're guessing.

Not because they're bad at their jobs. Because the factory was designed around one person and nobody updated the blueprints when the factory got bigger.

HBR put the outcome bluntly: 67% of well-formulated strategies fail not because the strategy was wrong, but because ex*****on was poor.

Good factory. Bad wiring.

So what are you waiting for to fix the wiring.

👇 How to do it: link in comments.

When every B2B company is running the same growth strategy, running that same strategy becomes the worst possible move.T...
29/07/2026

When every B2B company is running the same growth strategy, running that same strategy becomes the worst possible move.

The returns on obvious tactics don't disappear overnight. They erode slowly, until one day you're spending more to get less, and everyone around you is suggesting you spend even more.

The 27 tactics in this playbook share one thing in common: your competitors probably aren't doing them yet. Not because they're secret, but because they look indirect, or they're hard to justify in a quarterly review, or they don't produce a graph that goes up the week you start them.

Dark social sharing. Zero-volume keywords. Employee advocacy. Barnacle SEO. These aren't flashy. They're also not crowded.

I put them together in a free guide because the most useful growth moves in B2B right now are the ones that feel counterintuitive right up until they work.

Free download, link in the comments.

28/07/2026

Every founder I talk to about bringing in outside help has the same five objections. In order:

→ "The last consultant left me with a slide deck and nothing changed."
→ "I don't have the bandwidth to manage an outside engagement right now."
→ "You won't understand my business fast enough to be useful."
→ "It will take months before there's any real impact."
→ "The numbers don't support this right now."

Each one is completely reasonable. Each one is also asking the same question in a different costume: is this actually going to be worth it?

The bandwidth objection is worth pausing on, because it almost always misidentifies the source of the problem. If you're reviewing pricing exceptions because no one else has clear authority to approve them, bandwidth is not the issue. Your accountability structure happens to eat your calendar. An outside engagement doesn't pile on. Fixing the structure frees the calendar.

The last objection deserves a direct answer rather than the usual pivot to case studies. I wrote the direct version in this article.

Many companies have designed themselves into a corner.Not by accident, exactly. Every company is already designed, most ...
27/07/2026

Many companies have designed themselves into a corner.

Not by accident, exactly. Every company is already designed, most just weren't designed on purpose. I've worked inside multinationals where the politics, or the policies, had quietly become the point.

They set like concrete, one convenient decision at a time, until the org chart is running the company and the humans are just keeping it fed.

Bureaucracies are pretty good at that too.

As Rory Sutherland put it in a talk: "Creative people always have to present their ideas to rational people for approval. That never happens the other way around. The rational people have the power of veto and the creative people only have the power of suggestion."

That asymmetry is how the concrete sets. The safe, sensible, defensible option wins every small decision, and defensible compounds into a company optimized for approval instead of outcomes.

Designing on purpose means asking the questions the veto never makes you ask:
→ What game are we actually playing?
→ Are the right people in the right seats?
→ Does the work ship without heroics?
→ Who are we when nobody's checking?

Answer them on purpose, or the defaults answer for you. And they already are.

That's what I call company design. It doesn't have to be sophisticated. It just has to start.

We help teams put these in place in a few weeks. Reach out if your company's design needs a make over.

Want Faster Ex*****on? Start by Doing LessPeople ask me how to speed up ex*****on, and my answer disappoints them, becau...
26/07/2026

Want Faster Ex*****on? Start by Doing Less

People ask me how to speed up ex*****on, and my answer disappoints them, because it starts with doing less.

It disappoints them for a reason. "Do less" doesn't feel like leadership. Adding a sprint, a stretch goal, a push, that feels like leadership, even when it's the thing making everyone slower.

We're wired to treat visible effort as progress, so the quiet move of taking things off the table feels like doing nothing. It's often the highest-leverage thing on the list.

While you may think your team is slow, they're more likely overwhelmed. Pushing harder buys you a short boost you can't sustain. Speed comes from clearing the path.

Here are three moves you can use (and the order matters).

1️⃣ Cut the priority list to two or three things, and here's the part everyone skips: nothing new starts until something on the list is done. Work-in-progress limits aren't just for dev teams. They work beautifully for entire companies.

2️⃣ Remove friction. Every handoff, every approval, every "let's quickly sync" sitting between starting and shipping is a tax. Ask your team which ones are the worst, then go kill them.

3️⃣ Point AI at the friction, not the work. Let the machines carry the meeting notes, the status updates, the handoff docs, so the humans keep the judgment and the creativity.

The sequence is critical: focus, then remove friction, then add AI.

Do it backwards and you'll just automate the chaos.

A founder told me last month his growth had flattened and he was three weeks from hiring a second VP of Sales.I asked hi...
20/07/2026

A founder told me last month his growth had flattened and he was three weeks from hiring a second VP of Sales.

I asked him what the slowdown actually looked like. Not the numbers, the day-to-day. He described it perfectly without realising it: work still got done, just slower. Decisions he used to make in the hallway now needed four people in a room, and the room's main output was scheduling the next room.

That's not a sales problem. His product was fine, churn was low, the market still wanted what he sold. He was debugging the one part of the system that mostly worked.

The real issue was that nobody could make a call without him in the middle of it. He'd scaled the headcount, the office, and the AWS bill, and skipped the one thing that mattered: the ability to decide without him in the room. The VP he was about to hire would have landed in that same system and been quietly rejected within six months.

He paused the hire. We spent a day on the foundation instead. Decision speed shifted in weeks.

I wrote up the full pattern, because he is not the only one living it. Link in the comments.

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