Short, tactical, thought-provoking posts to start your week. Learn quick ways to improve your operations, rethink routines, and see patterns you might be missing.
This one is happening in real time. Right now, reviewing this week’s content in one chat. A second chat open in a completely different tab, for a digital product I’m learning to market — on a platform I’ve never used before, so every step needs actual attention. And three WhatsApp conversations running underneath both, each…
Someone on my team was going on leave. We did what you’re supposed to do — sat down, went through the handover. Programs assigned. Files shared. A neat little document listing who was covering what. Everyone nodded. Everyone felt covered. Two weeks later I found out a customer had been waiting on an answer that…
The week Amazon made my role redundant, I remember sitting down at my desk the following Monday out of pure habit, opening my calendar, and finding nothing there. Not one meeting. Not one call. After the better part of a decade managing teams and programs where my days were carved into thirty minute blocks back…
For a while I was the office manager at an NGO, which is a job title that meant almost nothing about what I actually did. On paper it was reception, some admin, ordering supplies. In practice I was also doing the accounts payable, half the procurement, and quietly keeping track of which grant reports were…
My first year managing a team at Amazon, I made the same mistake most people make when they start delegating. I picked people I trusted and figured that was the job done. Hire well, hand things over, everything’s fine. It wasn’t fine. Things got done, but not the way I’d have done them, and I…
A few weeks into a role at Amazon, I watched a customer complaint sit untouched for three days. Nobody was ignoring it — the one person who had authority to approve the fix was on annual leave, and there was no backup, no delegation, no plan B. The team could see the problem. They just…
When I got made redundant from Amazon after nearly a decade, the first thing that hit me wasn’t panic. It was quiet. For years my calendar had been solid blocks of back-to-back meetings — program reviews, team huddles, one-to-ones, engagement sessions. Suddenly all of that was gone, and in the space it left behind, I…
A client messaged me on a Tuesday and asked if I could have something ready by Friday. I said yes before I’d even looked at my week. This is exactly the kind of thing I would have told someone else not to do, back when I was still at Amazon. I spent years managing customer…
My first proper leadership job was running a Customer Service team at Amazon through peak season — the kind of stretch where the volume doesn’t let up for six weeks straight. I learned something fast: the team could read me before I said a word. If I walked onto the floor after a bad night’s…
The founder-dependency test is one of the most revealing operational diagnostics available. Here’s how to run it — and what to do with what it shows you. Here’s the test: if you disappeared for a week — genuinely unavailable, no messages, no calls, no oversight — what would happen to your business? Walk through it…
