This week has been about operational capacity — the idea that ambition doesn’t really have a ceiling, but people, teams, and systems do. Today, the practical bit: what I actually did about it in my own business this week. I sat down on Monday morning and went through everything that had shown up in my…
I first heard the phrase “operational capacity” used properly at Amazon, in a planning meeting about peak season staffing. Someone asked how many extra people we needed for the run-up to the holidays, and instead of just answering with a number, the ops lead pulled up a chart showing what happened to quality scores every…
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…
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…
Delegation drift is one of the most common and least-named patterns in founder-led businesses. Here’s how to spot it and fix it. Delegation drift looks like this: you hand something over genuinely. You felt good about it. The person seemed capable. The brief was reasonably clear. And then, over the following weeks, something quiet happens….
The practical barriers to delegation have known solutions. The emotional barriers are where most founders actually get stuck — and they’re worth naming. There’s a version of the delegation conversation that’s entirely practical. Clear briefs, defined outcomes, the 4 Levels of Delegation, process-based trust. All of it is useful, and all of it is learnable….
Personal trust gets delegation started. Process-based trust makes it scalable. Here’s the difference — and how to build the kind that lasts. Ask most founders why they struggle to delegate and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: trust. They don’t fully trust the people they’re delegating to — not necessarily to be dishonest…
The simplest antidote to Decision Latency: find the decision that’s been waiting longest, own it, and make it. By the end of this week, you should have made one decision that has been waiting longer than it should. Not the most complex decision in your business. Not the most strategic. The one that’s been waiting…
Operationally Speaking, Vol. 4 — A full breakdown of Decision Latency: what it is, what causes it, and how to fix it structurally. 📖 DEFINITION Decision Latency is the gap between when a decision could be made — when sufficient information is available and the decision is needed — and when it actually gets made….
An unmade decision is not a neutral state — it’s an active operational cost that compounds with every hour it remains unmade. There’s a decision in most businesses that’s been waiting longer than it should. Not because the information isn’t available, not because the stakes are particularly high, not because it’s genuinely complex — but…
