When I got made redundant from Amazon, I had, for the first time in years, an empty calendar and no meetings to run to. So I did something I’d never made time for while I was in the job: I sat down and mapped out exactly where communication had broken down over the previous year….
I lived in Japan for eighteen months, teaching English, and one of the first things that quietly wrecked me was how much got communicated without ever being said. Silence wasn’t nothing — it was information, if you knew how to read it. I didn’t, not at first. I’d ask a question, get a pause and…
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…
This week’s been about time — protecting space to think, and noticing how often a meeting is standing in for a decision you could just make. Today’s the practical part. Block one hour this week. No calls booked over it, no email open, phone in another room if that’s what it takes. Better still —…
At Amazon, if something felt hard or unclear, the reflex was always the same: get people in a room. It felt responsible. It felt collaborative. Looking back, a fair number of those meetings weren’t either of those things — they were avoidance, just dressed up with an agenda and a calendar invite. A meeting about…
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…
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…
