I took this picture while walking through a local park. What caught my attention wasn’t simply the old piece of equipment that had been left behind. It was the tree growing around it. Whatever purpose that equipment once served, it had clearly been there for a very long time. The environment changed, the tree continued…
As organizations grow, they naturally build systems for the things they know are important. Finance gets structure. Operations become standardized. Technology gets platforms and processes. Each area is designed to produce consistent results instead of relying on individual effort. Leadership is expected to scale without one. A high performer gets promoted into management. They do their…
Yesterday I found myself using a pair of scissors that are more than a hundred years old. They belonged to my grandfather. My dad kept them for decades, and when he passed away, they ended up in a box with a handful of things I couldn’t imagine throwing away. I needed to trim a few…
Most workarounds begin with good intentions. Something isn’t working the way it should, but the business still needs to move forward. A leader steps in. An extra approval gets added. A team creates a temporary process. Someone takes ownership of a problem that was never supposed to belong to them. In the moment, those decisions are…
When I spend time with leadership teams, one pattern shows up again and again. The issue usually isn’t a lack of capable people or committed leaders. In fact, most organizations are full of smart, hardworking individuals who genuinely want the business to succeed. The problem is that leadership capacity gradually gets absorbed by the organization itself….
Most organizations don’t struggle because they lack talented people. More often, they’re struggling because the flow of work has silently become constrained over time. It rarely happens because of one big decision. Instead, constraints accumulate one reasonable decision at a time. A decision begins waiting for another approval. A process becomes dependent on one person. A…
That title probably sounds ridiculous. After all, you’re there every day. You know the people, you know how decisions get made, and you’ve watched the organization grow over time. So how could I possibly suggest that the organization you’re leading no longer exists? Here’s what I mean. One of the things I’ve noticed after spending…
It’s capacity leakage. Teams rarely lose capacity all at once. Instead, it disappears gradually through small, almost invisible losses. Misalignment creates unnecessary rework. Simple decisions take longer than they should. Leaders compensate for gaps instead of addressing them, and decision ownership remains concentrated in the hands of a few people because they’re the only ones trusted…
Most organizations don’t set out to create weak leaders. In fact, they usually do exactly what seems logical. Someone consistently performs at a high level, earns the respect of their peers, and eventually gets promoted into a management role. It’s a reward for doing great work. The problem is that success in one role doesn’t…
Several years ago, I was on a sailing trip in the Bahamas with my family. One afternoon, while windsurfing through a shallow bay, I came across something I had never seen before. Five or six live queen conchs had been wired together and left on the ocean floor. At first, I couldn’t make sense of it. They…