Leadership
The best technician was promoted. Nobody replaced the technician.
Promotion is often the only currency a smaller firm has. It buys a manager at the price of the highest-output worker, and frequently not even that.
Rialto Bridge
Leadership
Articles on leadership.
Leadership
The owner took a fortnight off. Nothing broke. Nothing was decided either.
The holiday test is the most popular measure of owner dependency and one of the least informative. A better version…
Leadership
The promotion happened in January. The calendar still looks like December’s.
Promoting the best technician into a management role is the most common capacity decision a growing business makes, and the…
Leadership
The founder was away for three weeks. Nothing broke. Nothing moved either.
Surviving the owner's holiday proves less than most businesses think it does, and the thing it fails to prove is…
Leadership
The new service is 6% of revenue. It takes 40% of the leadership meeting.
Disproportionate attention on a small line is either the best investment a business is making or its most expensive habit,…
Leadership
The owner was away for two weeks. Nothing broke.
A fortnight tests the decisions a business makes weekly and none of the ones it makes twice a year, which…
Leadership
Every task has been delegated. Every decision still comes back.
An owner can hand over all the work and remain the constraint, because what was handed over was execution and…
Leadership
The decision was made in March. It has been reopened four times since.
Some decisions come back because the world changed. Most come back because the decision was never actually closed, and the…
Leadership
The approval limit is £5,000. It was set when the average job was £3,000.
Approval thresholds are usually calibrated once and then left to drift, until the founder becomes the slowest step in the…
Leadership
Headcount went from 14 to 22. The org chart didn’t.
Nothing visibly broke when the team was fourteen. The mechanism that made those first hires feel free reverses quietly, and…
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This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.