Borrowing discipline from the pros

I keep coming back to sports. Not the highlight reels. The infrastructure behind them. Few organizations chase performance with the discipline you find in professional sports. The planning, role clarity, and sheer demand for week-over-week improvement are on a...

What fantasy football has taught me

I love Fantasy Premier League. Genuinely. It engages me, frustrates me, and gives me real joy in ways that surprise people who don’t play. Part of it is the strategy. Part of it is the constraints: a fixed budget, a limited number of moves, rules that...

What the scoreboard replaces

I sat with a client last month who swore her team hated their scoreboard. “It feels like the Panopticon,” she said. I asked her one question: “Who updates it?” “They do. Nobody makes them.” Bentham’s prison worked because you...

Flat-pack truth

The box promises a bookshelf for forty dollars. That’s the appeal. Cheap, flat, and yours to build. Then you open the bag of screws and unfold one sheet of diagrams. No words. Just arrows and stick figures assembling something that looks nothing like your...

Proven elsewhere, but not proven here

The company needed a new head of product. So they promoted their best salesperson. He’d hit every number for six years. He understood the customer. He knew how to win. None of that is product management. This happens constantly, in sports and in business....