Here’s a thing that shouldn’t surprise me anymore, but does.
A leadership team gets a clear diagnosis. The meeting rhythm is broken, scorecards are inconsistent, and accountability is soft. We build the fix together. It’s specific – weekly cadence, defined metrics, a quarterly check-in to adjust the dose.
For two, four, six weeks, it works. Numbers move. The room gets sharper.
And then, almost without anyone deciding to, it fades. The weekly meeting becomes biweekly. The scorecard stops getting updated. Nobody announces the change. It just happens, the way a habit slips once the urgency that created it disappears.
This is where I think we misunderstand what a prescription actually is.
When a doctor treats a chronic condition, she doesn’t expect you to take the medication until you feel better and then stop. She expects you to keep taking it, indefinitely if needed, with regular check-ins to adjust the dose. The treatment isn’t a phase. It’s a practice.
We don’t extend that same logic to our organizations. We treat operating discipline like a course of antibiotics – something to finish and move past – instead of something a chronic condition requires for good.
The best performers I’ve worked with, the ones who sustain results year over year, aren’t more talented than everyone else. They’re still doing the boring parts in year three that they did in month one. Week after week.
That’s the whole differentiator. Not the plan. The willingness to keep running it after it stops being new.
