An archive of thinking
Essays on leadership, operations and strategy from building institutions, businesses and teams.
Leadership3 essays
You Can't Command a Peer. You Can Only Convince One.
Seven markets, seven Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and almost nothing in common between them. Making the numbers mean the same thing meant leading people who didn't report to me.
Two Levels Up, Two Levels Down
The parts of military leadership that transfer best into running a hospital aren't the ones about command. They're the ones about building something that keeps holding together once you've stepped out of the room.
Most Underperformance Isn't a Performance Problem
Underperformance rarely starts with performance. More often, it starts with information — something not communicated, not understood, or not surfaced early enough.
Entrepreneurship1 essay
Not Every Venture Is Trying to Win the Same Game
Looking back, the mistake wasn't that some ventures grew slowly or stalled. The mistake was assuming they should all be judged by the same scorecard.
Institution Building5 essays
When Standards Fail Quietly
Standards rarely collapse in a single decision. They erode through tolerated exceptions — and through verification that has stopped looking closely enough to catch them.
The Workplan Failed. The Data Didn't.
The real constraint was never the plan — it was how much organizational capability each approach demanded before it could produce any value at all.
Optimize One Part, and the Whole System Pays For It
A decision can be completely correct for one part of an organization and still be wrong for the organization as a whole.
The Dashboard Is Not the Ground Truth
On paper, nothing was broken. It took a Gemba walk to surface the issue — and to remind us that reports are not the same as ground truth.
When Strategy Meets Reality: Lessons from Opening an International Hospital
The gap between a strategy on paper and a strategy under real conditions is where execution either survives contact with reality, or it doesn't.