The Plan Everyone Agreed To and Nobody Did
You spent a day on strategy. Everyone left energised. Three months later almost none of it has happened, and nobody has mentioned it since.
11 articles on institutional — what breaks as businesses grow, why it happens, and what to do about it.
You spent a day on strategy. Everyone left energised. Three months later almost none of it has happened, and nobody has mentioned it since.
It worked for twenty years because everyone knew everything. Now there are forty people, and the way it always worked has stopped working.
From outside it looks like everything is working. Inside, you are holding it together with effort and hoping nothing breaks this week.
The team is stretched, the orders keep coming, and somehow there is less money than last year. You are not imagining it, and you are not bad at this.
You have not taken a proper holiday in three years. Every decision routes through you. You built this, and somewhere along the way it started owning you.
Premature process kills speed. No process kills the company at the moment it starts working. Here is the line between them.
Growth consumes cash before it produces it. Businesses fail while profitable more often than most owners expect.
Consulting engagements fail on scope and accountability far more often than on expertise. Here is what to establish before you commit.
Without knowing the cost to acquire and the profit to serve one customer, every growth decision is a guess dressed as strategy.
Resilience is not caution. It is structural flexibility — the ability to absorb a shock without the business stopping.
Most businesses do not slow down because decisions are hard. They slow down because nobody knows who makes them.
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