Ideas on decisions, organizations, people, systems, and institutional intelligence. Grounded in eleven years of operational practice across technology and engineering leadership.
Strip a company down and you don't find products, or capital, or even people. You find a long chain of decisions. Money has the ledger. Code has version control. People and inventory have the HRMS and ERP. Why do decisions get an inbox?
The best business schools in the world teach with case studies. It is a strange method when you look at it directly.
A promotion round has just closed. Somebody good, who has been waiting two years for this, did not make it.
I said last time I wanted to look at the bill. Not the moment somebody asks why a rule exists and the room goes quiet, which at least announces itself, but the cost underneath it, which arrives continuously and never appears on anything anybody reviews.
A company of three hundred people says yes to things hundreds of times a week. Approve this expense.
Think of a company's decision-making as a building. Not a metaphor about ambition or growth, but a literal architectural question.
If you have spent any time in a corporate meeting room, you have seen the Six Thinking Hats in action, whether or not anybody called it that. One person brings the data.
Last time I wrote about the seventh hat, the one nobody wants to wear, because committing to a decision without a record means carrying the accountability alone. But there is a cost on the other side of that too, one that the company pays whether or not anybody wears the hat.
Before accounting could work, it needed a classification. Not a ledger.
There is a story, sometimes told in negotiation workshops, about a mother who always made small pancakes even though her pan was large. When her daughter asked why, the mother said that is how my mother taught me.
Last time I wrote about organizational inheritance: practices running on autopilot, reasons lost, the small pancakes on the large pan. The company doing things it cannot explain because the reasoning was never recorded.
I have spent the last two posts describing what most companies live with. Organizational inheritance: practices running on autopilot, reasons lost, the small pancakes on the large pan.
I recently watched Safed Sagar, the name given to one of the Air Force operations during Kargil. The sequence that stayed with me was the one on hitting enemy targets within a two-hundred-metre range, with no visibility of the target at all.