OPERATIONS AUDIT
Where the work actually goes, mapped against where you believe it goes. The distance between those two maps is usually the entire problem, and it is rarely where anyone expects to find it.
OPERATIONS & SALES STRUCTURE
Operational clarity, delivered.
Simple management and execution systems designed to improve consistency, accountability, and outcomes.
XIV
FOURTEEN
CONSULTING
EST · MMXXVI
PRACTICE
SALES STRUCTURE
Stages, ownership, territory and compensation, rebuilt so the pipeline describes what is really happening rather than what everyone hopes is happening. A forecast is only as honest as the structure underneath it.
OPERATING CADENCE
The weekly and monthly reviews that let a plan survive contact with a real week. Most plans do not fail on the strategy. They fail because nothing brings them back to the table on a schedule.
APPROACH
OBSERVE BEFORE CHANGING
A first pass that documents the system as it actually runs, not as the org chart describes it. Nothing gets changed in this phase. Owners are often surprised by what the first pass finds, which is the point of doing it before anything else.
NAME ONE OWNER
Every step in a process gets exactly one person accountable for it. Shared ownership is the most common failure I find, and it is almost always the cheapest one to fix.
SET THE CADENCE
Consistency comes from rhythm, not from effort. Once the review calendar is right, the system holds itself up without anyone having to push on it.
MEASURE THE OUTCOME
One number per process, reviewed on the cadence. If the number does not move, the change did not take, and we go back to the first step rather than adding another layer on top of it.
PRINCIPLES
EFFORT IS NOT RESULT
Activity and movement are two different measurements, and the gap between them is worth watching closely. A team can work harder every week while the system moves less. Wyckoff read markets by comparing effort against result and treating the divergence between them as information. A pipeline can be read the same way, and the divergence tends to appear before the number does.
RICHARD D. WYCKOFF · THE LAW OF EFFORT VERSUS RESULT
CAUSE SETS THE SIZE OF THE EFFECT
Nothing produces a quarter it was not built for. The structural work — process, ownership, enablement — is the cause, and it gets done in the stretch when nothing visible is happening. That is precisely when owners lose their nerve and abandon it. A short base cannot support a long move.
RICHARD D. WYCKOFF · THE LAW OF CAUSE AND EFFECT
DESIGN FOR THE FAST DECISION
Under pressure, people think fast rather than carefully. A process that only works when everyone is deliberate is a process that fails in a busy week. Build so the quick answer is the correct one, and spend deliberation on the few decisions that genuinely repay it.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN · SYSTEM 1 AND SYSTEM 2 · THINKING, FAST AND SLOW, 2011
PEOPLE DEFEND WHAT THEY HOLD
A loss weighs heavier than an equivalent gain. This is why teams protect processes they will privately admit are broken, and why a change that takes something away stalls even when the arithmetic plainly favors it. Sequence the changes around that fact instead of arguing with it.
DANIEL KAHNEMAN AND AMOS TVERSKY · PROSPECT THEORY · ECONOMETRICA, 1979
THE WINNER IS OFTEN THE ONE WHO WAS MOST WRONG
In a competitive bid, whoever wins is frequently whoever most overestimated the value. Three petroleum engineers found it in offshore oil lease auctions: the companies that won the leases kept earning less than their own models had promised. The same arithmetic sits underneath vendor selection and underneath your team's bidding. Structure the process so you are not reliably the optimist in the room.
CAPEN, CLAPP AND CAMPBELL · THE WINNER'S CURSE · JOURNAL OF PETROLEUM TECHNOLOGY, 1971
SEPARATE THE CONTROLLED FROM THE REST
Half of a poor operating review is people answering for outcomes they could not have moved. Name the inputs the team actually controls, hold the line there, and stop litigating the weather.
EPICTETUS · THE DICHOTOMY OF CONTROL · ENCHIRIDION
ABOUT
The work is built to be left. A system that needs me in the room to function is a system I failed to build.
Fourteen years inside a large operations and sales organization, and five years as vice president of the board of a nine-hundred-home association — reserve planning, vendor contracts, insurance renewals, an engineering dispute, and the committees that carried the work. Governance is operations with the volume turned up: everyone is a volunteer, nothing is anyone's day job, and any process running on goodwill fails the first week someone is busy.
Neither of those was useful as a title. What was useful was watching which structures hold when nobody is watching them, and carrying that into a practice. The name is the experience, and XIV is how Rome would have written it.
None of the thinking above was written about operations. Wyckoff was reading tape, Kahneman and Tversky were running experiments, three petroleum engineers were losing money on oil leases, and Epictetus was teaching in exile. What they share is a subject — how people behave when the outcome is uncertain — which is the only condition operations has ever run in.
CONTACT
The best first step is a short conversation about what is not working. Bring the process that frustrates you most.