Chapter 8 of Come Prepared to Die. Improve every part and you can still wreck the whole. Performance is not the sum of the parts; it is set by the one constraint that governs the system.
Chapter 7 of Come Prepared to Die. When plan and reality disagree, most leaders load one reading: someone didn't try hard enough. The other says the plan was a hypothesis and the gap is data.
Chapter 6 of Come Prepared to Die. The behaviour you keep failing to install isn't a people problem. It's punished by a loop in the conditions you designed. Stop pushing; change the loop.
Chapter 5 of Come Prepared to Die. The gap between what a leader says they value and what they do under pressure is the one axis you cannot self-diagnose. Here is how to close it.
Chapter 4 of Come Prepared to Die. Keeping everyone busy feels like good management. In knowledge work it quietly makes the whole system slower, and the maths takes five minutes to teach.
Chapter 3 of Come Prepared to Die. Is AI a productivity layer you bolt onto the org you have, or the reason to redesign it? The cheapest mistake is the wrong tool; the expensive one is the wrong org.
A mirror for executives in software-dependent firms: the paradigm axes your organisation runs on, made visible so you can test them.
Simple hand signals that give video meetings back the body language they lost: C for clarification, delta for a topic change, and more. In active use since 2020.
The factory GM and Toyota reopened together shows what a healthy operating culture actually asks of people. What the andon cord teaches about safety, stopping the line, and blameless improvement.
[May 2026] I now reach [...]