Financial statements can support a broad assessment of a business’s general health, and even allow rudimentary predictions about its future viability. But they do not explain how exactly that business makes money.
While AI will disrupt virtually every industry to some degree, the nature and intensity of that disruption will vary enormously.
In the early days, a few versatile people can carry a business on their backs through sheer discretionary effort. But as you scale, that informal approach doesn’t just fail—it becomes an accelerant for chaos. Persistent problems are rarely “people problems”; they are organization-design problems. Discover why senior leadership must take back the wheel to solve the structural dependencies that middle management can no longer touch.
When intelligent, conscientious people make decisions that hurt the organization, the problem isn’t their IQ—it’s their environment. Without an explicit design, people default to maximizing personal efficiency or minimizing local costs. But as any physicist (or savvy executive) knows, optimizing the parts often suboptimizes the whole. Learn how to replace “rogue” metrics with a global, speed-based metric that keeps the big picture in focus.
The customer won’t talk without a price; the salesperson won’t price without requirements. This “Mexican standoff” kills deals before they start. While a wide range often feels dismissive to a buyer, there is a way to provide pricing early that offers the certainty they crave without the legal trap of a fixed-point estimate.
Think a transition to value-based pricing takes months of consulting and a room full of PhDs? Think again. By harnessing operator intuition and a “sprint” mentality, manufacturers can migrate to a superior pricing framework in five days flat. We break down the day-by-day roadmap—from assembling your champions to real-time model tuning in a production environment.
In The Goal, the Constraint is a discovery. In the real world, it’s a decision. Most TOC commentary focuses on “finding” the bottleneck, but for a practitioner held accountable for results, that’s a descent into chaos. Discover why the most successful organizations don’t look for their Constraint—they select the one resource that, when fully loaded, guarantees optimal profitability.
I’m not here to tell you to delete your organization’s bonus plan. Truth is, it’s probably not doing much harm. So, if you have one—and if your team seems to like it—you should probably leave it in place. My message is that you shouldn’t have one. I’m here to question the reasoning that preceded the… “Why you shouldn’t have a bonus plan”
When we work with those manufacturers that sell via resellers of various types, we often encounter an instance of the Drunkard’s Search problem within the sales department. This article describes the problem, as well as a solution we devised around 15 years ago—but abandoned because we believed it was too complex to be practical. Our… “A breakthrough (?) approach to the management of dealers (and other reseller relationships)”
I’m not joking. The following is precisely how most executives within industrial organizations conceptualize revenue. Q. Where does revenue come from? A. From salespeople. Q. How do salespeople generate revenue? A. Um. From relationships. This conception of revenue is not even vaguely correct. And, unfortunately, this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of revenue leads to… “The secret life of revenue within industrial organizations (and why salespeople don’t generate it)”
