Series 1: The Operating System
Most companies don’t lose because their strategy was wrong. They lose in the space between the strategy and the work: in handoffs, in goals that move too easily, in meetings that report instead of decide, and in bad news that arrives a quarter too late.
I’ve spent my career in that space, building the operating machine behind technology businesses that meet the real world: ride-sharing in Germany and India, micromobility, grocery delivery, and now psychiatry at Talkiatry. In each, the hard part was rarely the idea. It was making the company sense reality quickly and act on it well, again and again, as it grew.
This series is about that machine. It’s written for founders, CEOs and operators running companies through their most consequential growth, and for the boards and investors who back them. Each essay takes one part of the operating system, explains why it usually breaks, and offers a practical test you can run on your own company.
- Strategy Dies in the Handoff. Why strategies fail in translation rather than in the idea, and the five mechanisms that carry a strategy into daily work. The enemy is latency: the time between reality changing and the company changing with it.
- Goals Should Survive Contact With Reality. Why most companies change goals too fast and forecasts too slowly, how to set goals at the right altitude, and why the forecast should never be negotiated.
- The Numbers Were Right. We Read Them Wrong. What a weekly business review is actually for, told through a meeting in India that changed the course of a market. The room’s job is interpretation, not reporting.
- Code Reds and the Art of Escalation. How long a problem stays local before the right people know, why bad news travels slowly, and how to make raising a flag cheap and declaring a code red expensive.
- When Information Gets Cheap. What AI changes in all of the above. As sensing and coordination get cheap, the advantage moves to clarity, judgment, ownership and the ability to act, especially in businesses where the app is the easy part.
Read in order, the essays build one argument: a company is a system for turning reality into action, and the best operators design that system deliberately rather than hoping it emerges. Read individually, each stands on its own.
If you take one thing away, let it be this. Every company has fires, plans that break and numbers that mislead. What separates the best is how little distance sits between reality changing and the right person doing something about it, and with AI, how well they decide what to do once the machine can see everything.
- Strategy Dies in the Handoff Strategies fail in the translation into work, not in the idea.
- Goals Should Survive Contact With Reality Coming soon
- The Numbers Were Right. We Read Them Wrong. Coming soon
- Code Reds and the Art of Escalation Coming soon
- When Information Gets Cheap Coming soon
Series 2: Scaling in the Physical World
Why growth works differently when a human is in the loop.
Series 3: Field Notes from Growth Phases
Launches, turnarounds, integrations and crises, told from the inside.