2 min read Free

Managing Up Series #1: Managing Up Without Becoming Political

Managing up is an operational practice, not impression management: bridge the gap between a manager’s broad view and your detailed context. Reducing cognitive load, supplying candid information, and improving decisions serve the system rather than anyone’s ego.
4 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #10: The Redesign Playbook: How to Actually Fix an Organization

Organizational redesign succeeds through constrained, iterative choices—not theatrical attempts to fix everything. Prioritizing compounding damage, leverage, feasibility, and second-order effects turns diagnosis into a sequence that earns credibility and measurable change.
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #9: The Operating Cadence: Where Org Design Becomes Execution

Org design becomes operational through its recurring reviews, metrics, escalation paths, planning cycles, and decision records. A healthy cadence forces tradeoffs and assigns authority; an unchanged cadence lets the old organization continue beneath a newly announced chart.
1 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #8: Why 'Good Process' Goes Bad (And the Design Rules That Prevent It)

Useful process reduces real risk; bureaucracy survives after its context and value have disappeared. Giving every process an empowered owner, outcome metric, measurable cost, exception path, and review date creates the capacity to simplify or kill it.
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #7: What Should Your Organization Actually Be?

Reporting lines should follow a prior design choice: what work the organization must optimize, and which unit best contains it. Coherent boundaries, real authority, explicit interfaces, and acceptable coordination costs make accountability substantive rather than theatrical.
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #6: How Scale Changes Everything (And Why Reorganizations Fail)

Scale raises information costs until informal coordination becomes a bottleneck. Reorganizations fail when they redraw reporting lines but leave decision rights, incentives, information flows, cadence, and interfaces intact, allowing the old system to return.
4 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #5: The Informal Power Map (Who Actually Gets Things Done)

Formal authority rarely tells the whole story of how work advances or stalls. Mapping who accelerates initiatives, exercises hidden vetoes, and builds coalitions reveals the informal power system a redesign must engage without turning diagnosis into gossip.
2 min read Free

Organizational Design Series #4: Incentives Are the Infrastructure of Behavior

Incentives extend far beyond compensation to status, fear, promotion, attention, and forgiveness. Because people optimize for what organizations reward, leaders must examine where local or short-term metrics quietly produce gaming, conceal weak contribution, or damage the wider system.

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