Occasional Essays

AI agents don’t fail at execution. They expose the gap between what we mean and what we actually ask for.

An essay on the comfort of real time, the lag built into every system, and the quiet costs of trusting signals that arrive too late.

Teams change before anyone names it. Morale thins, trust drifts. Reading the early signs in the air keeps strain from becoming the baseline.

Decay is reasonable. Standards fail when one small compromise is made, then another. The solution: Define one binary rule to hold the line steady.

What a tiny red cell in a migration taught me about decay, denial, and the quiet systems that make forgetting feel like progress.

Why some teams feel exhausting even when everyone's working hard. It's not about speed - it's about rhythm. How to diagnose when teams are out of sync and build better timing together.

Stop worshipping your numbers.

Organizations forget vital knowledge. The essay argues that intentional documentation of key decisions prevents repeating expensive mistakes and costly rework.

Staff work, like Finance or HR, often goes unnoticed because its success is measured by the problems it prevents. This invisible infrastructure is crucial for growth, yet it's often undervalued as mere overhead.

Why we keep showing up to rituals that have stopped working, and what that persistence reveals about care, memory, and the hope for renewal.

Why new tools rarely solve old problems. The real system lives in habits, incentives, and the daily work of making change stick.

Why new tools rarely solve old problems. The real system lives in habits, incentives, and the daily work of making change stick.

A clear-eyed look at why plans die in companies, from whiteboard optimism to forgotten archives, and how treating strategy like living code can keep it alive, adaptive, and worth opening Monday.

When everything looks fine, it’s easy to miss the early signs of failure. Why green dashboards can hide real risk — and how to keep systems alert to what matters.

When everything looks fine, it’s easy to miss the early signs of failure. Why green dashboards can hide real risk — and how to keep systems alert to what matters.

When everything looks fine, it’s easy to miss the early signs of failure. Why green dashboards can hide real risk — and how to keep systems alert to what matters.

Business Operations only succeeds when it becomes invisible infrastructure that teams trust and use without thinking. How to build systems that earn belief rather than enforce compliance.

Why RevOps only succeeds when other teams believe in it. On building trust, shared systems, and the quiet work that makes everything else run.

Why the real quote-to-cash process happens in the shadows, and what smart companies do about it.

Every company has two org charts: the official one with clean boxes, and the real one built from DMs, side chats, and who people actually trust.

What makes RevOps actually work? Not tooling, not templates—belief. A field guide to building systems that are trusted, shared, and built to last.

Even the best people leave — resilient systems keep working anyway. Durability is built, not hired.

The core idea: good systems don’t stay good on their own. Left alone, they decay. Durability is something you have to tend.

A guide to building companies that survive through quiet, deliberate maintenance rather than heroic firefighting.

Forecasts aren't crystal balls—they're coordination tools. The danger isn't being wrong; it's forgetting they're educated guesses with formatting.

Finance isn’t just reporting—it’s how companies learn. A guide to building Finance as a feedback loop, not a gatekeeper.

Every system in this series depends on cash behaving predictably. That’s where we start.

An introduction to the project: who it's for, what it offers, and why the messy middle of operations deserves better writing.

On the systems beneath the surface — and the quiet ambition to make them hold.

Reflections on the invisible yet relentless efforts behind operations that hold firm, and why success often means nothing noticeable happens at all.

A celebration of turning disorder into clarity through spreadsheets, and the subtle satisfaction found in making data bend gently to logic.

A useful way to use the Google Sheet API to send spreadsheets everywhere.

An essay about writing online, slow work, and the quiet satisfaction of tending to things that grow at their own pace.

An essay about writing online, slow work, and the quiet satisfaction of tending to things that grow at their own pace.

About defining boundaries clearly enough to provide guidance without stifling the space in between, and why structure liberates rather than limits.

The invisible work of elevating baseline quality, and how small shifts in standards quietly transform outcomes.

On the overlooked elegance of starting from a blank grid. Exploring clarity, structure, and why order begins quietly with rows and columns.

The power of stripping away noise, uncovering what remains essential when words fail or become a liability.

Exploring the illusion that operational excellence requires sacrificing innovation, and how real effectiveness blends rigor and creativity.

Why true freedom in creativity emerges only after mastering constraints. On discipline, rigor, and the earned liberty to experiment.