Implementer Posts
The Most Misunderstood Line in an EOS Level 10 Meeting
The most misunderstood line in an EOS Level 10 Meeting is the one everyone reads out loud and rarely executes. 7:52 on a Monday. A tech named Maria holds a shaking rescue mutt while her manager mentions a new intake policy she has never seen. A client is watching. Her stomach drops because she looks like she does not know her own clinic. That policy was decided nine days earlier. Different building. People Maria will never meet. World-famous vet clinic in NYC. One location grew to eight. Great leadership team, clean meetings. And they were “Hitting the Ceiling.” Everything at the top looked right. But walk the floor and you felt it. Eight locations, eight slightly different clinics. The rumor mill louder than the leadership team, because it always is when the real message goes quiet. We went back to the Five Leadership Abilities. Simplify Delegate and Elevate Predict Systemize
You Are Not Breaking, You Are Being Forged
Took the train in this morning and walked the last few blocks in the sun. Felt good for about ninety seconds. Checked in with security. Took the elevator up. No hugs. A nod, and a handshake with a foot of daylight in it. That is how I knew. Rewind. This team walked into VB1 carrying 14 V/TOs. Fourteen. And 14 people ready to defend them. You cannot run the EOS Process under those constraints. I tried anyway. Score: 5. In the corporate world that’s a PIP. In our world, it feels like a strike. I couldn’t tell if it was strike one, two, or three. I figured I got fired. One-on-ones followed. Director of Ops. CFO. COO. President. Careful voices. Long pauses. Then eight hours alone preparing for VB2. And I did something I’ve never done before. I built a draft Corporate V/TO in Claude using nothing but publicly available
Episode 4 – The Identity Trap: You Are the Business
Read time: ~2 min | Goal: Expose the identity fusion that makes owners protect the very trap they complain about. If your business needs you for everything, here is a hard question. Do you actually want it any other way? This one gets personal. This is the video most business coaches will not make, because it is not about tactics. It is about you. Here’s something I’ve seen over and over. An owner says they desperately want freedom. They want the business to run without them. They want their nights and weekends back. And then you watch what they actually do, and they keep pulling everything back to themselves. They insert themselves into decisions that don’t need them. They make sure they’re still the one with all the answers. Why would you say you want freedom and then quietly protect the cage? Because somewhere along the way, being needed became
What Your Rocks Reveal About Your Leadership Team
One of the clearest ways to see whether a leadership team is genuinely on the same page is to watch what happens when you ask them to set their Rocks for the next quarter. During Quarterly Planning, I ask each person to work individually & write down the three to seven priorities they believe the business must focus on over the next 90 days. These should be the things that will genuinely move the business towards its One-Year Plan & Three-Year Picture. I always tell teams that three is ideal. Once everybody starts coming up with five, six or seven priorities each, things can get ridiculous very quickly. Recently, I worked with one leadership team where every person completed this exercise separately. When we put all their ideas together, there were just four potential Company Rocks. Four. Not four after hours of debating, combining & negotiating. Four in total. Although
The Visionary / Integrator Term Sheet
An Implementer brought me a client with a laundry list of complaints about EOS. I read it and saw one thing beneath it all: the Visionary and Integrator were not on the same page. The list was long. Scorecards aren’t landing. Rocks keep slipping. L10 feels off. Every complaint pointed at a different tool. Sometimes a list like that really is a problem with the EOS Tools. Not this time. This time it was Rocket Fuel. Mark C. Winters and Gino Wickman wrote the whole book on it. The Visionary and Integrator have to be on the same page, in the Right Seats, pulling in the same direction. In this case they weren’t, and every complaint on that list was just a symptom of the same crack. So I built a term sheet for exactly this case. A tool to use to facilitate a Same Page Meeting with the Visionary
Episode 3 – Busy Is Not the Same as Building
Read time: ~2 min | Goal: Break the busy-equals-progress belief and introduce build-once vs forever work. You can work 12-hour days, cross off a hundred tasks, and grow your business by exactly nothing. Let me explain. I want to challenge something you have probably believed your whole career. That being busy means you are making progress. That if you just work harder and longer, it will all add up. Here is the uncomfortable truth. Motion and progress are not the same thing. You can be in constant motion, putting out fires, answering questions, jumping from task to task, and at the end of the year have a business that is no more valuable, no more stable, and no less dependent on you than it was 12 short months ago. Busy feels productive….which is why it’s so dangerous. Every fire you put out gives you a little hit of usefulness. You