Build

Build #104 – I should have done it sooner Hey Reader, “I should have done it sooner.” It’s something that I’ve said (or thought) a lot over the years, regardless of the job I was in at the time Different roles, different businesses, different phases of my professional life but the same five words kept on popping up. Looking back it strikes me that it’s not the big leaps forward that I remember most vividly – it’s actually the things I didn’t do or the things I left too late. After working…

SPONSORED NEWSLETTER Build #103 – Your BOS tool won’t save you (but it might just help) Hey Reader, I talk a lot about operating systems – more specifically business operating systems (BOS) – things like EOS, Scaling Up and their ilk. And even more specifically I’ve been doing a client project reviewing the tooling options to support their BOS – yes, systems to run a system. It’s all getting a bit meta. I’ve been doing a market appraisal of the software tools that have sprung up to help…

Build #102 – Autonomy without boundaries just isn’t autonomy Hey Reader, I’ve been thinking about something that came up in a project I’m delivering at the moment (it’s funny how these little moments sit with me for days afterwards). I’m working with a tech SaaS client on building the “practices” component of their bespoke business operating system. I was leading a workshop exploring how decision-making needs to change as they make a fairly rapid push from 35 to 95 people over the next year….

I’ve been noticing something over the last month that’s been making me increasingly uncomfortable, so I wanted to share that in this month’s Build. Let me give you an example that stuck in my mind. Last Tuesday, I was reading a Slack message from a founder I’m working with. It was perfectly constructed, well formatted with clear bullet points and a nice professional tone. But still it took me reading it three times to realise what was really…

Build #100 – Ringing the changes Hey Reader, One of the things I seem to do a lot with founders is prioritisation. There’s a real purity in knowing what to focus on and where to place the effort we put into building businesses. And now it’s time for me to take a bit of my own advice and get my house in order. Many of you will know that a real focus for me this year so far has been launching and building my new operating partner business – Team Wakeman, as well as my new founder newsletter The…

Build #99 – Mind the gaps Hey Reader, There’s a particular kind of organisational dysfunction that really been bugging me this year – when everything looks right on paper, yet nothing quite works in practice. This week’s Build pulls together three articles exploring critical gaps that separate intention from reality in how we build companies. What makes these gaps so dangerous isn’t that they’re invisible, it’s that we seem to have become remarkably skilled at pretending they don’t exist at…

Build #98 – AI and the workslop epidemic Hey Reader, I’ve been thinking about a particular kind of waste in business a lot recently. Not the obvious kind – where someone clearly hasn’t done the work or has done it badly. That’s easy to spot and easy to fix. No, I’m talking about something far more insidious: work that *looks* perfectly fine but is actually wholly worthless. It’s work that appears plausible, sounds professional and uses all the right language. But when you really examine it,…

I bring you three articles that circle around a single question: how do you get things done through other people? Whether it’s handing off tasks to your team, thinking about the relational structures that underpin your organisation or building the kind of…

I’ve been thinking a bit about a pattern I keep seeing in the founder-led scale-ups I’ve worked with over the years. It goes like this. Founders hire a “professional manager” to bring structure as their companies grow past the a number of people – usually 20 to 50. That manager arrives with all the creds. They talk about governance frameworks and reporting cadences and accountability matrices (I am aware that I talk…

This week’s Build seems to have inadvertently landed on a theme around the uncomfortable gap between corporate rhetoric and reality. These three articles share a common thread about the limitations of aspiration when confronted with the messy complexity of real organisational life. They challenge us to move beyond comforting abstractions that founders tend to rely upon on towards harder, more honest…