Operating insights
The Playconomix Playbook
Practical field notes on product, sourcing, supply chain, community, leadership, and building companies that can handle their next stage.
Customers do not care that your dashboard was green if their order was late.
Service-level agreements get treated like warehouse math. But an SLA is the operational version of a pro...
Complexity makes founders feel important. Simplicity makes companies valuable.
As a company grows, the founder becomes the only person who remembers why everything is weird. Specia...
Replacing a person will not fix a job designed to fail.
When something keeps breaking, leaders reach for the easiest explanation: somebody is not good enough. Sometimes that is tru...
Founders can smother a company with good intentions.
You see a problem, jump in, make three calls, rewrite the plan, and save the day. Helpful, right? Sometimes. But if nobody know...
A manager is not a human forwarding address.
If every problem travels through a manager and lands unchanged on the founder’s desk, you did not create leverage. You added a tollboot...
Most people think I left printing and moved into consumer products.
I don’t see it that way.
I took the operating system the print industry beat into me—the estimating, materials, eq...
Busy is not a business result. Slack messages are not a business result. Meetings are not a business result. Ninety percent complete is definitely not a business result.
I have see...
Let’s kill one of the dumbest ideas in modern business: holding people accountable does not ruin culture. Avoiding hard conversations ruins culture.
I’ve watched good companies tie...
