Articles and thinkpieces from Stu on company culture, leadership, strategy, and more.
Most business owners think they have a strategy. To prove it, they point at results: Revenue is up, headcount is growing, projects keep coming in, the phone is ringing, cash flow is decent. To prove strategy, they will point to growth. But ask them why this growth is occurring, and
Your Tools aren’t the problem. I’ve been in a number of conversations lately with firm owners trying to get a handle on resource management. Almost all of them are struggling—and for good reason. Project schedules are dynamic. Project management discipline is inconsistent. And let’s be honest, our people aren’t interchangeable
Introducing the BOSS Strategy Execution System™ I’ve always been a pretty good vicarious learner. Early on, that meant watching my older siblings—seeing what worked, what didn’t, and adjusting accordingly. Later, that shifted to reading the work of people who had already figured some things out, and spending time in peer
Making Annual Reviews A Positive Process Download
As a small business consultant, I start most engagements with a simple assessment: 20 questions covering the fundamentals of how a business actually runs. Strategy, accountability, metrics, cadence, decision-making—nothing exotic. Just the basics. Here’s the hard truth: most small businesses score pretty low on that first pass. That usually changes
A surprising number of firms still don’t run any kind of structured employee review process—not annually, not quarterly, not ever. And when you dig into why, the answer is usually some version of this: “Our technical leads are slammed. They don’t have time to review their people.” Fair point. In