Operations

The Observation David Senra asked Brad Jacobs how he differentiates A, B, and C players. Jacobs runs a mental exercise: picture the person in your office saying they’re done. Not a counteroffer conversation. Already moved. Orderly transition only because they respect you. Then feel the reaction. He walks the scale C to B to A. Restated in rank order: C (Jacobs): You shouldn’t smile. Nobody likes firing people. You postponed it. Now you don’t have to pay severance. Problem solved. Replace them. Get the courage to take them off the team right away next time. ...

The Observation Touch it once. When something lands, finish it or triage it on the first touch. Do not pick it up, set it down half-handled, and pay the full re-entry cost later. Touching without deciding is how piles become careers. I learned that young. At sixteen, through business class and Business Professionals of America, I interviewed for an On the Job Training slot and got hired as a teller at Norwest Bank, the company that became Wells Fargo. Stillwater in May 1993. Through March 1998 I moved from that floor to the Norwest Center downtown Minneapolis (now Wells Fargo Center), then across the street to IDS as lead teller, then to sales and service supervisor with a second drive-up branch on Portland Avenue while they found a new supervisor. Somewhere in that stretch, leadership training put the line in my mouth: touch it once. ...

After a foodservice liquidation, the survey scores came in. Same complaint, different names. The display piece mounted high on the wall. The scramble for help. Paying someone to take down what they already bought. Our invoice terms were clean. The buyer removes their lots. Onsite help is fee-based, not staff. High mounts and wall pieces were always going to be the buyer’s problem under the paper. I still kept catching recovery notes that apologized for the terms. “You shouldn’t have had to climb.” “You shouldn’t have had to pay for help.” That sounds kind. It also rewrites the deal after the gavel. ...

The spark I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk on The GaryVee Audio Experience, an October 2025 episode about wasting time on people who will never buy from you. He made a comment about bonus structures that stuck with me. His framing was intentionally sharp, but the useful part was underneath the rhetoric: employees often factor the maximum possible bonus into their lives. Once they do, the bonus is no longer experienced as upside. It becomes expected compensation. ...

A seller calls a few days after the auction closes. The line of equipment they bought new in 2021 came back at 40 cents on the dollar, and they’re sore. They paid top money for it. They expected more than this. So you do the thing the business trained you to do. You send the marketing report. Look at the reach. Look at the registered bidders, the ad spend, the page views, the email opens. We ran the play. We found the market. ...

If you choose convenience, you decline. That’s a human law. In business, commentary is the ultimate convenience. It is easy to write a forecast, spin a narrative, or make a decision because “it makes sense at the time.” But commentary naturally drifts and flatters us, and human memory decays too quickly to defend the truth. A typo can sit wrong by $1.2M for eleven months because nobody was forced to check the record. ...

I was listening to a podcast episode of No Priors recently where Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said something that stopped me. Customer support, he argued, exists because we build bad products. If we build great products, why would we have to have customer support? It’s too complicated, it’s hard to onboard, it’s got too many dials. That’s why it takes so much time to make, and eventually it’s not efficient. ...

When AI commoditizes text generation, the natural gravity of human behavior is “normal drift,” gravitating toward low defaults and “easy peasy chat” while expecting a “silver magic bullet.” To survive this without losing my own original thinking, I’ve realized I cannot rely on self-discipline or raw willpower alone. I need a triple-layered cognitive defense system: The Tactical Defense (The Code Layer): Encoding Socratic pushback, friction, and accountability directly into the custom agentic skills I build. I don’t just open a ChatGPT tab; I build systems designed to actively resist my own laziness. The Contextual Defense (The Data Layer): Operating under the law of reciprocity. Deep sparring requires deep context. If I don’t build a dense, custom vault of actual thinking, the system has no leverage to push back, and the dialogue collapses back to generic out-of-the-box templates. The Meta-Cognitive Defense (The Mindset Layer): Active self-awareness of my own blindness and non-original thinking. Recognizing that I am naturally prone to low-effort defaults, and deliberately hunting for those defaults inside my daily work. Without these layers, I am just defaulting to convenience and calling it innovation. ...

Two observations stacked on the same Friday morning. The first one I’ve lived. Marketing agencies typically charge a percentage of marketing spend as their fee. The agency makes more money when the client spends more money. The incentive is to grow the budget, not the results. I’ve been quietly dismantling that arrangement in our vendor stack for the last couple of years. The second one I heard this morning. Pavel Durov on the Lex Fridman Podcast (#482, Sept. 30, 2025), making the point that drug companies aren’t actually incentivized to find the root-cause cure. They’re incentivized for you to keep taking the drug. Recurring revenue. Maintenance, not resolution. ...

In August 2025 I wrote a thought card about structured data. The argument was simple. Treat your data as a long-lived asset that should be findable by any system, and you build infrastructure that compounds. The card said nothing about agents. I had no idea WebMCP was coming. Six months later, Google announced WebMCP and the agentic web, the standard protocol for AI agents to act on structured web data. A protocol I’d never heard of, designed for a use case I hadn’t predicted. And the platform I’d been building already fit it. Not because I saw the future. Because the principle didn’t depend on seeing the future. ...