The Advisory by Michelle Vaughn

A profitable quarter matters. A difficult quarter matters too. Neither one is a full diagnosis.

Before you change everything, look for the pattern underneath the visible result: what changed, whether it can be repeated, and whether the offer, communication, timing, team or something else is actually driving it.

A result is data. It is not the whole business.

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There’s a point where collecting more information actually makes a decision worse.

You already know the customer is leaving. You already know the process isn’t working. You already know the project is consuming more than it produces.

Another spreadsheet may make you feel more certain, but it doesn’t necessarily make you more informed.

Sometimes the decision is already sitting there waiting for somebody to be willing to make it.

Compare demand, cash, capacity, and commitments before the next 90-day decision.

What the Latest Economic Data Should Make You Review | The Advisory Use July employment, lending, and retail data to review demand, cash, capacity, hiring, and borrowing before the next business decision.

If your team keeps bringing you the same decision, you probably don’t have a people problem. You have a decision-rule problem.

The goal shouldn’t be to make every decision for everyone. The goal should be to make the standard clear enough that people know what to do when you’re not in the room.

That’s one of the differences between managing work and building an organization.

‘Improve the customer experience’ is not an assignment. Map the work before automating it.

Timing should be tied to consequence, not manufactured urgency.

Sometimes the strategy isn’t wrong. The company has just added so many exceptions to it that nobody is actually executing the strategy anymore.

One customer gets a custom process. One employee gets a workaround. One deadline gets moved. One product gets added because somebody asked.

None of those decisions looks dangerous by itself.

Eventually you look up and realize the exception has become the operating model.

That’s usually when the problem stops being strategy and becomes leadership.

The buyer should not have to translate the offer.