Bring me a real problem and I will solve it in front of your room.

The same idea, except nobody watches. Laptops open, everyone builds their own. We start from the task each person actually resents rather than a made-up exercise, and I move around the room unblocking people one at a time. The point is not to finish a curriculum. The point is that every single person in that room has made a working thing with their own hands by the time they leave, which permanently changes what they believe is possible.

Before Web.com was Web.com, it was Website Pros, and the assembly line I built there turned a small design team into a 120 person operation. This is that story told as an operating argument rather than a war story: what a repeatable production system actually does to a business, why almost every company builds one by accident and then defends it, and why this technology is the same problem showing up again with a new face. It ends on the specific question a leadership team should be arguing about this quarter.

Not a strategy session, because most leadership teams already have more strategy than they can act on. Three decisions get made in the room and written down before anyone leaves: what this company will and will not put through these tools, who owns the answer when somebody asks, and which single process gets rebuilt first. I facilitate and I argue back. Nobody leaves with a homework assignment they will not do.

Aimed straight at the thing the room is worried about and nobody has said out loud. We separate the robot work, the copying, the retyping, the chasing, the formatting, from the part of a job only a person can do, and we do it on their actual jobs rather than in the abstract. Handled honestly this is the most relieving hour a staff room has had in a year. Handled dishonestly it poisons a rollout, which is why I will not deliver it as a reassurance exercise for management.

Pick the process the team runs most often and likes least. We map it on the wall exactly as it really happens, including the undocumented step somebody invented in 2019, then rebuild it together and run it once before we finish. Teams consistently discover that the expensive part was never the software. It was the four handoffs nobody had ever drawn.

Most deals are not lost to a competitor. They are lost to the seventh follow-up that nobody sent, because the first six were the wrong message and everyone got tired. We build the chaser: the sequence, the rules that decide what goes out and when it stops, and the honest line between persistence and being the person whose emails get filtered. Built with the team, on their real pipeline, in the room.

Turning a name and a company into a briefed, specific first call in about four minutes, done live on the attendees’ own upcoming meetings. Includes the part most sessions skip: how to tell when the research is confidently wrong, and what a seller should never repeat out loud without checking. Sales floors tend to adopt this one the same week because the payoff arrives on the next call.

I sat in one of these groups as a member, and the sessions I remember are the ones where the speaker respected what a day out of the business costs. This one uses the board the way it is meant to be used: each member states the decision they are avoiding, the room pressure-tests it, and I supply the operating reality on what is actually buildable, at what cost, on what timeline. My job is to keep the room honest about feasibility, not to be the expert at the front.

Every member of a peer board is being pitched the same promises right now by people whose incentive is the signature. This session teaches a board to interrogate that pitch as a group: the four questions that separate a real capability from a demonstration, what to ask for in a pilot, what a fair exit looks like, and the specific contract terms that quietly transfer their data. I have been on both sides of that table, which is the only reason this session is worth a board’s time.

The calendar nobody shares, the meal planning that collapses on Wednesday, the medication list for an aging parent that lives in one person’s head, the school paperwork that arrives as a photograph of a photograph. A household runs on the same failures a small business does, with worse tooling and higher stakes. We build one of these live, and it is usually the session where somebody in the back row goes quiet and then asks the best question of the day.

For parents, teachers and anybody advising somebody young about work. Written to be honest rather than comforting: what genuinely changed, what is being oversold, which habits still compound, and why the ability to define a problem precisely is about to be worth more than the ability to execute a defined one. No predictions I cannot defend, and no pretending that the last twenty years of advice still applies unchanged.

Ninety minutes a week for six weeks, with real work in between. Each week ends with a working piece rather than a lesson: capture, a morning brief that assembles itself, an inbox that triages itself, a follow-up chaser, a searchable memory of everything the person has decided. By week six they are not using somebody else’s system, they have built their own and they can extend it without me. Runs for a single company or for a mixed cohort.

One company, one cohort of its leaders and its two or three most capable operators, eight weeks. We pick three internal problems worth real money, and the company’s own people build the tools that solve them with me alongside rather than in front. It ends with a working handover and a written standard for what this organization will build itself from now on and what it will keep buying. The deliverable is capability, so my last day should be uneventful.