Everything works. Nothing moves.In 1921 a naturalist measured a column of army ants that had walked into a perfect circle. Twelve hundred feet around. Two and a half hours a lap. They carried their eggs the whole way, because they believed they were moving house. Every business writer since has told that story wrong.Operations rarely fails the way you were warned about. It fails while every step is defensible, every person is working hard, and every process is functioning a...

It was working. Nobody could tell.A twenty agent real estate brokerage automated part of its nurturing sequence. Every message went out on schedule, correctly formatted, with every field populated from the right record. Nothing in the system reported a fault.What the sequence had stopped carrying was what the agent knew about the family. That had never been written down as a step, because to the people doing it, it was not a step. It was what you say to someone you met on a...

Revenue is not a number. It is a composition.A restaurant added a delivery channel and its revenue went up every month. It was losing money on almost every order that came through it, and nothing on any report said so. Nothing sold less.Every revenue figure is a blend of channels, products and customers carrying different margins. The top line reports the total while the blend moves underneath it. A business can add units, add revenue, and lose money on every marginal unit,...

A renewal date tells you what already happened.The customer decision was made much earlier, frequently before any money changed hands, and it degraded through every touch point in between. By the renewal date it is a recording rather than a measurement.A business that measures only at the end holds one data point about a process that had dozens. The instrument that would have caught it is a health reading, numbered and consistently defined, taken at every touch point from f...

In 1998, The Uninvited were poised to become the next multi-platinum darlings of the new millennia**.** With a hit song burning up the charts and a major label release described as “The breakthrough album of the next decade,” everything was teed-up for a life of sold-out arenas, gold plated Ferraris and Dom Perrion on draft. But the chances are you never heard of The Uninvited – so what the hell happened?THE UNINVITED: ON THE ROAD WITH THE GREATEST ROCK BAND YOU NEVER HEARD...