01 · Operations
The Monday Call
Every Monday at seven-fifteen we hold a forty-minute operating call. There is no deck. There are four standing questions: where are we behind, where are we ahead, what did we learn last week, and what decision do we owe each other by Friday. In the four years we have held the call without exception, the company has taken seven significant operational errors off the field in time to prevent them from becoming public. None of those errors would have surfaced on a quarterly cadence.
The call is not scalable. It is not, in the management-literature sense, a practice. It is a discipline, in the old sense — a thing we have agreed to do whether or not it is convenient.
— Plant-level COO, specialty manufacturing, Great Lakes region
02 · Judgment
What the Plant Manager Said
We had spent eleven months building a case for a second line. The NPV was defensible at the hurdle, the strategic logic was intact, and the board was, in the private sense, persuaded. On the Thursday before the vote, the plant manager — a man who has been at the facility since 1994 — walked into my office and said, without preface, that we would not be able to staff the second line at the current wage scale within eighteen months, and that the first line would deteriorate as a consequence. He was right. We withdrew the capital request. That decision has saved the firm, by my best reckoning, between nine and eleven million dollars.
The plant manager was not at the capital committee. He should have been. He is, now.
— Chief Executive, private industrial firm, Midwest
03 · Capital
The Last Capital Committee of the Year
We hold six capital committees per year. The sixth — the last one, in December — has a single standing item: the review of decisions taken at the preceding five, with outcomes updated against the memoranda that approved them. We do not discuss new capital in December. The session runs approximately three and a half hours. It is the least popular meeting on the calendar and the one I would preserve last if I had to preserve only one.
The discipline is this: no member of the committee may refer to a prior decision in a new debate without first reading aloud the paragraph of the memorandum in which that decision was justified. The practice surfaces, with unsettling regularity, the extent to which our institutional memory of our own reasoning is generous to the point of fabrication.
— Chair, family-office investment committee
04 · Governance
A Letter Not Sent
In August I drafted a letter of resignation from the board on which I have served for nine years. The occasion was a capital decision I believed to be indefensible. I finished the letter, set it aside for the weekend, and did not send it. On the Monday I requested, instead, a single thirty-minute meeting with the chair. The decision was reversed within the week, not because of the meeting itself but because the chair, confronted with the prospect of explaining the decision to a resigning director, reached the conclusion that had been available to him throughout.
I keep the unsent letter in the same folder as my appointment memorandum. I have had occasion to re-read it twice.
— Non-executive director, mid-market industrial
05 · Turnaround
Notes from a Turnaround
The firm was four weeks from a covenant breach when we arrived. The management team had, in their defence, drafted seven variants of a recovery plan over the preceding nine months. None of the seven had been adopted, because none of the seven specified what the firm would cease to do. We wrote the eighth in six days. It was four pages long. Its central section, titled What We Will Not Do in the Next Ninety Days, named eleven activities, seven customer accounts, and two product lines. It was the first document the senior lender agreed to accept as a basis for forbearance.
A plan that does not include a subtraction is a wishlist. I have not since written one that does not.
— Independent turnaround director