The Weekly Memo
The stuff nobody writes down.
One essay, most weeks, on how this sector really works — the incentives, the money, and the things everyone in the room already knows and nobody says out loud.
What you are subscribing to
No fixes. Just what’s actually going on.
You’ll get a structure named, an incentive traced to the behavior it produces, and a specific example — usually a real organization, occasionally a national name that won’t enjoy the paragraph.
You won’t get a fix dressed up as a framework. I stop where your judgment starts, and that’s deliberate rather than lazy: a structure in the hands of somebody who knows their own organization beats instructions from somebody who doesn’t. That somebody is me. I haven’t seen your board, your budget, or your town.
No welcome sequence. No webinar funnel. No email telling you the cart closes Friday.
Where to start
Start with these two.
They’re a pair — the diagnosis, then what follows from it. Read them in order and the rest of the archive makes more sense.
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The people who pay are not the people who receive
In a business, the person who pays for the thing is the person who gets it, so money carries information: if the product’s bad, revenue tells you, on schedule, without anyone having to be brave. Split those two people and that channel goes dead. Everything else — the overhead theater, the unmeasured programs, the growth reflex, the salaries — follows from that one gap.
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Every fix worth making does the same one thing
One diagnosis, one class of remedy. Every fix in this sector that’s ever worked closes the gap between the person paying and the person receiving. Every fix that failed left the gap alone and went after the symptoms. That’s a filter you can run any piece of advice through.
Full archive lives on Substack. Read everything →
Where else
Three places, three jobs.
Substack
The main body of the work. Long essays, the full archive, and where a paid tier eventually sits. If you follow one thing, follow this.
For people already running something. Operational detail, how decisions actually get made, the mechanics. Narrower and more technical than the newsletter.
YouTube
Frameworks, drawn and explained. No face, no studio, no intro music. For people who’d rather watch a structure get built than read about it.
The books
The memo names it. The books fix it.
An essay can tell you your overhead number is probably wrong. It takes a chapter to show you the real one, and a book to tell you what to do once you’ve got it.