Manifesto

Why This Document Exists

I felt compelled to write this not as a conventional strategy document, nor an attempt to justify past or future decisions. This document exists because, over the past year, running the business has felt heavier than it should. We have capable people, real customers, and products that matter, alongside clear ambition. Yet, the day-to-day experience of leading has become more taxing and diffuse. This document seeks to understand that tension.

The uncomfortable facts we can't talk around

We've missed revenue expectations, some customers are drifting, and initiatives are harder to explain. Decision-making, particularly around growth, has become slower and more political — not due to bad faith, but a lack of clarity.

Crucially, opportunities remain very real: markets are fragmented, regulators are pressured, and technology opens new doors. Our problem isn't a lack of opportunity or effort, but the growing sense that we are working harder without becoming clearer. This document addresses that condition.

This is not about performance

This is not a performance issue. The reflex to push harder — more planning, metrics, meetings — often misses the point. Our team is working; leadership is engaged. Effort is not our limiting factor. The risk has been too many well-intentioned efforts pulling in slightly different directions, indicating a problem of understanding, not execution.

The quiet realization behind this work

The core realization: We may no longer be running a single kind of business — even if we still talk about it as one. We've taken on diverse work that looks similar but behaves differently, responding to varied incentives, speeds, and risks. When these differences aren't explicitly acknowledged, leadership absorbs friction personally, and decisions escalate due to unclear rules. This isn't a moral failing, but a classification problem.

What this document is trying to do — and what it isn't

This document aims to surface and resolve this classification problem by clarifying how we understand the company's work. It seeks to:

• Name the different kinds of work this company is actually doing.
• Explain why those differences matter for leadership, decision-making, and accountability.
• Provide a shared mental model to make the business easier to run through better understanding.

It won't prescribe answers to every question or eliminate all uncertainty. Its purpose is to build a lens through which judgment can be applied in the right context.

A note on tone and intent

Written in my own voice for honesty, this document is shaped by my personal experience of confusion and misalignment. It reflects a belief that clarity is a form of care. This is not a critique of anyone, but an attempt to fairly address the complexity of our business. If successful, some parts may feel obvious in hindsight, others uncomfortable — both are acceptable if it leads to greater clarity.

What Finally Broke the Pattern

The shift wasn't a sudden insight but a gradual realization. Repeated conversations, stalled decisions, and conflicting initiatives made the business feel heavier than it should. The signal wasn't in dashboards, but in the disproportionate effort required to keep things moving.

When effort stops producing clarity

We observed a pattern of expending disproportionate leadership energy reconciling competing "right answers" — sales urgency versus delivery caution, product ambition versus operational readiness. These tensions created persistent friction, turning decisions into negotiations and priorities into unresolved tradeoffs. The business wasn't resisting direction; it was responding to mixed signals.

The subtle escalation nobody names

Decisions that should have been resolved closer to the work kept moving upward. This wasn't due to a lack of judgment from leaders, but a lack of a shared framework for whose judgment applied. Habitual escalation is often a sign that responsibility isn't clearly defined where decisions reside.

The moment the question changed

The real breakthrough came not from asking what we should do differently, but from asking a more basic question:

This question immediately shifted the conversation. Disagreements felt contextual, tension became structural, and confusion looked more like misclassification.

Seeing the pattern beneath the noise

With this new lens, clear patterns emerged:

• Some work was about competing in dynamic markets.
• Some work was about running programs where trust and consistency are paramount.
• Some work was about building future capabilities through investment and learning.
• And some work was about stabilizing the enterprise itself, ensuring reliability and resilience.

We had been treating these four distinct kinds of work as if they were one problem. This explained why urgency felt misplaced, innovation destabilizing, and why strong leaders could disagree in good faith and talk past one another. They were operating under different, unspoken rules.

Once visible, the problem stopped feeling mysterious and started to feel solvable.

This realization reframed everything. The answer wasn't more meetings or KPIs, but a clearer understanding of the work itself. The next step was to make that understanding explicit.

The Mistake We Didn't Know We Were Making

Once the central question changed, the mistake became clearer: we had been operating under a single, overarching assumption that most company work could be governed by the same logic — plan, prioritize, execute, measure, adjust. This approach worked well when the work was uniform, but our work no longer was.

Treating different work as if it obeyed the same rules

We inadvertently collapsed fundamentally different types of work into a single operating framework. This meant:

• Competitive sales activity was evaluated alongside long-cycle program delivery.
• Exploratory product development was discussed in the same breath as quarterly revenue commitments.
• Enterprise stability and risk management were pulled into conversations about speed and innovation.

Each activity had unique incentives, timelines, and success metrics. Governing them interchangeably created friction that even strong execution discipline couldn't resolve.

Why this mistake is so easy to make

This subtle error often occurs in growing companies. In earlier stages, businesses are more uniform, with fewer tradeoffs and immediate outcomes. Leadership integration happens naturally. However, as the company matured, new types of work emerged — regulated environments, long-term investments, and responsibilities that couldn't be easily undone. The business changed, but our operational language didn't.

When leadership becomes the integration layer

Instead of structural clarity absorbing complexity, leadership carried the burden. Decisions escalated, tradeoffs were debated by committee, and leaders spent energy reconciling mismatched expectations rather than advancing the work. This constant cognitive switching — where every conversation required translation and every decision negotiation — burned out capable teams.

The hidden cost of misclassification

The cost was more than inefficiency; it manifested in subtle ways:

• Innovation felt premature or stalled.
• Commercial urgency bled into areas requiring caution.
• Operational rigor was perceived as resistance.
• Support functions were asked for flexibility when consistency was needed.

These issues arose not from individual failures, but from asking the wrong questions of the right people. New roles or KPIs wouldn't have helped, as structure only works when it reflects the reality of the work. We needed better distinctions, not just more boxes.

Once this was visible, the path forward became clearer. The next step was to articulate these distinctions explicitly, beginning with the question that reframed everything: What kind of work is this?

The Question That Changed Everything

With the mistake of misclassification visible, the next step was to name things accurately — to describe the business as it actually behaved, not as we wished it did.

This meant returning to the core question:

The focus shifted from who owned the work, its urgency, or importance, to its inherent nature, risk profile, and relationship to time.

Listening to the work instead of the org chart

Asking this question consistently revealed patterns in how decisions behaved, independent of teams or titles:

• Some decisions were reversible and competitive.
• Some were slow, contractual, and trust-based.
• Some were exploratory, uncertain, and future-facing.
• Some were stabilizing — designed to reduce variance.

Four distinct ways the business actually operates

Over time, the work resolved into four recurring contexts. These were not abstract models, but emerged from lived experience and the high cost of treating fundamentally different work as if it obeyed the same rules. Each context represented a unique way of creating value, managing risk, and exercising judgment.

Why naming the contexts mattered

Naming these contexts shifted conversations from personality and performance to fit and governance. Disagreements, urgency, and escalation could now be understood as clashes of context or structural signals, rather than personal failings. This reframing reduced friction and enabled deliberate governance for each type of work, freeing leadership from constantly reconciling incompatible expectations.

Before we describe them, a clarification

These contexts are not departments, product lines, or career tracks. They are lenses — ways of understanding responsibility. Teams and individuals may touch multiple contexts, but the rules governing the work must be clear at any given moment.

Sell — Competing Where Customers Have Choice

Sell is the most familiar and often deceptive business context. It's where revenue shows up, pressure accumulates, and urgency feels justified. This proximity can lead Sell to dominate conversations, even when other contexts are more appropriate. Therefore, understanding what Sell truly governs — and what it does not — is critical.

What Sell really is

Sell governs how the company competes in open markets: environments with customer choice, alternatives, price fluidity, and a focus on efficiency. Its defining characteristic is optionality; customers can walk away, competitors can undercut, and demand can shift. This reality shapes all work within this context.

Why discipline matters more than optimism

A common trap in Sell is attachment to past successes. However, open markets reward clarity, not sentiment. A strong Sell context demands honest leadership willing to ask tough questions:

• Where do we still have an advantage?
• Where has that advantage eroded?
• What are we defending out of habit?

These deliberate calls prevent inertia from dictating strategy.

Selling is not the same as pushing

Sell is not about activity for its own sake, maximizing top-line revenue at any cost, or turning every capability into a product. Instead, Sell is about economic judgment:

• Which SKUs deserve investment?
• Which should be harvested?
• Which should be retired, even if they still generate some revenue?

This judgment protects the organization from engaging in battles that don't justify their cost.

Where Sell fits — and where it stops

Operating in competitive environments, Sell naturally values speed, responsiveness, and adaptability. These instincts are appropriate within this context but become problematic when they spill into others.

Sell does not govern:

• how regulated programs are delivered,
• how future capabilities are explored, or
• how enterprise stability is maintained.

Applying Sell's rules to these areas results in misgovernance. Clear boundaries protect Sell and the rest of the business.

Operate — Running Trusted Programs

Operate can appear similar to Sell, involving customers, revenue, and important outcomes. However, the work differs fundamentally. Operate governs environments where WKT is trusted with delegated, non-optional responsibility — often in regulated or high-stakes contexts. This difference is critical.

What distinguishes Operate from Sell

In Operate, customers delegate authority, trusting WKT to run programs correctly, maintain compliance, protect reputations, and stand behind outcomes. These customers, often accountable to regulators or stakeholders, have low tolerance for experimentation or surprise.

This is not a competitive environment; it is a trust environment.

Why speed is not the primary virtue

Friction arises when commercial urgency leaks into Operate. From a Sell perspective, speed is virtuous. From an Operate perspective, it can be reckless. This isn't resistance, but stewardship. Operate optimizes for:

• consistency over novelty,
• defensibility over flexibility, and
• continuity over acceleration.

Mistakes here don't just cost revenue; they cost trust, which compounds slowly but erodes quickly.

The nature of risk in Operate

Risk in Operate contexts is asymmetric. Programs that run smoothly go unnoticed, while a single failure can dominate the conversation indefinitely. This requires a different leadership judgment:

• comfort saying "this can't be rushed,"
• attention to dismissed details, and
• deep awareness of second- and third-order consequences.

Why Operate requires its own authority

Because Operate work carries delegated responsibility, it cannot be governed solely by commercial logic. Discounting decisions or delivery shortcuts might make sense in competitive markets but be disastrous in trusted ones.

Operate must have clear authority to define service boundaries, enforce delivery standards, and decline commitments that exceed capacity or integrity. Without this authority, Operate becomes reactive, and trust is lost.

Invent — Protecting the Future from Premature Certainty

Invent is often the least visible and most misunderstood context in a business. It produces no immediate revenue, has uncertain timelines, and unpredictable outcomes. Yet, without it, the future collapses into a narrower version of the present.

Invent's purpose is to build future capabilities and change what the company can achieve, even before proof, demand, or organizational comfort exists.

What Invent actually holds

• Adaptive learning architectures and logic
• Ontologies and competency models
• Credentialing, proof, and verification mechanisms
• Assessment frameworks
• New execution models that don't yet fit existing delivery patterns

This work is united by optionality: creating choices the company does not yet have.

Why Invent feels uncomfortable inside operating businesses

Operating organizations reduce uncertainty, but Invent intentionally introduces it. This is because learning precedes leverage; new capabilities' full potential is unknown until they exist.

This creates natural tension: Invent can feel indulgent commercially, destabilizing operationally, and difficult to justify financially. These reactions are why Invent must be governed differently.

The danger of premature answers

The greatest risk to Invent is not failure, but premature certainty.

When exploratory work is forced to justify itself too early — e.g., pricing, delivery commitments — it loses the conditions necessary for generating insight. Invent work needs space to:

• test assumptions,
• discard approaches, and
• refine understanding before commitments are made.

Once something is ready for sale or delivery, it leaves Invent. But not before.

What strong Invent leadership looks like

Strong Invent leadership prioritizes judgment over mere creativity. It requires the ability to:

• distinguish between interesting ideas and those that are position-changing,
• protect exploratory work from inappropriate pressure, and
• say no — even to personally favored ideas.

Invent leaders are stewards of future leverage. They discipline where curiosity is allowed to wander.

Support — The Quiet System That Keeps Everything Standing

Support is rarely visible when working well, yet critical for business reliability. It governs systems that ensure the business functions consistently, over time and under pressure, making stability a deliberate outcome.

What Support actually holds

• Finance and accounting
• Legal and regulatory compliance
• Risk management
• People systems and HR
• Customer support and service continuity
• Platform reliability, security, and uptime
• Executive administration

What unites this work is dependability. Support reduces variance, ensuring a solid foundation as other parts of the business take risks or experiment.

Why Support is often misunderstood

Support work is undervalued because its success is preventative and often unseen in growth metrics. It's mistakenly viewed as optional overhead rather than essential infrastructure, leading to fragility.

The cost of instability compounds quietly

Failures in Support accumulate, rather than arriving suddenly. Small oversights in controls or processes individually seem manageable, but collectively increase risk until something breaks. Strong Support leadership prevents this accumulation.

What strong Support leadership looks like

Support leaders prioritize reliability. They:

• build systems people can rely on without thinking,
• enforce standards consistently,
• anticipate failure modes, and
• reduce decision-making by creating clear, durable processes.

They make speed safer, rather than slowing the business down.

Why Tension Is Not the Enemy

After recognizing distinct business contexts, the natural question arises: how can they coexist without friction? The truth is, they can't, and shouldn't. Tension isn't a flaw; it's proof the business is performing diverse, valuable work. The error isn't tension itself, but seeing it as a problem.

The source of tension

Each context optimizes for something different:

These priorities are not meant to align perfectly. Organizations don't eliminate these forces; they govern their interaction.

Productive vs. destructive tension

The difference lies in clarity, not temperament.

The Integrator's role: Classification

The Integrator's job is not to harmonize every disagreement, but to classify by asking:

• What kind of work is this?
• Which context governs it?
• Are we applying the right rules?

Answering these questions resolves many conflicts; others escalate for the right reasons.

Escalation isn't failure

Escalation signals that a decision crosses contexts, requiring tradeoffs at a higher level. This model eliminates unnecessary escalation — decisions rising because no one knows whose authority applies — dramatically reducing leadership fatigue.

When it's working well

When these interactions are well-governed:

• Meetings are shorter.
• Decisions are clearer.
• Disagreements are more productive.
• Leaders steward, rather than defend, their domain.
• The business feels lighter, not simpler, because responsibility is no longer smeared.

What This Means for Structure and Accountability

This document now shifts from descriptive to prescriptive, proposing to organize accountability around existing work rather than a company-wide reorganization. Effective structure must reflect reality, not add abstraction.

Why traditional structures started to strain

Traditional functional structures strain when a business simultaneously competes in open markets, runs trust-based programs, invests in future capability, and maintains enterprise stability. This forces integration upward, into leadership, rather than embedding it where the work happens.

Accountability follows context, not titles

In this model, accountability stems from context ownership. Each of the four contexts — Sell, Operate, Invent, Support — requires:

• a single accountable leader,
• clear authority within that context, and
• explicit boundaries around that authority.

This eliminates ambiguity, fostering collaboration without confusion.

What this changes — and what it doesn't

This approach does not mean:

• four independent companies,
• duplicated functions, or
• leaders operating in isolation.

It does mean:

• clarity about which decisions belong where,
• discipline about escalation, and
• respect for the fact that not all leadership judgment is interchangeable.

The role of the Visionary and Integrator

They no longer absorb confusion that should be resolved structurally.

Why this makes leadership easier, not harder

This model simplifies leadership. When leaders clearly understand their work, success metrics, and when to escalate, they focus less on negotiating authority and more on exercising it. The business becomes easier to run because fewer decisions are misrouted.

The test of whether this is working

This model is working if:

• fewer decisions escalate unnecessarily,
• leaders are confident saying "no" within their domain,
• tension is discussed openly and resolved faster, and
• leadership energy shifts from reconciliation to progress.

If these outcomes aren't observed, the model isn't being effectively utilized.

What This Asks of Us Now

This document asks for honesty: about the business we run, the decisions leadership makes, and whether our structure supports them. Most importantly, it asks us to accept that clarity is an ongoing discipline, not a one-time event.

What this model requires — and avoids

This approach deliberately avoids immediate reorganization, new job titles, or a wholesale reshuffling of people. Instead, it requires us to stop treating ambiguity as a personal flaw or execution failure, and start seeing it as a signal that accountability isn't aligned with reality. The initial work is cognitive, not structural.

The real work begins with shared understanding

Before any changes to charts or roles, leadership must internalize the distinctions this document makes. Understanding these concepts well enough to use them in conversation will be a sign of progress. If we find ourselves asking, "Is this a Sell problem or an Operate one?", the document is doing its job.

What this enables Glenn to do next

This model gives Glenn a clear framework to:

• Run serious EOS-style accountability discussions.
• Evaluate "right people, right seats" objectively.
• Design leadership roles that reflect the actual work, not legacy structures.

It also provides language to explain why some roles are hard to fill due to specific judgment requirements, not talent scarcity.

A different posture toward change

Perhaps the most important shift is in our posture. Instead of asking: "How do we get everyone aligned around a single plan?" we can now ask: "How do we govern multiple kinds of valuable work without exhausting the people doing it?" This mature question reflects a company ready to operate with intention, not just momentum.

Why this matters now

Markets are shifting, technology is accelerating, and regulatory pressure is increasing. Companies that struggle in such environments are often those that fail to adapt to these changes. This document is an attempt to ensure we are not one of them.