Doc with helpful links referenced during the call.

The Strategic Alignment Workshop Facilitators Guide.

Are you now preparing for 2025 strategic planning? If so, then you should know about these to two surveys and the accompanying facilitators guide, which I believe are the best in the business for strategic planning and alignment.

First, you can conduct an Entropy Survey, which will show what your company’s internal strengths and weaknesses are. Use the results of this survey to build a shared understanding of where your team should focus now to make the biggest improvements to drive operational excellence. To see how the survey works, sign up for free and take it yourself. Send it to the all attendees for completion about a week before the offsite so that you can digest the results.

Second, you can conduct a Top-Level OKRs Strategy Survey, which will show your company’s current lifecycle stage and its strategic execution risks which will help you to formulate the right growth strategy. To see how the survey works, sign up for free and take it yourself. Send it to three to five of your most senior leaders about a week before the offsite so that you can digest the results.

Additionally, here is a step-by-step Strategic Alignment Facilitators Guide that you can use to facilitate a world-class strategic planning session with your team. Take the time to read this guide in advance, then use it as a guide during the strategic planning session. It will help you create a clear and powerful outcome and should build momentum for next year.

Finally, if your company is in the […]

Did you know that most startups fail due to mistimed market entry?

Market timing in business expansion isn’t just about being first—it’s about being right. And mastering this art can make or break your venture’s future.

Here’s the insider playbook most entrepreneurs overlook:

✅ Read the market pulse: Don’t confuse early interest with market readiness. Genuine demand trumps curiosity.

✅ Technology maturity matters: Ensure underlying tech can support your solution at scale.

✅ Competitor landscape: Sometimes, being second mover has advantages. Learn from pioneers’ mistakes.

✅ Customer evolution: Your early adopters’ needs differ from the early majority. Time your expansion accordingly.

✅ Envision ahead: If you’re successful, how will your product or service fit into the broader landscape? Are you attempting to build a real business or is this really a product feature?

Executing perfect timing is more complex than it seems. Remember: Successful expansion isn’t about being the fastest, but about aligning your unique and differentiated capabilities with market readiness and customer demand.

The key? Patience balanced with preparedness. When the market calls, be ready to answer—but not before.

How familiar are you with Porter’s Five Forces? It’s an excellent model for analyzing your companies market position and strategy.

It helps you understand:

📉 New Competitors: How easily can new players join your game?
📉 Supplier Power: Can your suppliers dictate terms, or are you in control?
📉 Customer Power: Are your customers loyal, or always looking for a better deal?
📉 Substitute Threats: Could a new product make yours obsolete?
📉 Competitive Rivalry: How cutthroat is your industry?

Let me give you an example to make this easier 👇🏻

Netflix uses this framework to stay ahead:

✅ They make it hard for newcomers by investing big in original content (Battling New Competitors)

✅ They balance power with content creators (Battling Supplier Power)

✅ They keep subscriptions affordable to maintain customer loyalty (Battling Customer Power)

✅ They innovate constantly to combat other entertainment options (Battling Substitute threats)

✅ They differentiate themselves in a crowded streaming market (Battling Competitive Rivalry)

By understanding these forces, you can:

>> Spot industry trends before they hit
>> Identify hidden opportunities and threats
>> Make smarter business decisions

On LinkedIn, a military officer asked me how Porter’s Five Forces might be applied to the military. It’s usually a sign of a strong mental model if you can cross disciplines with it, so I thought it was an interesting thought exercise. Here are some ways that it applies:

📉 New Competitors: If this conflict gets out of hand, will neighboring territories or factions get involved?
📉 Supplier Power: Where are the resources to fight this conflict coming from? Do we have logistics integrity? What do we need to do to ensure that we do?
📉 Customer Power: Are we winning hearts and minds? If not, what is our strategy?
📉 Substitute Threats: What are the alternative ways to resolve […]

This may be the most important speech of this decade. Tony Seba hammers home that we are now in simultaneous PHASE SHIFTS across five sectors of society: Food, Energy, Transport, AI, and Materials (specifically Precision Fermentation, which was a new one for me). “Cost curves are like gravity. There’s no escaping.” His conclusion? The world is going to super abundance and near zero costs.

If you need to lead your family into the future, then I can’t recommend watching this video enough. But if you need to lead your company into this future, then I would also read my book Organizational Physics which is all about structuring and executing phase shifts. Finally, if you want to be on the winning side of these phase shifts, contact me to explore coaching. We are living in interesting times. Cheers, Lex

Organizational Physics is a way to understand and leverage systems principles to create more effective, efficient, and resilient human-based organizations. I usually write about entrepreneurial organizations. In this post, I am going to shift gears and create a mental map for how to think about what we can do as citizens to restore and improve the United States government.

My approach is to put the US government in its proper context using systems thinking, then show where it’s gone terrifyingly off the rails, and finally to highlight the highest leverage points we can focus on to restore and improve it. To be clear, I’m not writing from a political ideology, Republican or Democrat, but rather from a systems view.

Also, nothing in this article will help us navigate through the current political crisis. This article provides useful concepts to consider in a post-crisis period of rebuilding. God Bless America.

What is the Purpose of Government?

“Government” is a loaded term, holding different meanings for each of us. Ask a Communist and a Libertarian the meaning and purpose of “government” and you’ll get very different answers. From a systems perspective, however, the answer is clear: The purpose of government is to maintain high integration and low entropy for a critical mass of its stakeholders, now and over time. A good government accomplishes this objective efficiently. A bad government does not.

To clarify how I use these terms:

Integration measures how well a system is connected to its surrounding environment. High integration means there’s ample flow of energy, resources, and opportunities available to stakeholders. Low integration indicates a scarcity of these flows. In order to get a sense of the importance of integration, imagine a race car without gas. Despite its potential, it’s not going anywhere. […]

Gareth Dickens, ConvenientMD Chairman and CEO, and I did a masterclass on lifecycle strategy.

Here’s the link to the working doc we used during the class.

Thanks to Gareth and to all the participants. I hope you find these concepts useful in your own company. Cheers, Lex

I don’t know who might need to hear this today, but as a founder, are you spending some time each day thinking like a business designer rather than a doer?

Here are some significant differences between a doer and a designer:

❌ Doer: Focusing on day-to-day tasks
✅ Designer: Envisioning the future of your organization and developing strategies that align with long-term goals

❌ Doer: Managing operations reactively
✅ Designer: Proactively building scalable systems and processes

❌ Doer: Working in the business
✅ Designer: Working on the business to foster innovation and growth

❌ Doer: Handling every detail personally
✅ Designer: Delegating smartly and pushing ownership deep

❌ Doer: Resisting change to maintain control
✅ Designer: Embracing agility and adapting to market dynamics

❌ Doer: Overwhelmed by daily firefighting
✅ Designer: Prioritizing strategic initiatives and long-term planning

❌ Doer: Focused on short-term gains
✅ Designer: Investing in unique capabilities that capture growing opportunities

❌ Doer: Limited by personal capacity
✅ Designer: Scaling your impact through your strategic execution team

Making this shift requires stepping back from the operational pressures and dedicating time to envisioning and designing where your organization can go.

It’s about setting clear goals, designing systems that support those goals, and building the best team to execute.

By adopting a designer mindset, you not only position your business for scalable growth but also free yourself to focus on steering its strategic direction of your company. .

Adopt this phrase as your personal rallying cry: “I design the game for others to play.” :-)

I’ve been reading two books this summer, one on Comanche Indians and the other on Pirates! Talk about fun summer reading-what’s more captivating in history than the true stories about the dashing pirate and the fierce Comanche warrior? Interestingly enough, both came to prominence around the same time – the 17th and 18th centuries. Both groups wielded enough power to shake the foundations of empires. What’s truly fascinating, though, is their strikingly similar organizational structures—structures that offer surprising lessons for modern business strategy.

Why Pirates and Comanches Have Similar Management Tactics

Both groups, pirates and Comanches, were built for plundering targets and then escaping into the vastness… the sea or the southwest plains. By necessity and pragmatism, both developed very meritocratic and egalitarian societies. This wasn’t due to some altruistic motivation.. It just happens to be the best culture to support their similar strategies.

For example, the leadership composition and compensation strategies for a pirate ship were incredibly flat. Pirate ships made decisions by consensus and every full-fledged member of the crew received no less than one full share of the booty. And no one received more than two shares, which was the highest paid role of war captain. Specialist roles like the carpenter, cook, and ship’s doctor, received slightly more than regular crew members of 1.25 to 1.5 shares total. That’s incredibly flat!

Why is this? Well, it ensures that when battle comes, all pirates are in it to win it. Afterall, if you were a regular pirate, why would you jump into the enemy ship and engage in close quarters combat if the captain was going to pull 10X or 100X of your share? You wouldn’t.

The same spirit held true for the Comanche. Not even the war chief could order a […]

When it comes to identifying problems and crafting solutions, “Get to Ground Truth” is non-negotiable. It’s the difference between mediocrity and mastery.

Picture this: a hiccup on the manufacturing line. The poor engineer? They bury their nose in the plans, hunting for deviations. They think, “The plan is the reality.” But here’s the kicker – plans are just maps, and maps are never the territory.

Now, the great engineer? They head straight to the shop floor. They talk to the operators, inspect the machinery, and immerse themselves in the chaos. They know that the real insights, the ground truth, come from seeing things as they are, not as they’re supposed to be.

Getting to ground truth means stripping away assumptions and confronting reality head-on. It’s about recognizing that the shop floor holds the secrets to what’s really happening. This approach exposes hidden variables and reveals the actual constraints – the stuff that plans can never fully capture.

In leadership and engineering, those who master ground truth turn problems into opportunities. They understand that real-world complexities demand real-world engagement. They prioritize direct observation and foster a culture where ground truth is sacred.

So, let’s get real. Great engineers and leaders don’t just solve problems – they live them, breathe them, and experience them. They step out of the office and into the field, knowing that true understanding comes from the ground up. This shift isn’t just powerful; it’s transformative. The difference between good and great lies in this simple truth: get to ground truth, and the rest will follow.