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It’s time I made entropy my friend instead of treating it as my enemy.

For much of my career as a coach and author, I’ve preached the gospel of integration over entropy. Drawing on the first and second laws of thermodynamics, I’ve often illustrated entropy as the villain and integration with the environment as the hero. In my book, Organizational Physics: The Science of Growing a Business and the Universal Success Formula, I show how Integration over Entropy is the ultimate barometer of success and happiness. My intention was clear: to teach leaders how to identify energy drains—symptoms of entropy—so they could plug those drains, creating more capacity for integration, innovation, and positive outcomes.

However, upon deeper reflection, I realize I’ve been caught in a dualistic trap. I’ve categorized energy gains like Love, Flow, Success, Harmony, Growth, and Development as positive, and energy drains like Fear, Discord, Inefficiency, Corruption, and Disintegration as negative. As a systems thinker, I pride myself on recognizing that most situations involve managing polarities and trade-offs, rather than solving black-and-white problems. Yet, in this instance, I missed the mark.

Embracing Entropy as a Positive Force

It’s time for me to put entropy in its proper place as a positive force for change. In the physical world, all systems eventually succumb to entropy. Death, decay, and disintegration are natural parts of the lifecycle. Without death, there would be no room for new life to emerge. Old systems give way to the new, creating opportunities for progress and renewal.
Consider the natural world: a forest fire, while destructive, clears the way for new growth. Similarly, in our lives and organizations, entropy points the way to “problems,” which in turn are opportunities for improvement. Everything is interconnected. When we view destruction as inherently bad, we […]

Have you ever found yourself seething with anger or feeling deeply upset over a situation, only to realize later that the intensity of your emotions far outweighed the actual circumstances? This is a common experience, and it serves as a powerful reminder: if you’re hot, the problem is you.

At first glance, this might sound like an oversimplification, or even an accusation. But it’s neither. It’s a profound truth that speaks to the heart of our personal growth and evolution. Our experiences in life are deeply intertwined with our consciousness. What one person perceives as a source of happiness, another might see as a reason for sorrow. This divergence in perception highlights a crucial point: life is fundamentally lived from the inside out.

The Lens of Consciousness

Our consciousness acts as the lens through which we interpret and interact with the world. When we encounter a situation that makes us angry, upset, or self-righteous—when we are “hot”—this often points to an inner state that is ready for transformation. These intense emotional reactions are signals from our consciousness, indicating areas where we need to grow and evolve.

For example, consider a situation where a colleague receives praise for a project you worked on together. If you find yourself feeling resentful or indignant, it’s worth examining why this reaction occurred. Is it because you feel unappreciated or overlooked? Or perhaps there’s an underlying insecurity about your own value and contribution? The specific trigger matters less than the inner state it reveals.

Progress Through Transformation

Recognizing that the problem lies within us is not about denying that wrongs and rights exist in the world. Of course, injustices and ethical violations occur, and they deserve to be addressed. However, it is important to observe […]

Free Resources and Helpful Links Doc shown near the end of the video in case you want them.

I hope you found this helpful. Thanks again to Vijay Sondhi, CEO of NMI for participating and sharing his perspective. Cheers, Lex

If you have a hurt shoulder, where should you focus your energy and attention to help create permanent pain relief?

Do you rely on aspirin, ice, shoulder band resistance training, or even surgery?

Or, do you consider the connective tissue that surrounds the shoulder in your neck, torso, and even all the way down to your feet?

While it might seem strange that the pain in your shoulder could be caused by an imbalance all the way down in your feet, the reality is that foot pain can cause you to lean forward or hunch over, leading to a forward head posture that strains your neck, shoulders, and back.

Everything is connected.

What about your business? If there’s pain in your business, such as friction, inefficiency, infighting, poor velocity, or substandard quality, where should you focus your energy and attention to create relief?

Do you address the pain point directly, or do you examine the interconnections that surround it?

This is why I created the Entropy Survey. It’s a root cause diagnostic tool that scans your business for internal pain points and identifies the connective tissue causing the pain.

It allows you to see the inner workings of your business through a systems view.

For example, is the breakdown in our sales function due to a poor customer onboarding process, inadequate product management, or because we are targeting the wrong types of customers?

If you don’t look holistically at the entire business, then you’ll attempt to cure the symptom but miss the underlying root cause.

Everything is connected. Look to the interconnection points and put your energy and focus there.

If operational excellence is important to you, I highly recommend taking this tool, the Entropy Survey, for a free test drive and discovering what you can uncover.

If you believe like I do that a person’s life is a reflection of their commitments, then this interactive program “Your Vision & Action Plan” is one of the most important investments you can make. It will guide you step by step to clarify and follow through on your most important commitments — those that you’re ready to make to yourself, your loved ones, your company, or whatever is truly most important to you.

The program is divided into three parts:

Part I. Your Long-Range Vision
The goal of this section is to capture the essence of what you want your life to look and feel like five years from now. Think of this section as the “why” of your life. Budget 30 minutes to complete this.

Part II: Your Annual Targets
The goal of this section is to clarify and align your most important annual targets for the coming year. Ones that will bring you closer to your vision and cover the most important topics of your life and work this year. Think of this section as the “what” of the coming year. Budget 20 minutes to complete this.

Part III: Your New Quarterly Growth Habits
Part III is about the process that you’ll implement this quarter that will ensure you achieve your annual targets and actualize your long-range vision. Cultivating a habit is a way of operating in your daily/weekly life that reinforces your desired behavior in support of your annual targets and your vision. Think of this section as the “how” for the coming quarter. Budget 30 minutes to complete this.

Click here when you’re ready to begin: https://organizationalphysics.com/your-vision-and-action-plan/

I’ve been a business scaling coach for over a decade and in that time I have learned a lot. Some big wins, some battle scars, and a deeper appreciation for taking a systems thinking approach to growing companies.

In  my coaching practice, I have a unique specialty area. I don’t specialize in a particular type of business or vertical niche. I work with companies across a range of sectors because I specialize in a specific stage of organizational development — the expansion stage, also known as the transition between the Nail It and Scale It stages.

This is a critical and usually rocky period for businesses to navigate. One the one hand, you have nailed product-market fit and growing sales. On the other, the old structure and approach—the one that got you here—isn’t getting you to the next level. How do you scale your company through this transition without losing your entrepreneurial speed and edge?

What I’ve learned is that most companies struggle with this transition. The founders or CEO feel like a bottleneck. There are strong vertical functions like sales, operations, engineering but weak cross-functional coordination. The company may have lost sight of its founding vision and what used to be fast and easy to accomplish inside the company now seems to take too much time and effort to accomplish.

Many companies (myself included when I was a venture-backed CEO) have tried to solve these problems but chose a “cure” that was worse than the original disease, setting themselves back months and years. There are folk cures such as replacing the founder prematurely and losing a powerful innovating force; or attempting a Queen of England structure, in which a single President and COO oversees the company while the founder focuses on innovation […]

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0J9RUbLkFA535t4e1QjJsi

I thought this was a fun interview. Mike and I discuss the laws of Organizational Physics and their implications to growing a business.

One of my biggest pet peeves is unproductive meetings. In fact, I dislike unproductive meetings so much that I began to study what it takes to facilitate great meetings—and meetings that matter.

Thinking through meeting design and facilitation has been my way of trying to lessen the burden and suffering that I and others experience when we’re stuck in a bad and unproductive meeting.

This list of Ten Rules for Highly Effective Meetings is born from experience and the principles of Organizational Physics. You can apply them to your own meetings and improve them by 30% or more.

Think about that figure for a moment. How much time and energy do you personally spend/waste in meetings each week? And how much does your entire company spend/waste each week? It’s likely a big and costly number.

A change in approach to how you organize and run meetings can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line. Meetings will take less time, consume less energy, and result in better decisions and faster organizational velocity.

Why Have Meetings at All

There’s a lot of noise on the internet right now telling you that the best solution to bad meetings is to get rid of meetings altogether. Slamming meetings isn’t a new trend. Here are two of history’s most prominent management gurus on meetings:

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

“Either you meet or you work. You cannot do both at the same time.” – Peter F. Drucker

I used to be in this “get rid of meetings so we can work camp” too. But I came to a realization. Trying to get rid of meetings, or attempting to automate them away through the use of AI, is like trying to get rid of the […]

Two past coaching clients just reached out to ask me about structuring AI into their companies this week. This tells me it’s time to write an article, so here we go.

One of the principles behind Organizational Physics is that you always want to manage appropriately for the lifecycle stage of the project, product, business, or business unit. First you pilot it, then you nail it, then you scale it. AI adoption is no different.

The Pilot It Stage of AI Adoption: Using GPTs

Most companies are already in the Pilot It stage of AI adoption. Employees, especially innovators and early adopters, are using AI tools to be more productive, but the work itself has not fundamentally changed. This means that your social media marketing manager uses a GPT plug-in to create more social media posts, but their job remains fundamentally the same. It’s the same for software engineers, salespeople, and really any knowledge worker using a GPT. Discovering what different AI tools are capable of is fascinating and a bit unnerving. On their own initiative, the leading edge is researching and deploying their own AI tools and often bringing their findings back to the company.

Of course these discoveries raise plenty of questions and concerns. “Wait… what about data security?” “Wait… what about privacy?” “Wait… does this mean won’t have jobs?” These concerns are valid, yet every thinking person can see that the world has changed. If your company is going to survive and thrive, then it must quickly figure out how to nail AI adoption.

The Nail It Stage of AI Adoption: Building an AI Brain

My coaching clients on the leading edge of AI adoption are all on the same mission right now: to create and leverage their own internal, centralized AI brain. […]

Recently, I was featured on the Sparking Entrepreneur Podcast on Spotify. Many of the questions were about becoming a coach and how to be successful as a coach, so I’m including it here in case you’re interested. Cheers.

I have found that the way we want to be and become as an organization is shaped by two dimensions.

One area is quantitative goals. This includes things like our top-line revenue goals, profit goals, and measures of excellence in the form of key performance indicators (KPIs). If your company were a human body, think of these things like the objective goals of the brain.

The other area is qualitative goals. These include things like our reason for being, our core vision and values, and why what we do is actually important. If your company were a human body, think of these things like desires of the heart.

Here’s the thing. An integrated human being seeks to align their head with their heart. And this is an ongoing, dynamic process. Alignment is not a one-time event. It’s a constant dance. A person committed to integration adjusts their choices and relationships consciously when they notice a misalignment occurring. Living a life well-lived is all about playing that game.

The same applies to your business. It also has a collective brain and heart. An effective leader is one who can define the current and desired future reality in such a way that it galvanizes the organization’s brain and heart to close the gap—to make the current reality more like the desired future reality.

How to Integrate the Organizational Head and Heart

With Organizational Physics, you can quickly gather perspectives on what should be included in the head and heart of your organization through two survey modules. This is a structured way to gather feedback from your leadership team and other key influencers.

An organization’s “heart” is defined by its company core. The Company Core survey module includes nine questions that define your company’s qualitative objectives and its reason […]

Modern MBA is a great YouTube channel if you like business stories as much as I do. It examines behind-the-scenes strategic decisions and missteps that led a high-profile company to its current state. Usually, the episodes are entertaining and easy to watch. This episode, “Fried Chicken Wars: The Curse of Popeyes,” was sponsored by Organizational Physics @3:17. Enjoy!

And here’s the link to the Strategic Alignment Guide mentioned in the video.

Will your company hold strategic planning sessions in the coming quarter? If that’s the case, I highly recommend these two resources:

See the Strategic Alignment Guide. Use this guide to run a world-class strategic alignment and planning session, including a new and improved SWOT Analysis.

See Designed to Scale Structure Resources. I’ve recently placed all Designed to Scale videos and tutorials in a single source page. Remember, when the strategy changes, change the structure!

I hope you enjoy and get value from these resources. Here’s to a successful 2024 and beyond!

Cheers,

Lex

SANTA BARBARA, CA, UNITED STATES, September 17, 2023/EINPresswire.com/ — Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of AskLEX, a groundbreaking chatbot powered by the latest GPT-4 technology, which provides instant access to a comprehensive knowledge base of best practices for leading authentically and growing businesses.

AskLEX is the culmination of over a decade of research and development, bringing together the power of machine learning with the principles and expertise of Organizational Physics founder Lex Sisney. Individuals and organizations can easily access and apply the principles of Organizational Physics with this new tool.

Key Features of AskLEX:

• Cutting-Edge AI: AskLEX is built upon the GPT-4 platform, the most advanced AI language model available today. This ensures that users receive accurate, up-to-date, and insightful responses to their queries related to Organizational Physics.
• Comprehensive Knowledge Base: AskLEX hosts an extensive knowledge base that covers the full range of Lex Sisney’s content and philosophies. Users can access information on topics such as authentic leadership, building high-performing teams, setting strategy, designing scalable structures, driving sustained strategic execution, and much more.
• Instant Expertise: With AskLEX, users can tap into the expertise of Organizational Physics at any time, gaining valuable insights and guidance to enhance their own effectiveness.
• Personalized Recommendations: The chatbot leverages machine learning to provide personalized recommendations and solutions tailored to specific challenges and objectives.
• 24/7 Accessibility: AskLEX is available round the clock, making it a valuable resource for individuals and organizations across different time zones and schedules.

AskLEX is set to streamline the way organizations solve their unique business challenges and opportunities. It empowers leaders, managers, and employees to make informed decisions based on the principles of Organizational Physics, ultimately leading to enhanced productivity, engagement, and overall success.

“We are excited to introduce AskLEX to the world,” said Lex Sisney, founder and head coach of Organizational Physics. “Organizational Physics is a powerful […]