Last week, we looked at how today’s compensation systems evolved. Hourly pay wasn’t invented because it was the perfect way to compensate employees. It was created because factories needed people in the building at specific times. That raises an important question. If different compensation systems were designed to solve different

If you ask ten business owners how employees should be paid, you’ll usually hear one of two answers. “They should be hourly.” “They should be salary.” It’s often presented as though one of those options is the “right” way to pay people. But here’s the problem: Neither one was designed

Recently, I spent two months operating at about 20% capacity. A medical issue. A medication that made me feel awful. A doctor who kept saying, “It’s not ideal, but give it another two months.” This isn’t a criticism of my doctor. It’s a description of the system. In our current

I see the same pattern over and over again: business owners trying to make a strategic decision but starting with the wrong question entirely. It’s easy to think that the decision you need to make is the right question, but that fails to account for some critical assumptions and doesn’t

At this point in the process, you’ve already done the thinking most business owners skip. You’ve paid attention to what actually happened. You’ve captured lessons instead of rushing past them. You’ve slowed down long enough to separate noise from patterns. Now you’re standing at the point where strategy either becomes

Once you finally have the space to think — whenever that is for your business — you need a clear starting point. That starting point isn’t a goal-setting worksheet or a long planning retreat. It’s Lessons Learned. Not complicated. Not formal. Just a structured way to understand what actually happened