These five prompts cover 80% of the operational decisions that eat your week. Save them somewhere you can find them. Operations leaders make dozens of high-stakes calls per week: allocation trade-offs, capacity decisions, vendor negotiations, process redesigns. Most of these rely on gut instinct plus a spreadsheet. AI gives you
Your strategy has probably never been seriously challenged. Here are five prompts that will stress-test it against the frameworks that matter, in under an hour. Most mid-market strategy documents follow the same path: a small team writes it, leadership nods politely, and the company commits capital. The plan is never
The most expensive decisions in mid-market operations are not the ones that fail immediately. They are the ones that look like wins for 90 days and then compound into problems that cost three times the original savings. Second-order thinking, asking "and then what?" before committing resources, is the
Costco's strategy works because every decision reinforces a single bet: fewer choices, lower prices, higher loyalty. Most mid-market companies fail not because they lack strategy, but because their strategy tries to say yes to everything. Use our Strategy 1-Pager to test whether your own decisions are coherent. The
Your warehouse bottleneck is not dock doors, truck capacity, or headcount. It is almost certainly a policy constraint: a batch sizing rule, scheduling formula, or inventory allocation logic that was built for a company half your current size and never revisited. The UDEs Tell the Story UDEs come from Goldratt&
If your strategy document is longer than one page, you haven't made the hard choices yet. Length isn't a sign of rigor. It's a sign that you're avoiding tradeoffs by including everything. This template, built on Richard Rumelt's Kernel framework,
These three podcasts will sharpen how you think about decisions, systems, and leadership. They're not operations podcasts in the narrow sense. They're shows that make you a better operator by improving how you think. 1. The Knowledge Project (Shane Parrish) Shane Parrish built Farnam Street into
If you run operations at a mid-market company, these three books will give you more leverage than any ERP implementation or dashboard project. They teach you how to see your system, find the constraint, and stop optimizing the wrong things. 1. The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt The most important operations
These are the three strategy books that will change how you make decisions at work. Not theory for MBAs. Frameworks you can apply to your next planning cycle, your next pricing review, your next resource allocation fight. 1. Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt Rumelt's core argument:
Most strategy advice is either too academic to use or too shallow to matter. Clearheaded Operations sits in the gap: short-form articles that apply two of the best strategic frameworks ever written to the operational problems you're actually facing at work. If you're running a mid-market
