So I don't start with a plan I'd have to pretend to believe. We agree on where you want to go, we move, and we let what happens tell us the next move. Movement is my driving force.
Nothing exotic. It's just done sooner, and more honestly, than most people are comfortable with — with someone next to you who has made these calls before.
Most stuck things are stuck under their own weight: dozens of dependencies, a room full of stakeholders, a plan that has to be perfect before anyone moves. I find the handful of things that matter now and park the rest.
Cross the line from talking to doing, early. Ship the page, talk to the customer, run the event, publish the chapter. Something real, in front of reality.
Reality answers. Customers respond, assumptions break, and the real obstacle shows up — usually not the one we were worried about. That isn't the plan failing. That's the information we needed.
We use what we learned to decide the next move. Not a new plan for the quarter — the next smart move. Then we make it, and the loop starts again.
Along the way, the people get better — not just the project. You start making the next calls yourself, faster and with less second-guessing. That's the part that compounds.
The goal was never that you keep me. At San José State I launched the incubator, built the team to run it, handed it over, and left. That's what finishing well looks like.
I borrowed the sprint from engineering: set a direction, move fast, learn from reality, adjust. Two weeks can disappear inside an organization just getting people into a room. Three is long enough to actually move something, and short enough that nothing hides.
We agree on where you want to go and make the first real move. By the end, we know things we couldn't have known at the start.
What's working gets more fuel. What isn't gets cut. The real obstacle usually has a name by now.
We go after whatever's actually in the way — even when it isn't what we expected.
Where were we? Where are we now? What's possible that wasn't before? Then we decide together whether to keep going.
Every three weeks, the same four questions: What did we do? What happened? What did we learn? What's next?
Twelve weeks from now, we'll be meaningfully further along than we are today.
That's the commitment. What I won't do is sign up to a definition of "done" written on day one — that means pretending to know something nobody can know yet. We may discover the path is different from the one we imagined at the beginning. That's part of the work.
The advisor when advising is. The trainer, the professor, the operator — each when that's what the moment needs, and not a minute longer. I'm not exclusively any of them. I bring whichever one creates the next useful movement, and the goal is always that you can keep going without me.
This isn't a framework I invented for a slide. It's twenty-five years of getting things moving — and teaching others to — distilled into four principles — and told as a business fable in my book, What Holds Up the Roof. If you want the thinking before you want the help, start there.
Book thirty minutes. Bring the direction — you don't need the plan. We'll figure out whether I'm the right person to go there with you.
Book 30 minutes with me