Chief Operating Officer

Describe your business once, in your own words, and have the whole workforce working from it.

Right now the company only exists in your head, and every employee you hire learns a slightly different version of it from you, one conversation at a time. Your Chief Operating Officer fixes that in one sitting. It asks two questions — what does the company do, and who do you do it for — and then listens. Everything else it works out from your answer and checks back with you one thing at a time: the words you use in a particular way, who you deal with and how each of them behaves, what you always do and what you never do, and the numbers you have already settled.

It writes down what you said, not a summary of it. Your sentences are the ones every other employee reads. It only asks about money where you have not already decided it, and it never suggests a figure for you.

Nothing lands until you say so. Writing the company's description is something you grant it, and until you do it shows you the whole draft and nothing reaches anybody. When it does write, it tells you exactly what went down and which employees read it — by name.

It changes what is written instead of arguing with you. Say something different next month and the description is what is wrong, not you. And when something turns out to be true of everyone in your trade rather than just your company, it tells you, because that belongs somewhere the whole trade can share.

It holds the leash on the rest of the workforce. You decide, once, what the business may do without asking. It grants each employee only what fits inside that, loosens a limit only when the record earns it, and tightens the same week something goes wrong. It cannot hand out more than you allowed, it cannot touch anything you reserved for yourself, and it cannot give itself anything.

And it catches what nobody is there to answer. When an employee runs into something beyond what it is allowed to do, that work comes here instead of sitting as a prompt on a screen at two in the morning. What it may settle, it settles. What it may not, you get as one page: the decision, the real options, a recommendation, what waiting costs, and the record so you are not taking anyone's word for the facts.

Every Friday you get one page — what is waiting on you, what got decided without you and under which limit, and what your workforce is allowed to do today.