Writing.
The pipeline maths I run before every quarterCalculator
You know the call. Last Friday of the month, forecast due, and the CRM gets updated in the hour before it. Dates slide to the right and probabilities get rounded up, and whatever comes out of that hour gets read to a board. How many first conversations does one seller need to hold today to land the number they signed up for? The arithmetic takes an afternoon. Put your own numbers in and find out.
Everything breaks down into three things
People pick the book up expecting a manual for using AI to remember things. A few pages in they work out it is about the structure of knowledge instead. I have been building knowledge repositories my whole life: diaries first, then iPad files, then Notion dashboards rebuilt more times than I want to admit. Different tools, same instinct, same failure. What I found eventually is that everything breaks down into three things.
The day a client turned his laptop around
Bangalore. I walked into that room relaxed, because I had delivered the same pitch a hundred times and delivered it well. Then the client turned his laptop around and walked the room through what he was seeing on his end. The numbers were on the screen, the room went quiet, and I had nothing to put next to them. It was one of the best days of my career. What happened next is the whole job.
The graveyard of systems
There are twenty leather-bound notebooks on a shelf in my home office. Half used. Stacked like monuments to productivity. Flick through them and you can watch the decay happen: beautiful at the front, desperate scribbles by the back. The planners gave way to apps, the apps gave way to a Notion second brain, and none of them held. It was never a discipline problem.
The promotion trap
The day you get promoted out of an individual contributor role is the day you start working with worse information. As an IC you had everything: every data point, every signal, every deal. Then comes the title. More markets, more people, more responsibility, and less information than you have ever had in your career. Why that happens, and what closing the gap actually asks of you.
One email, every second Friday.
What I'm learning about running commercial teams in the AI era.