Operations
Four stations, in order: get on the same page, set the rhythm, keep the promises, put it on the wall and dust it off. Each one has a read and a block of The Operations Page. Read four is below in full and it is free; the other three are inside Base Camp.
Put it on the wall — and dust it off
You almost certainly have a number you report every week that everyone trusts — clean, exact, never argued about. Here is the uncomfortable question: does it actually move when the thing you care about moves? A lot of them don’t.
Here’s the one that fooled me
I spent years in a company that measured everything, and measured it well — that is why it worked. Our number was “traces closed”: a customer phones asking where their shipment is, it gets passed to the local team, and closing it counts as the work. Easy to count, nobody argued, everyone understood it. I stopped watching it. It never showed what I cared about — whether the call went well, whether the problem was really solved, whether the customer ended up happy. It only showed that someone marked a line done. Worse: a trace exists because something already went wrong, so a rising count can mean the operation is failing faster and cleaning up hard behind itself. On the wall, that reads as productivity.
A number can be true, exact, and reported every week — and still point you backwards.
Three tests you can run this afternoon
Take each number on your wall and ask: Can it move without the thing I actually care about moving? If yes, it is a stand-in. Does closing it need the result, or only the activity? Am I counting something I would rather have less of? Any number that fails one of the three doesn’t belong on your page — take it off, today. And remember people aren’t cheating when they chase the number you put in front of them; they are doing exactly what you asked.
What actually goes on the wall
Three numbers, where everyone walks past them, with what “on track” means written beside each — not in your head, not in a file. Then two questions a week from the people doing the work, on the same page: what is stuck, and what did a customer say, in their own words.
Then dust it off
Drift is the normal state, not the failure. People change and the way things get done changes with them — within a month the equipment is back in the wrong place. So every process on your page carries one name and a date it was last checked, and the owner is the person closest to the work, not you. Once a quarter, ask them when it last changed, and why.
Take the lying numbers down. Put three up. Then put a name and a dust-off date on every way of doing things.
Run the three tests on every number you report today, and take off the ones that fail. Then write three that pass, with what “on track” means beside each, and where the board hangs. The sheet is free and takes twenty minutes in the room.
Open the free sheet, Put it on the wall →Inside Base Camp this sheet is Block 4 of The Operations Page — the last station. The three before it, the same page, the rhythm and the promises, are the reads below.
Taking a number off the page is free. Deciding what replaces it is the rest of the chapter.
The other three reads and The Operations Page — the team on the same page, the four meetings, the promises list, the numbers and habits on the wall, on one sheet, with the week, the month and the table behind it — are inside Base Camp, along with your own four gear results and a second reading ninety days out.
The other three stations, and the page they fill.
You have just read station four. Stations one, two and three come before it, and in Base Camp they come in order, each with its own block of The Operations Page: the team on the same page first, then the meetings, then the promises, then the wall.
One room, the same page.
The whole team in one room, once: the leader reads the Direction Page out loud and the team says it back in its own words until everyone believes it. One name on every part of the business. Nobody leaves until everyone can say the one thing without looking.
A team cannot keep a rhythm on something it has not agreed on. Nine minutes by the board every morning is worth nothing if the people at the board do not agree on what the business is for and where it is going.
INSIDE BASE CAMPFour meetings that never move.
Day, week, month, quarter: same day, same time, same people, one name running each and one thing on the table. Nine minutes standing every morning does more than two hours sitting once a month.
A fixed date, a named person, and a number read out loud whether or not it was good. Not a system, not a dashboard. A meeting that happened on the day it was supposed to.
INSIDE BASE CAMPOne name and one date.
Everything the team agreed to deliver, with a person (not a department) and a date (not “soon”) beside each line, read out loud every week — the late ones said out loud with a new date, and the two questions the people doing the work are asked every week.
Almost nothing is ever late all at once. It slips a little, the slip gets mentioned once, and then it disappears into the general noise until somebody notices two months later that it never came back.
INSIDE BASE CAMPMeasured against what you expect, written down, and then it is a best practice.
The definition I carry came out of watching a company that measures everything: measurements documented against what the company expects, which is how a best practice gets made — the how-to-do-it. It is the exact counterpart of the Team rule that an expectation only becomes real when the person validates it, accepts it and believes it. A process is no different. It is real when the people doing it recognise it as what actually happens.
Finances is the last chapter, and it is written. Read its opening free →
Every story in this chapter comes from the operating history of the people who built Summit. Companies are unnamed on purpose and individuals stay unnamed permanently. Nothing here is adapted from anybody else’s material.