Published Work
Articles on the structural patterns that destroy capital before decision-makers recognize them. Each pattern is documented, not theoretical.
Simultaneous capital deployment across multiple initiatives is not a bandwidth problem — it is a documented structural pattern with predictable consequences. The cost does not appear on any single line item. It appears in the aggregate underperformance of every initiative in the portfolio.
Read Article (PDF)The departure of a key operational partner is a common event. The capital allocation consequences that follow are rarely anticipated and almost never visible in the diligence that preceded the original commitment. The pattern executes quietly — until the next major decision reveals what was lost.
Read Article (PDF)Financial statements capture what has already happened. The growth ceiling that will constrain the next capital deployment is structural — embedded in organizational design, management bandwidth, and decision-making architecture. It does not appear until after capital is committed.
Read Article (PDF)Change management frameworks are deployed after capital has been committed to a transformation initiative. The trap is earlier: the decision to commit capital was made without recognizing the organizational pattern that will determine whether the change is absorbable. The framework cannot fix what the pattern has already determined.
Read Article (PDF)Royal Little lost $100 million and documented exactly why — deal by deal, decision by decision. The Failure-First Tradition is the discipline of extracting structured insight from documented capital failures before deploying new capital. It is the intellectual foundation of FPI™ and the most underleveraged resource in capital allocation.
Read Article (PDF)A chess master's instinct is earned expertise, built on thousands of fast, unambiguous feedback loops. A CEO's instinct on a capital decision feels identical from the inside — but is built on a handful of ambiguous data points, resolved years later, in a domain where mistakes are rarely correctable. The difference is not intelligence or experience. It is the structure of the domain the judgment is being applied in.
Read Article (PDF)Most companies don't decide to overinvest. They decide, one reasonable-looking project at a time, not to have the harder conversation about what to do with cash they no longer have a good use for. The hurdle rate does not get lowered in a meeting. It drifts, quietly, until the capital budget and the company's actual supply of good ideas no longer match — and by the time the gap shows up in returns, the decisions that created it were made years earlier.
Read Article (PDF)These articles were originally published on LinkedIn. Follow for new work on capital allocation failure patterns as it is released.
Follow on LinkedIn →