We asked executives at manufacturers, contractors, and freight companies what a recent slipped commitment had actually cost them, and handed them a list to choose from. Money or a deal. Trust or a relationship. Wasted time or rework. Nothing serious. It is still costing me.
More than half of them named wasted time or rework, which is more than the other four answers put together. Money or a deal took about 16%. Trust or a relationship took the same.
I had money winning. It is the answer that sounds right, and it is what software like ours gets sold on. Fewer than one in six chose it.
So I went back to the stories the same people told us, to see what rework looks like when an executive describes it in his own words. A senior director at a third-party logistics company gave the shortest version anyone has.
"Someone was supposed to get something done for me. I assumed they'd get it done without me hounding them or following-up. I was wrong. It never got done."
Sit with the second sentence. Hounding is his word, and he is using it for the thing he chose not to do. He had two options: chase a colleague about a promise that colleague had already made, or trust the promise. He trusted it. The work did not happen.
That is what the rework answer is describing. No customer walked. Nothing moved in a forecast. What changed is that a senior person now spends part of every week personally confirming that work he already handed off is still moving, because the one time he did not, it was not.
The bill came out of his calendar. That is why the money answer lost.
–Clint
What's on Larry's mind
At SugarCRM I ran a weekly staff meeting, and the first 15 minutes of it went to status. We spent them establishing whether the things we'd decided the week before had happened.
That quarter hour never appeared in a budget. Nobody around that table logged it as the price of a commitment that slipped, because it didn't feel like a price. It felt like managing.
This is meta work, the work about work, and it survives because it never looks like waste. Nobody in that room was idle. The second pass looks exactly like the first, and the person doing it is doing their job. That is why nobody flags it, including the person paying for it.
Underneath those hours sits a second charge that nobody writes down. Trust was the cheapest instrument the logistics director above had. He could take a colleague at his word and spend nothing at all. Once that stopped being safe, the cheap instrument was gone, and everything he reaches for now costs him time he has to find somewhere.
The checking is countable, if anyone decides to count it. The other loss has no unit. A commitment that slips takes somebody you could take at their word and turns them into somebody you check, and nothing in the business ever records that it happened.
–Larry
Product progress
Brief tracks two kinds of commitments. The ones you owe someone, and the ones someone owes you.
Both of them close themselves.
When the person who owes you something tells you it is done, sends the thing, or holds the meeting they owed you, Brief goes and checks. If the evidence holds up, it closes the item and shows you the message it read.
This is the harder half of the problem, and it is the half we wanted. Closing your own work is the easy side. You did it, and the proof is sitting in your sent mail. Work you are owed gets finished by somebody else, in their words, on their schedule, somewhere in a thread you may not even be on. Brief treats what they said as evidence that counts, and acts on it when it holds up.
Two places we deliberately do not make changes.
What you owe still waits on you to notify the other person that you are done. A preemptive reply from the other side does not close it, because someone else being pleased is not you being finished.
Where the record never named who owed you the thing, Brief leaves it open rather than guess. Those you will need to close out.
Anything Brief closes arrives under "Brief closed these" in your daily brief, each with the message that closed it. You can undo any of them.
Open your commitments and read what you are owed. What is still on that list is what is still actually open. The next time you wonder whether somebody did the thing, you can look instead of ask.
–Zac
There is one distance that matters, from a call a leader faces to work that is actually finished, and it opens in two stages with the decision as the hinge. Larry takes the whole of it apart in the second Executive Intelligence Paper, The Decision-to-Done Gap. It is free, ungated, and about a twenty-minute read.
If you work with a manufacturer, a contractor, a distributor, or a logistics company, 100 people or more, where a dropped handoff costs a delivery date: who there is responsible for work actually getting finished?