Operating thesis · 2026
A short statement of the working beliefs underlying the operating and advisory practice. Each is held as a proposition, not a slogan; each has been tested against operating data and revised where the data disagreed. They are intended for boards and operating teams as a basis for inquiry rather than as a manifesto.
01.1
Sustainable revenue is the output of how an enterprise is wired. That means its compensation, its data flows, its decision rights, its capital allocation. When growth is delegated to a function it becomes brittle. When it is treated as a property of the operating system, it compounds.
01.2
Most enterprise AI activity to date has altered tooling without altering the underlying unit of work. The interesting question is not what models a firm uses but what it now asks employees to stop doing, start doing, or do differently. Where work has not changed, value has not been created.
01.3
Director experience is the largest under-deployed asset on most enterprise balance sheets. The binding constraint is not the composition of the board but the absence of a method for routing the right director to the right operating question at the right time. The dissertation underlying this site is concerned with that activation problem.
01.4
A firm under acute stress shows where its real decision rights live, which relationships hold, and which assumptions were never tested. The most useful operating insight tends to arrive during the periods leaders most wish to forget. Disciplined recovery work begins with refusing to discard that information.
01.5
Booked revenue, pipeline coverage, and headline ARR are reportable but coarse. The questions that move enterprise value are about gross retention by cohort, net dollar expansion by motion, and customer acquisition cost recovered against gross margin. Each should be read alongside the operating decisions that produced them. Theater is what is reported up; quality is what is measured down.
Each engagement begins with which of the five propositions is most contested at the firm in question. A board may dispute proposition 03; a revenue leader may dispute proposition 05. The early diagnostic work is largely concerned with surfacing where the firm and the operating thesis disagree, and asking what evidence would resolve the disagreement. Where the firm is correct, the thesis is revised.
Related reading: the Capital-to-Revenue Multiplier is the method that follows from propositions 03 and 05; the doctoral research is the empirical work underneath proposition 03.
Note
The operating thesis is held lightly. Propositions are revised on publication of better evidence, including counter-evidence from engagements. Correspondence on disagreement is welcome via the contact page.