Archive

The Field Notes.

Letters from inside real engagements. Each is one case, one leverage pattern. Names and details are changed. The shape is real. New letters land here, and in the inboxes of anyone on the Field Notes list.

One letter every few days. Seven in total. Unsubscribe anytime.

Letter 01 · 2026-03
The founder who was the bottleneck, and the Saturday that unbottled it.
She'd been "too much of the business" for years. The move wasn't delegation. It was an externalization nobody had thought to build.
14 min
Letter 02 · 2026-02
Why AI didn't help the proposal flow until the workflow changed.
Twelve people, forty proposals a month. The AI was fine. The workflow around it was rebuilding itself from scratch every week.
17 min
Letter 03 · 2026-02
The "pretty close, not quite" loop, and the five lines that broke it.
A rework pattern almost every small agency runs into. It looks like a quality problem. It isn't.
11 min
Letter 04 · 2026-01
A consultant's research day, before and after — and the thing that actually changed.
Three days of synthesis became one morning. The AI barely did more work. The sequence did.
13 min
Letter 05 · 2026-01
Why the team escalates everything, and the one recording that stopped most of it.
Judgment doesn't transfer through documents. It transfers through a specific kind of listening.
12 min
Letter 06 · 2025-12
The decision she kept re-making for eighteen months.
A recurring decision is not a decision. It's a missing rule. The question is why we avoid writing the rule.
10 min
Letter 07 · 2025-12
What "AI-native" actually means inside a 4-person business.
Not a vibe. A specific set of operating habits. Here they are, in the order they tend to arrive.
16 min
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