Hard Things, Clearly

The Hard Thing An owner asked me to diagnose a managed services company he'd bought. It took one day: wrong people, wrong process, wrong technology. He walked away to fix it himself. Eighteen months later he came back worse off and got the same answer. A year after that he came back losing money, people and clients. What I've never said publicly is this. The diagnosis was never the hard part. Hearing it was. He didn't need more information. He needed permission to stop protecting a decision...