Here’s the thing about operating principles: most founders write them like they’re auditioning for a TED talk. They craft these beautiful manifestos about “radical transparency” and “fail-fast cultures” that sound profound in Medium articles but crumble the moment someone misses a deadline or burns through runway faster than expected.
After years of watching Fortune 100 companies turn simple decisions into semester-long case studies, I’ve developed what I call the Surgical Principle: cut precisely, move quickly, and never mistake motion for progress. It’s less sexy than “move fast and break things” but infinitely more useful when you’re actually trying to build something that matters.
The truth is, most operating advice comes from people who’ve never had to choose between paying rent and paying developers. So here’s how I actually work, stripped of the LinkedIn-optimized wisdom and performance theater that passes for leadership content these days.
THE FOUNDATION FIRST DOCTRINE
Everything starts with foundation. Not strategy, not vision, not the beautiful deck that makes investors swoon. Foundation. Because I learned something watching Disney spend six figures on campaigns that said nothing: you can’t polish a brand that doesn’t know what it stands for.
When I take on a project or make a hire or even decide what to work on each morning, I ask the same question: does this strengthen the foundation or just add more floors to a shaky building? Most operators get this backwards. They optimize for growth before they optimize for clarity, then wonder why their teams are confused and their message is muddy
This shows up in everything. When we’re developing Authority OS, I don’t start with features. I start with the foundational question: what problem are we solving that nobody else is solving? When I’m hiring, I don’t start with skills. I start with: does this person understand what we’re building at a foundational level? Because skills can be taught. Foundation either exists or it doesn’t.
THE THREE LENS FILTER
Every decision gets filtered through three lenses: Brand, Business, Audience. In that order. Not because brand matters more than business (though it often does), but because most operators get the sequence wrong.
Brand lens: Does this align with who we are and where we’re going? Not who we want to be or where we hope to go, but the actual trajectory we’re on based on our actions, not our aspirations.
Business lens: Does this move us toward sustainability and scale? Notice I didn’t say profitability. Sustainability comes first. You can’t scale something that isn’t built to last.
Audience lens: Does this serve the people we’re trying to reach, or does it serve our ego? This is where most founders fail. They build for themselves and call it customer-centricity
Here’s how this played out recently: we had an opportunity to partner with a major tech company that would have doubled our revenue overnight. Passed the business lens easily. But it failed the brand lens because it would have positioned us as a vendor instead of a platform. And it failed the audience lens because it would have diluted our focus on the customers who actually need what we’re building. Easy decision, even though it hurt financially in the short term.
THE MEETING AUDIT
I learned this one the hard way at ESPN, where I once sat through a two-hour meeting about scheduling a meeting. Now I audit every recurring commitment monthly with one question: if this didn’t exist, would I create it today?
Most meetings are corporate theater. They exist because they’ve always existed, or because someone thinks collaboration means putting eight people in a room to discuss something two people could decide in ten minutes. I’ve killed more meetings than I’ve started, and productivity has only improved.
The meetings that survive serve one of three purposes: decision-making, information transfer, or genuine collaboration on creative work. Everything else is performance art
This extends beyond meetings to processes, tools, and even team structures. Just because something worked when you were five people doesn’t mean it works when you’re fifteen. Most operators are afraid to kill things that used to be useful. I’m afraid of keeping things that are no longer usefu
THE PRESSURE VALVE PRINCIPLE
Pressure is information. When something feels overwhelming, that’s usually a signal that I’m trying to solve the wrong problem or I’m solving the right problem in the wrong order.
Most founders treat pressure like something to push through or manage. I treat it like a diagnostic tool. High pressure usually means I’m working on too many things at once, or I’m working on things that don’t actually matter, or I’m trying to control outcomes instead of controlling inputs.
When pressure builds, I don’t work harder. I work more selectively. I’ll spend an entire day just auditing what I’m working on and why, because eight hours of clarity is worth more than eighty hours of confusion.
This probably sounds like luxury thinking to founders who are barely keeping their heads above water. But here’s the thing: pressure that comes from doing important work feels different than pressure that comes from doing busy work. One energizes you even when it exhausts you. The other just exhausts you.
THE ABANDONED PRINCIPLES
I used to believe in radical transparency. Turns out, radical transparency is often just radical oversharing dressed up as leadership philosophy. Some things need to be processed privately before they’re shared publicly. Some decisions need to be made before they’re debated.
I used to believe in consensus-driven decision making. Democracy is beautiful in theory and paralysis in practice. Now I believe in input-driven, leadership-decided processes. Gather information from everyone, but don’t mistake gathering input for sharing decision-making authority.
I used to believe in work-life balance. Now I believe in work-life integration. Balance implies that work and life are opposing forces that need to be managed. Integration assumes they’re part of the same system that needs to be optimized. The difference matters more than it sounds.
I used to believe that good ideas speak for themselves. They don’t. Good ideas need good positioning, good timing, and good communication. The best idea poorly communicated loses to the mediocre idea well communicated every single time.
WHAT I’M STILL FIGURING OUT
Scale. Everything I know about operating comes from small teams and direct relationships. As we grow, some of these principles will need to evolve or die. I’m not sure which ones yet.
The line between conviction and stubbornness. Sometimes holding your ground is leadership. Sometimes it’s ego. The difference is often only clear in retrospect.
How to maintain surgical precision as the complexity increases. It’s easy to cut precisely when you’re dealing with simple problems. Complex problems require complex solutions, but complex solutions are harder to execute with precision.
The relationship between systems and intuition. I’ve built systems for almost everything, but the best decisions still come from intuition informed by data, not data interpreted by systems. Figuring out where to systematize and where to stay human is an ongoing experiment.
Here’s what I know for sure: most operating advice is written by people who want to sound wise, not by people who want to be useful. The gap between those two things is where real operators live. It’s messier than the LinkedIn posts suggest, but it’s also more honest. And in a world full of performance art masquerading as leadership, honesty might be the most radical operating principle of all.
How I Actually Work (And Why Most Operating Principles Are Performance Art)
