McKinsey surveyed organizational leaders for its 2026 State of Organizations report and found that two-thirds, 67%, believe their own organization is overly complex and inefficient, while the traditional fixes, restructuring, cost cuts, flatter hierarchies, are producing diminishing returns. (McKinsey & Company, February 19, 2026)
Read that number as a diagnosis of what actually sits underneath complexity. Restructuring the org chart does not fix a process that only one person knows how to run correctly. Cutting a layer of management does not make a workaround documented. Most leaders are treating a symptom because the underlying disease, undocumented process masquerading as institutional knowledge, stays invisible until the one person who understands it is gone.
This is the third pillar in the Enterprise Value Playbook, and it inherits everything from the first two. A documented strategy with individually accountable leaders still breaks down if the processes those leaders are accountable for exist only as tribal knowledge. Strategy tells the organization where to go. Accountability assigns who is responsible for getting there. Process is what makes the trip repeatable without that one person in the room.
YOUR CRM IS NOT THE PROBLEM. YOUR BUSINESS WAS NEVER INTEGRATED.
Just 14% of organizations report significant success across a completed acquisition, according to PwC’s M&A Integration Survey. The gap is rarely the technology. It is Revenue Intelligence, the collective commercial knowledge a CRM should produce and too often does not, that determines whether leadership can trust the numbers behind growth strategy, capital allocation, and enterprise value.
I wrote about it this month for Top Sales Magazine: why CEOs, boards, and sales leaders need to stop asking which CRM platform to buy and start asking whether they have built a unified Revenue Intelligence strategy.
This week’s concept sits in Pillar 3, Operations + Technology: your core processes are documented, scalable, and executed consistently across the organization.
Where You Stand
Pick your single most important recurring process, the one that touches revenue, delivery, or the customer directly. Could a new hire execute it correctly from a written document alone, with no one walking them through it verbally? If the honest answer requires naming a specific person, that is your actual score.
The Failure Pattern
Core processes exist as tribal knowledge, executed slightly differently by every team that touches them, with no documented standard to train against or audit against. The process breaks the moment the one person who understood it leaves, gets promoted, or takes a vacation at the wrong time.
Kotter’s Step 1, Create Urgency, is the honest starting point here. Most organizations only document a process after it has already broken in a costly, visible way. Document every core process that touches revenue, delivery, or customer experience, not as a compliance exercise but as an operational asset. Standardize execution against that documented version and treat any deviation as a signal worth investigating, not a personal style choice. Building urgency before the breakage, treating undocumented process as an active risk rather than a someday project, is what actually gets the documentation done.
The Win Condition
Any core process can be handed to a new hire as a documented standard, without requiring a tenured employee to walk them through it verbally. Execution is consistent across teams, not dependent on which team happens to be doing it.
FROM THE CHAIRMAN
“What happens to this business the week your best operations person takes an unplanned two-week leave? If the honest answer is we would struggle, you do not have a process. You have a person, and people leave.”
MARKET INTELLIGENCE
Three signals from this week across Venture Capital, Private Equity, Family Offices, and Capital:
Crusoe raised $3.9 billion in Series F funding at a $30.9 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Mubadala Capital, and Valor Equity Partners, to expand its AI data center buildout. (TechCrunch, September 17, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/crusoe-raises-3-9b-to-build-massive-data-centers-and-small-modular-ai-factories/) The detail that matters is not the valuation. It is how Crusoe intends to deploy the capital: manufacturing modular data centers, called Spark, at its own facilities so it can install compute capacity quickly without staffing up a large construction workforce at every new site. That is Pillar 3 at industrial scale. The company turned building a data center into a documented, repeatable, manufactured process instead of a headcount problem.
KKR emerged as the preferred bidder for Logoplaste, a Portuguese packaging manufacturer, in a deal that could value the company at more than 1.7 billion euros, after Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, which holds 60% of the company, moved to sell its stake. (Bloomberg, via Investing.com, September 16, 2026: https://au.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/kkr-emerges-as-preferred-bidder-for-portugals-logoplaste–bloomberg-93CH-4645082) A packaging manufacturer commands that price because its production lines run the same way regardless of which plant or which shift is running them. Consistency across a manufacturing footprint is not a nice to have here. It is the asset being priced.
Family offices, managing an estimated $5.5 trillion in assets, are increasingly bypassing traditional venture funds to make direct investments and buy secondary stakes in AI companies, chasing deals that promise faster returns than a standard fund commitment. (TechCrunch, September 18, 2026: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/family-offices-are-clamoring-for-ai-investments/) One family office advisor put the logic bluntly: offered a choice between a fund that triples an investment in three years and a deal that could do it in three months, the choice is easy. That speed comes at the cost of the process discipline a fund’s own diligence machinery normally provides. Pillar 3 does not disappear because the check gets written faster. It just moves the exposure from the fund manager’s desk to the family office’s, without the documented process to catch it.
ONLY 100 PEOPLE WILL EVER GET THIS
Starting this month, I am building a second home for this work on Substack, with a new Enterprise Value Playbook focus and a paid tier alongside the free issues you already receive.
The paid tier is called From the Tip of the Spear: Executive Briefings. Every month I release one Executive Briefing Framework, thirteen in total, each a board-ready deck answering the only question my work is built around: how you scale the organization and maximize enterprise value. Membership also includes a monthly Insider group briefing with live Q&A.
Founding Member seats are capped at 100, priced once at $1,200 for lifetime access. Annual access is $400. Seats will not reopen once the cap is reached.
Reply “Briefings” for early access before the general list opens, and I will send you the first one free. The free weekly edition continues without interruption either way.
FROM THE TIP OF THE SPEAR
Two out of three (67%) leaders think their own organization is too complex to run well. McKinsey published that number this year, and the instinct it produces almost every time is to redesign the org chart. Fewer layers. Cleaner reporting lines. A new structure that looks better in a slide than the old one did.
None of that touches the actual problem. A process that lives in one person’s head is not simplified by moving a box on an org chart. It is still undocumented. It still breaks the same way, the day that person is out sick, promoted, or gone.
Crusoe raised close to four billion dollars this week building a company on the opposite premise: manufacture the process, do not staff it. KKR is paying more than 1.7 billion euros for a packaging company priced on the fact that its production runs the same way no matter which plant is running it. Family offices are moving capital faster than the diligence process that used to slow them down, and every advisor quoted admits they know exactly what they are giving up to do it.
Pillar 3 is not a technology upgrade and it is not a reorganization. It is the discipline of writing down what your best people already know how to do, so the business does not depend on them remembering to show up. Ask yourself the Chairman’s question this week. If your best operations person took two weeks off tomorrow, would the business struggle? If the honest answer is yes, you do not have a process. You have a person, and people leave.
I WANT YOUR SCAR TISSUE IN MY NYU CLASSROOM
The discipline behind this newsletter is the same discipline I teach at NYU, across two courses: Scaling and Exiting the Business for Maximum Value, and Funding and Legal Approaches for Start-Ups. Each semester I bring operators into the classroom, live in NYC or virtual, to sit with graduate students working through the same problem from the practitioner side.
If you have scaled a company, exited one, raised capital, negotiated the legal terms of a deal, or sat across the table at the moment it was won or lost, I want to hear from you.
From the Tip of the Spear is my weekly publication for executives who are building something real. One issue, every Tuesday. A field report from active operator engagements, one principle with supporting data, and market intelligence from across my VC, PE, and family office network.
