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The river
Peter Rahal pictures a business as a river: as long as it flows, great, and when something blocks it, the blockage gets fixed. He ruminates on a problem until he cannot sleep, so he fixes it to be able to sleep. His forever job is the management team, product-market fit, organizational health, strategic alignment, and cash, plus what he calls reactionary leadership support.
Reactionary leadership
Reactionary means he literally reacts. When a fire or a problem reaches him, he drops what he is doing or reshuffles, assesses it, provides resources, shines a flashlight on it, and leaves. He expects every leader at the company to work the same way.
The cost
The approach has a cost: he does not acknowledge wins, only what is wrong. He hands that off internally, asking people to mark milestones like the company's birthday. At a taste test, when the team called a product awesome, he called it wrong and then listed every flaw.
Why do unfinished problems keep people awake?
In 1927 Bluma Zeigarnik reported that people remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. A 2011 study by E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that making a specific plan for an unfinished goal reduced the intrusive thoughts it caused afterward. Their study appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Why do leaders notice problems more than wins?
In a widely cited 2001 review, psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues concluded that bad events have a stronger effect on people than good events of the same size. Negative information gets more attention and is processed more thoroughly. The review was titled Bad Is Stronger Than Good.
How does management by exception work?
Management by exception, an idea traced to Frederick Taylor around 1900, says that routine matters run on their own and managers act only on deviations from plan. Leadership researcher Bernard Bass later divided it into an active form, where leaders watch for deviations, and a passive form, where they wait for problems to arrive.
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