The advice gets likes because it's simple. It destroys execution because it's partial.

Execution is torn between BANDWIDTH, SKILLS, COORDINATION, and CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT. Starve one, the others collapse.

Stop following advice that sounds good. Start diagnosing which force you've starved.

Right people, right seats addresses SKILLS. But unhelpful if BANDWIDTH is oversubscribed, COORDINATION happens on the fly, or there's no space for CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT.

Execution isn't a single problem. It's four forces in tension. Partial solutions just shift the bottleneck elsewhere.

These are simplified diagnostics. If none highlight the issue, but execution is still broken, go deeper: bandwidth, skills gaps, communication breakdowns, candid feedback.

Most of the time? One of these four shows you where to start.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT: When's the last time someone told you what's broken?

Answer yes to any? That's your bottleneck.

Often, more than one is broken. Find the lowest hanging fruit. Which force, if fed first, stabilizes the others?

But they can't see the skill gaps they're bringing either.

When this happens repeatedly, you blame the workforce.
They blame your systems.

The real problem? Execution lives in tension between TIME, SKILLS, COORDINATION, and IMPROVEMENT.

It's not a people problem. It's a system under tension.

Execution isn't a people problem or a process problem.

It's a system problem.

You can't fix it by yelling louder or hiring faster.

You fix it by identifying which force you've starved—and feeding it.

Starve TIME, and quality drops. Starve SKILLS, and delivery grinds to a crawl.

Starve COORDINATION, and everyone's working hard on different things.

Starve CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT, and you solve the same problems every quarter.

If your team keeps solving the same problems, you don't have a people problem. You have a tension problem.

The answer isn't "push harder." It's "build slack."

When you push one too hard, the others collapse. Coordination becomes "just get it done." Skilled people make sloppy mistakes. Root causes never get fixed.

You're not improving the system. You're wearing it down.

That last game hit different. My team talked about my leadership, and I remembered that terrified grad student convinced she'd always be the worst.

When people focus on my Fortune 50 roles, they miss where I learned to diagnose what's broken: on a volleyball court, not inside an industry titan.

But I made a choice. Became aggressive. Always the backup, even if someone else called it. Never gave up on a ball before it hit the ground.

My team rallied around me throughout. I grew. Became a pretty good setter. Then, as club president, I grew the club into the 2nd-strongest on campus.

Founders do this with their teams.

Connection exists. Communication capability exists. But you never explicitly coordinate: update cadence, what "in the loop" means, when silence is okay vs alarming.

Result: "Why didn't you tell me?" moments with people you trust.

Not connection. Coordination.

I dove into chaos—new school, new city, setup, meeting people. Weeks passed. I didn't even contact my own parents. To me, "weeks" felt reasonable.

To her? I'd broken trust by disappearing.

We both wanted connection. But never coordinated what that meant. Days vs weeks. Different definitions.