Summer Reset – Part 2
The Unspoken Realities of People, Data, Time, and the Lonely Craft of Leading
Part 1 was about the soul of your company: vision, values, culture. The high-level ideals.
But the soul alone won’t run your business. Now we need to walk into the engine room, where it’s hot, noisy, and everything is in motion: people, data, time, accountability, habits, flow… and the solitude of the person in charge.
This is where leadership stops being theory and starts being lived reality.
1. People & Data: Your Two Relentless Bosses
People and Data are the two most demanding “managers” you’ll ever have.
People bring complexity. They have feelings, egos, blind spots, and personal histories that walk into work with them every morning.
Data brings clarity, but only if you collect it properly, interpret it correctly, and actually use it.
You can’t pick one. You need to master both.
Data: The Mirror That Doesn’t Lie (Unless You Let It)
Data is like a mirror in harsh lighting: it shows you exactly what’s there, not what you wish was there.
The danger? Many CEOs either avoid the mirror when they suspect they won’t like the reflection, or they decorate it with vanity metrics until it flatters them.
If you want data to serve you, strip it to its essentials:
Collect what matters, not just what’s easy to measure.
Traffic, followers, topline revenue, easy to track, comforting to see. But the real game lives in harder metrics: retention in your best customer segment, lead-to-close times, contribution margin by product line.Create one source of truth.
If Sales, Marketing, and Finance each have slightly different numbers, you don’t have “data”, you have three competing realities.Make it universally understandable.
If only you and the CFO can read the dashboard without a translator, you’ve created a bottleneck. Data’s power lies in democratizing insight.Tie every metric to a decision.
If a number changes and nothing in your priorities, resource allocation, or execution changes, that number is trivia, cut it.
The test is simple: does this metric make us act? If not, it’s decoration.
People: Your Real Leverage (or Your Drag)
People are your biggest multiplier or your slowest leak. And pretending otherwise is expensive. In every team, you’ll find:
Strongest Links – You trust them with complexity, they deliver without drama. Give them autonomy and fuel.
Reliable B-Players – They’re steady, consistent, the foundation. Make sure they know they matter.
Busy Bees – Always in motion, rarely producing impact. They get one round of coaching with clear targets. If they don’t change, they go, because they drain energy and attention.
Defenders – More focused on protecting their turf than on advancing the mission. They either shift their stance or leave.
Pretenders – All optics, no substance. The hiring mistake you fix as soon as you realize it.
Leverage comes from investing in Strongest Links, valuing B-Players, fixing or exiting Busy Bees and Defenders, and clearing Pretenders.
Anything less, and you’re running the company with the brakes half-on.
2. The A-Team Myth
Forget the “only hire A-players” slogan. Real life needs a balanced A-Team:
A few stars who raise the game for everyone.
Solid, reliable players who keep the ship steady.
Zero tolerance for subprime hires, the ones who slow progress, erode morale, or create friction, even unintentionally.
It’s not about assembling the perfect roster. It’s about keeping the ratio right and moving decisively when someone isn’t adding to the team’s velocity.
3. Meetings: The Good, the Bad, and the Endless
Meetings aren’t evil. Bad meetings are.
A good meeting is like a good pit stop in Formula 1: everyone knows their role, it’s lightning fast, and when it’s over, the car, your team, is back on track and faster.
A bad meeting is like a pit stop where no one has the right tools, three people are arguing about which tire to change first, and someone’s still looking for the jack. You lose time, momentum, and probably the race.
The rules for meetings that work:
No agenda = no meeting.
Timebox everything – if a pit crew can change four tires in under 10 seconds, you can cover your agenda in under 30 minutes.
Finish with a green light – clear decisions, clear owners, clear deadlines.
Once a quarter, audit your calendar. If a meeting exists only because “we’ve always had it,” it’s gone.
4. Walking in the Flow: Responsive ≠ Permanently ON
I’m a fan of Inbox Zero. I like being responsive.
But there’s a difference between being responsive and being permanently available. Too many CEOs blur the line, turning themselves into human notification centers.
The cost of “always ON”:
You train your team to expect firefighting, not leadership.
You destroy deep work with constant context-switching.
You confuse speed with quality.
Reactivity doesn’t mean “answer in 30 seconds.” It can mean an hour. It can mean a few hours. That’s still responsive without sacrificing focus.
How to walk in the flow:
Batch responses.
Block deep work time like a board meeting.
Teach urgency vs. importance.
Model it, show your team that thoughtful beats instant.
5. Habits Over Heroics
Heroics look good in interviews: “We pulled three all-nighters and shipped!” But if heroics are your operating system, you’ve built a machine that runs on burnout.
Habits are boring, and unbeatable. They make your performance consistent, your execution reliable, and your progress compounding.
How to build them:
One habit at a time, give it 6–7 weeks to stick.
Start small, make it impossible to skip.
Anchor it to something that already happens.
Track it, humans love streaks.
Heroics are for rare sprints. Habits are for the marathon.
6. Accountability: Making Excuses Impossible
Accountability isn’t micromanagement, it’s removing ambiguity.
If something matters, it has:
A clear objective.
A deadline.
One owner.
And you create a culture where these escape routes don’t exist:
“I didn’t know.”
“I thought someone else had it.”
“I told you so.”
“We talked about it.”
If it’s not written, it doesn’t exist. If it’s not assigned, it’s optional. If it has no deadline, it’s a wish.
7. The CEO’s Blind Spot: Assuming They Think Like You
Great CEOs have three reflexes most people don’t share:
They live the big picture daily.
They can handle urgent issues without losing the long game.
They anticipate and prioritize instinctively.
Your mistake? Assuming your team operates with the same instincts. They don’t. Even your best people need objectives, deadlines, and follow-up spelled out.
If you want something done, define it clearly and enforce it. Hope is not a system.
8. The Solitude of the CEO (and the Art of Taming Chaos)
This is the part nobody fully understands until they sit in the chair.
You can be surrounded by people, a big team, loyal co-founders, supportive investors, and still be alone. Not “alone” as in “no one to have lunch with.” Alone in the existential sense.
Because your crisis is yours. Your name. Your risk. Your vision.
Your people don’t live it like you do. They can’t.
Some of them will push hard every single day. They take nothing for granted, they bring energy, they move the business forward, and you feed off that.
Some will be competent enough, steady, maybe not lightning-fast, but they get things done and you can count on them.
Some will frustrate you, not because they’re terrible, but because they refuse to evolve, cling to comfort, and resist change, even passively. And a few will slow the team down so much that it’s sabotage, even if they don’t mean it that way.
And here’s the truth: unconscious sabotage is still sabotage.
It doesn’t matter that someone “once scored a decisive goal” in the past. That doesn’t make them indispensable today. In sports, yes, you might have had a big win once, but if nine out of ten times you’re slowing the team, hurting morale, and killing velocity, that one moment of glory doesn’t save you.
It’s the same with suppliers and clients. They will disappoint you. Not always because they’re bad, but because it’s your baby, your project, your standard, and you see the gaps.
Sometimes the issue is them. Sometimes the issue is you, the process you set, the expectations you didn’t make explicit. You have to be able to tell the difference and fix your side of the equation.
In the middle of all that, you are constantly judging, adjusting, and deciding:
Who stays.
Who goes.
What gets pushed harder.
What gets dropped entirely.
And you do it while carrying a constant swirl of inputs, clients, suppliers, employees, market shifts, financial realities, all colliding into each other, all triggering emotions. Sometimes thrilling you. Sometimes draining you. Sometimes both at once.
That’s why I call the CEO a dompteur, a tamer.
You tame your time. Your agenda. Your own impulses and neuroses.
You tame clients, suppliers, employees, partners, even friends who think they know your business better than you do.
You tame an environment that refuses to be tamed.
And you have to do it with versatility, firmness, fairness, lucidity, and a good heart.
Because success isn’t about removing the chaos, it’s about being so good at handling it that no one else even sees it as chaos.
9. Killing the Repeat Failure Patterns
If there’s one thing that quietly kills companies, it’s not “the one big mistake.” It’s the failure pattern, the same problem, showing up again and again, unchallenged, like a bad movie stuck on loop.
We convince ourselves that it will get better with a few changes here and there, nothing dramatic. spoiler alert : it almost never works. And the longer we wait, the more it embeds itself into the company’s DNA.
Three examples you’ll recognize:
The person you think will improve but doesn’t, and who, on their own, quietly sabotages a chunk of the business.
The hiring pattern that keeps bringing in the wrong people, and no one can explain why. It’s absurd we’re still here, repeating the same bad hires while watching other companies attract the talent we can’t seem to land.
The product you stay obsessed with despite no product–market fit, because you don’t have the courage to cut it, pivot it, or simplify it. So you keep pouring time, money, and morale into a hole in the ground.
These aren’t “one-off mistakes.” They’re recurring loops. And if you don’t kill them, they will kill you.
I’ve seen more companies die from recurring, ignored failure loops than from any catastrophic blow-up. And they don’t die because the patterns are invisible, they die because nobody had the courage, clarity, or discipline to end them.
Your job as CEO is to spot these loops early and end them permanently. Not patch them. Not hope they’ll fade. Eradicate them.
Because if you don’t, they will quietly, methodically, and inevitably drain the life out of your business until there’s nothing left to save.
Final Thought
A summer reset isn’t a holiday from leadership, it’s a pit stop. You use it to recalibrate your people, your data, your habits, your time, and your own state of mind.
You can’t erase the chaos. But you can get better at taming it. And when you do, it stops looking like chaos to everyone else.
And most importantly, stop putting off the hard calls. If you see a pattern of failure, kill it now. Because it won’t go away by itself. And the longer it stays, the more it becomes the quiet, invisible reason your company eventually fails.
That’s leadership. That’s the job. And that’s why, even surrounded by people, you’ll sometimes still feel alone.
P.S. Some people will probably say I’m being too harsh here. And maybe I am, if you measure “harsh” by how much I’m willing to let comfort and politeness dilute the truth.
But my job isn’t to sugarcoat. My job is to save the entrepreneur from sabotage, both self-inflicted and from others. That’s the mission. The only mission.
I can’t manage everyone’s moods: the employee’s, the supplier’s, the client’s, the investor’s. The only “state of mind” that matters to me is the entrepreneur’s. That existential crisis, the one that keeps you awake at night and makes you question everything, is what moves me.
Of course, there are rare cases where the entrepreneur is the one sabotaging the company, not progressing, and simply not having what it takes. In those situations, the company comes before the CEO. That’s a different kind of intervention.
But outside those exceptions, my energy, my focus, and my loyalty are to that entrepreneur’s fight. It’s what drives my passion for this work, every single day. Nothing else.
