Founders love process TOO much.

Founders love process TOO much. Here's how 3 sentences can guide a company longer than 300 pages of SOPs.

We try to document every step, every detail, every possible scenario so the team knows exactly what to do.

That works when the work is predictable, but business isn't predictable.

Take marketing in this example. You can document how to publish a blog post or send an email. But you’ll never write a step by step process for how your company should create every piece of content.

There are too many variables. The customer changes. The competition changes. The channels change. The creative changes.

Trying to document every possibility either creates a 97 page manual nobody reads, or boxes your team in so tightly they stop thinking.

This is where founders often miss something more important than process: Frameworks.

In 1977, Apple wrote its marketing philosophy on a single page, and if you read them you can see it is still alive in their products and marketing TODAY, 30 years later.

Three ideas:

•Empathy: Understand the customer better than anyone else.

•Focus: Eliminate unimportant opportunities so you can do the important things well.

•Impute: People judge the quality of the product by how you present it.

That’s it. Notice that these aren’t instructions - they’re principles people can use to make thousands of decisions that could never have been predicted when the document was written.

You can do the same thing across your business, in every department.
Sales.
Operations.
Hiring.
Culture.
Customer service.

For predictable work, build a process.
For work that requires judgment, give people a framework.