GarthBox

Where to play and how to win.

That is the whole of strategy in seven words, and I love it more than anyone should love a sentence out of a business book. The two men who wrote it down meant it the way a coach means it. A field, an opponent, a scoreboard. Fine. I keep snagging on the verb anyway…

They could have written where to dominate. Where to invest. Where to work, or where to deploy resources (a phrase that has never once gotten anybody out of bed on a Saturday). Any of those would describe the same market on the same map. They picked play, the only word on that list that expects you to lose now and then and keep going.

Lose where you meant to dominate and you failed. Lose where you meant to invest and you get a write-down, followed by a meeting about the write-down. Get tagged and you’re it, which is just a new job inside the same game. The loss is one of the moves.

Since the start of this year I’ve been running my year in themed weeks. Poetry, cooking, stand-up, woodworking, stocks, nature, video editing, gardening, meditation, improv, watercolor, motorcycle, candlemaking, manga. Every week gets the same seven slots, from reading something, to cold-emailing a local practitioner, to teaching my daughters, to a big closing number I named the Wow capstone. Seven days on one small field. Then the lines get painted somewhere new.

The scoreboard is honest, which means it’s ugly in spots. Woodworking was a wipeout, nothing built. But there was a broken bowl I hand-carved (and hand-broke?). History and geography got abandoned with the supplies ordered and never used. The gardening planter box got pushed a full year. Each of those cost me exactly the week I gave it and not an hour more.

Lined up side by side, the losses share a fingerprint. Anything that needed a new tool, shop space, or somebody else’s calendar tended not to happen. I didn’t find out I’m bad at wood. I found out where my field actually ends, which no amount of planning had told me.

Play is the only one of those verbs that pays out when you lose.

The winning half surprised me too. The Wow capstone was supposed to be the fireworks, and it was the slot I skipped most. The fake Netflix special never got filmed. The maker’s mark never got made. What I kept instead was smaller. Poems on index cards pinned to a tackboard. A binder of handwritten recipe cards. A frame of pressed leaves. A jar of improv prompts from a living-room showcase. I had defined winning as fireworks, and the game kept handing me ticket stubs.

The bar runs on the same logic. One location, on purpose, no second pot. Inside that one room, 90s Week, Plant Week, a tap list that refuses to sit still. The field stays fixed so the play can move. Plenty of companies run it the other way around, picking where to dominate, defining winning as the launch, and then wondering why nobody on the team will try anything that might not land.

If you lead anybody, hand them a field before you hand them a target. Edges they can see, small enough that a loss inside them costs a week instead of a reputation. Then watch who starts leaping.

My daughters had this figured out on poetry week. They loved tracking down every item on the scavenger hunt and never quite grasped the part where the items turn into a poem. The poem was my idea of how they’d win. They had already picked where to play.

Stay Positive & Go Lose A Week (You’ll Gain Much More)

A cursor blinking in an empty folder where a whole weekend used to be.

That picture makes my stomach drop. I gave a weekend to a report for work, and if it vanished tomorrow I would be devastated. Not annoyed. Devastated, the full-body kind, where you check the trash folder six times.

Now the other file. I post here most days, and I’ve signed off the same way for more than fifteen years. If every post on this blog disappeared tonight, I’d be… fine. (Sad for an afternoon, maybe. Then I’d go write something.)

Put those two on a grid. Effort runs left to right. Up the side goes how long you’d grieve if the thing were gone by morning. The report sits in the top right corner, sweating through its shirt. The blog sits in the bottom right with its shoes off. Same effort. Opposite grief. The left side fills itself in: the lucky photo you’d mourn forever up top, most of your inbox down below.

Grief isn’t measuring how much the work matters. It’s measuring how much of the payment hasn’t landed yet.

I work in payments, so I think about this gap more than is healthy. A card gets approved in about two seconds. The money takes a day or two to actually settle. For that stretch the sale is a promise wearing the costume of a sale, and promises fall through.

The report lives in that stretch. Every hour I put into it is approved and pending. It pays when somebody reads it, nods, and decides something. Until then my weekend is sitting in a file, and files die. The blog cleared at the keyboard. Each post paid me the moment I found a sentence I didn’t know I had. The archive is a drawer full of receipts, and nobody grieves a receipt.

I learned this standing next to a fire full of homework. At the end of a school year we burned a year of notes and worksheets, and it didn’t feel like loss. It felt cathartic. The learning had already moved into us. The paper was just proof we’d shown up, and proof burns fast.

Impact is a different question, and the report probably wins it. Reports like that get decisions made off them. Nobody has ever changed a plan because of a post about a broken bowl (that I know of). But impact that only pays when someone else signs for it can also disappear in one bad click.

So the fix isn’t caring less about the report. It’s getting paid on the way. One page, just for you, written before the thing ships: what you learned, what surprised you, the one sentence you’d still defend if every chart vanished. If the laptop eats the file, the weekend survives in you. Grief becomes annoyance, which is a much better price. Annoyance drives action and prevents people (and ideas) from dying standing still.

If you lead anybody, look at where their grief lives. If your team would be wrecked by losing any single thing they’ve made, you’ve built a place where work only pays out when you receive it. They spend their weekends in the pending column, waiting on your nod. Give them some work that clears the moment they make it. They’ll show up Monday already paid.

The report will land or it won’t, and somebody else decides which next week. This one cleared while I was writing it, though. I even enjoyed thinking about it while I was on vacation the other week. Delete it tomorrow and I still walk away holding a few sentences I didn’t have this morning.

Stay Positive & Back It Up, Map It Out

“We just don’t have the budget for it.”

It is the most comfortable sentence in business. Nobody has to be wrong. Nobody has to say the idea was confusing, or aimed at nobody, or a little bit about the person pitching it.

But there’s one belief I’ve got…There is always budget for a good idea.

Money turns up mid-quarter like a twenty in last year’s jacket the second the right person gets excited. Budget is a crowd, and a crowd drifts toward whatever someone can describe to it on the way out of a meeting.

What there’s never budget for is a good idea with no audience attached. Or a good idea nobody else can carry.

I just got back from Portugal where my job was to stretch myself in ways the daily life doesn’t. Back home the meetings kept happening (meetings are the one part of a company that never takes PTO), and every idea I’d left on the table had to stand up without me. I don’t know yet which ones did since I’m logging back on after I write this post… which is sort of the point. A vacation is the cheapest stress test an idea will ever get.

“No budget” is a translation. Unfold it and the original usually says one of these:

• Nobody could say who it was for without using the word “everyone.”
• It only made sense with you standing next to it, waving your hands.
• The person who loved it would have to pitch it to the person who signs, and they heard it once, walking to the parking lot.
• Its goal was “awareness,” which nobody has ever been fired for missing.
• Nobody’s name was attached to the result.
• It needed a slide to explain the slide.
• It solves a problem the room doesn’t feel yet.
• It sounded vague, and vague always rounds up.
• Saying yes meant someone else’s project had to lose, and nobody told that person.
• Its best argument was your enthusiasm, and enthusiasm does not survive being forwarded.
• Nobody could explain it in the time it takes to pour a pint.
• The finance person couldn’t tell their boss what changes if it works.
• It arrived finished, with no handles for anyone else to grab and call partly theirs.
• “No budget” is easier to say than “I don’t get it,” and much easier than “I don’t want to be the one who carries this.”

Every one of those is a portability problem. Not a budget constraint. The idea couldn’t travel.

That’s the whole game in B2B, and it is humbling, isn’t it?

Your product gets bought in a meeting you’re not invited to, described by someone who heard your pitch once and liked it more than they understood it. The pitch that counts is the one they give. So the work is shrinking the idea until it fits in someone else’s mouth: one audience, one goal, one sentence that survives being repeated by a tired person at 4:45 on a Thursday while you’re climbing stairs of a castle and laughing when your tour guide Bruno forgets to turn the mic off when he blows his nose.

My out of office told everyone exactly when I’d be back. The ideas worth funding never needed to read it.

Stay Positive & Can Your Idea Survive The OoO Test?

There is always a slowest tap.

Pull it, and the title just moves one handle over. The beer that was second slowest yesterday wakes up this morning as the problem, and nothing about it changed. Same keg, same pour, same handle, now wearing a dunce cap it never tried on.

Every revenue report eventually makes you the same offer. A fifth of the names are paying for most of the lights. Keep those, let the rest drift, and enjoy how much lighter the boat feels. (Spreadsheets always sound so calm. That’s how they get you.)

The trouble is that the shape lives in the list, and the list comes with you. Cut the bottom 80 percent and the survivors are an 80/20 of their own the moment the cut is made, a fifth of them paying for most of what’s left and the rest suddenly looking a lot like drag. Cut again and you’re down to four percent of where you started, still lopsided, the curve growing back like a hedge that takes every haircut as a suggestion.

Follow the plan all the way down and you end up with one customer.

That isn’t a business. It’s a job with a worse boss. One logo sets your prices, bends your roadmap, and knows to the dollar how much you need it.

I’ve been on the wrong end of the trim. At a company I worked for, two vendors courted us for months. Then the executive who owned the budget went on leave, the conversations went quiet, and somewhere a rep read the quiet as a no. Both marked us closed lost, right before a new VP walked in with budget and appetite. Neither came back. On their list we were the 80… we were about to be somebody’s 20.

The bottom of a list is a seat. Somebody is always sitting in it. Some are on the way up, some are on the way out, and the ranking can’t tell you which, because a ranking only knows where everyone stood on the day you printed it.

So cut for behavior, never for rank. The customer who treats your team like a vending machine has earned the door at any size, and showing that one out actually changes the room. Show the small one out and you’ve only handed the small title to whoever’s next in line.

Then give the bottom of the list a job. Part of it is your future 20, still growing into its budget. Part of it tells you what the market is doing, since your biggest accounts mostly tell you about themselves. Part of it is ballast, and a lighter boat is also an easier one to tip. If the 80 feels like drag, it’s usually being served on a model built for the 20: the same meetings, the same handholding, the same price of attention. That’s a packaging problem wearing a customer’s face.

The same math runs through a team, where it gets expensive. Rank a great crew and somebody is still last. Cut them, and the new last one spends every shift waiting to be next, and the guests can feel it from across the bar.

80/20 is always 80/20. You never get to delete the shape, only furnish it. There will always be a slowest tap, a smallest account, somebody at the end of the bench… and everyone else is watching how you treat whoever’s sitting there.

Stay Positive & Pour One Out For The Slow One

Cold butter. 375. Twelve minutes. Follow that and you get cookies, most days.

Understand it and you can save the batch when the oven runs hot, when the flour is old, when six more people show up.

Following scales. Understanding adapts.

Playbooks get handed down as orders. Run the sequence. Post on Tuesday. Nobody says why, so when the ground shifts the team executes perfectly into a wall.

Give them the why and you’ve given them a choice.

Stay Positive & Understanding Is Choice (That Reads In Both Directions)

Somebody asks for a beer we don’t carry, and then somebody else asks, and the answer is the same one we gave the week we opened.

Before we opened I wrote a fear down on a piece of paper: people won’t come back to us. That one came true. It keeps coming true. Most of it is on purpose, which is a strange sentence to have to make peace with.

The temptation, when a position costs you somebody, is to explain it. Walk them through the sourcing, the rotation, the reason that beer sits where it sits and not on our wall. You can spend a whole night doing this. It feels like generosity and it works like a hearing…

Notice what explaining does to the thing you just said. It turns it into a proposal. A position you defend is a position you have agreed to put up for a vote, and now the other person is the judge, and now you are standing there waiting on a verdict you never needed.

“I disagree” is a complete sentence. You can set it down on the bar and go wipe something.

No case, no evidence, no follow-up email. Some people hear that as rude, because we’ve all been trained to believe a position owes the room a receipt.

The ones who belong with you are not in that argument. Most of them are not even here yet. They are a year out, two years out, working somewhere that sands them down a little every Tuesday, and the only way they ever find you is by triangulating on a signal that has not moved. Consistency isn’t a virtue thing. It’s a findability thing.

Every flip resets their search or merely makes them miss out entirely (or worse, find a competitor who is saying a similar thing to you – consistenlty)

This gets worse inside a company than outside one. A team cannot stand next to something that moves. Say the strategy in March, soften it in May because a loud person sighed, and by July nobody will repeat it out loud with their own name attached, because repeating it is how you end up holding a thing the building already set down. You didn’t lose an argument. You taught the room not to carry anything.

Brands do the same flip in public and call it a refresh. New category language every two quarters, a new enemy every fall, each version perfectly defensible on its own. Together they train the exact buyer you wanted to stop memorizing what you are, because what you are has a shelf life now and they’ve learned to wait for the next one.

(None of this is a case for being stubborn about something you got wrong. Changing your mind because of new information is a completely different physical act than changing your answer because somebody in the room sighed.)

The cost is real and it arrives first. You lose people, and some of them tell other people, and that all happens early. The ones who came for exactly the thing you refused to change show up late, quietly, already sure.

They were never going to be argued in. They were looking for something that stayed put long enough to be found.

Stay Positive & Still Not Carrying It…

The first time somebody told me the front brake does most of the stopping on a motorcycle, I rode an entire session not believing them. It sounds like a setup. The wheel that steers you is also the wheel you’re supposed to stand on when you want to slow down, and the back one, the big dumb reliable one, mostly just goes along.

But it’s true, and the reason it’s true is the good part. When you squeeze that front lever, the fork compresses and the whole mass of the bike and everything you ate that morning shifts forward onto a patch of rubber roughly the size of a credit card. That patch spreads out like a palm pressed against glass (or… like my daughters face on the sliding glass door to our deck…).

More rubber touching the road means more grip. More grip means you can brake harder. Which shifts more weight forward. Which gives you more grip.

The traction is not sitting there waiting for you. You manufacture it by asking for it. Forcing it, really.

Which means the whole thing runs backwards from how it feels. A bike with nothing loading the front end is not relaxed, it’s vague. It wanders. It floats into corners with a kind of polite uncertainty and you spend the entire turn wishing you had committed to something a quarter mile ago…

So the load is not the cost of the speed. The load is where the grip comes from.

I think about that every time somebody wants to launch something into a soft room. A friendly beta. Four customers who already like us. A pilot with no exit clause and no consequence, running quietly in a corner of the business where nobody’s compensation depends on the answer. It feels responsible. It is actually a coast. Nothing is pressing on the front wheel, so nothing tells you what the surface is made of.

The market is the brake. Positioning does not get sharp in a doc. It gets sharp the first time a buyer with real money looks at your sentence and says, politely, that this is not a thing they were planning to solve this year. That resistance is not the setback before the traction. It is the traction. (I have written plenty of messaging that never had to survive a no, and it read beautifully, and it did nothing. Others might think it’s my best work. I think it’s my worst.)

Same goes with people. Give somebody a project with nothing on the line and you’ve given them a hallway. Give them something early enough that being wrong is survivable, and watch how fast their judgment gets good. That’s the whole sequence. You put weight on your team, on purpose, before it’s comfortable, and they put weight on the customer, and the customer eventually puts weight on you.

Now the part that will hurt you.

You squeeze the front brake. You do not grab it.

Grab it mid-corner, or on gravel, or cold, and the front washes out and you are on the ground before your brain has finished forming an opinion about it. I’ve been down (different mistake, and the pavement did not grade my reasoning any more kindly for it). The load has to go on progressively, over a beat, while you’re still moving forward. Front-loading is not dumping. It’s pressure applied with your fingers, not your fist.

Which is why the skill isn’t courage. It’s knowing what’s under your tire before you ask it for everything.

A tire standing still is just rubber. It only becomes a tire when something asks it to stop.

Stay Positive & Squeeze