Most of my week right now goes to the scaffolding underneath a small operating team. What the weekly review looks like, where the hiring loop makes its real decisions, which written artifacts the group keeps, and which ones quietly die in the drafts folder. The parts nobody writes memos about, and the parts that decide whether the team still knows itself a year in.
On the writing side, I’m chasing two threads. One is a long piece about what happens when AI gets good enough to do the craft layer and the judgment layer stays human. The other is shorter, on why most operator handbooks stop fitting around year five, and what has to get rewritten when they do.
Reading has been slow this quarter. I’m a few hundred pages into Chandler’s Visible Hand for the third time, because the railroad operators of the late 1800s are still the best case study I’ve seen on how operating infrastructure gets invented under pressure. Also back through Drucker’s book on managing nonprofits, which doesn’t get enough credit for being the sharpest book about running ordinary organizations I’ve read.
I’m in Dubai most of the time this year, in Amsterdam a couple of weeks a quarter. If you’re in either city, hello@karlbaz.com works, or use the form on /contact/.