Hanson Barry

    The read

    Ten statements. Score each one to five, honestly rather than aspirationally. Two minutes, and you add them up yourself, because a page that does it for you would need your email first and that isn't the deal.

    It isn't measuring how good your business is. It's measuring how much of its judgement lives somewhere other than your own head.

    1. A decision worth S$10,000 can be made well this week without me in the room.
    2. Someone other than me can say which customers are quietly drifting, without asking me.
    3. My team makes calls with real information in front of them, not a summary I prepared.
    4. When someone gets a call wrong, we go back over it while it's still fresh.
    5. I could be uncontactable for two weeks and the business would make good decisions, not just safe ones.
    6. New people get put in real situations early, with support, rather than watching for months.
    7. "How are we actually doing?" takes minutes to answer, not a week of pulling it together.
    8. My managers disagree with me sometimes and are usually worth listening to when they do.
    9. What I know about this business exists somewhere other than my memory.
    10. Our systems make the same things visible to everyone who needs them.

    10–20 · You are the business.

    Usually the mark of someone who built it themselves and was good at it. But nothing runs without your read, so growth costs time you don't have.

    21–30 · One good instrument.

    The judgement is real and it's yours. The constraint is that it's singular — your people aren't short of ability, they're short of reps.

    31–40 · Second reads forming.

    Some people are making genuinely good calls, usually uneven by area: strong where someone's been in it, thin where they haven't.

    41–50 · Distributed judgement.

    Rare. If that's accurate you don't need me — you need to know which single area is the exception, because there's usually one.

    Which band did you land in? · · ·

    If you landed in the first two and want the longer version of why, it's in the seven days. If you landed in the third and it stung slightly, that's usually the right time to talk.

    For people who run things