22 essays
Anthropic found its AI agents spent 80% of session time waiting on a human. Your attention is now the bottleneck. Here's how to make agents need less.
Small firms can't hire and won't fire, so the team you have is the team you'll grow with. That calls for designing the work, not running more job ads.
I backed servant leadership in 2010 and I still do. But "How can I help?" needs a boundary, or helping ends up meaning you own someone else's problem.
Ten articles on Gerber's E-Myth, condensed into one practical read: capability maps, role specifications, governance, and why founders now stay close.
AI models are commoditising and human intelligence always was. Being smart was never scarce — the container you build around it is what creates value.
Knowledge work is shifting from doing to triage: approve, redirect, audit. Gerber saw this coming, and AI has made it impossible to keep deferring it.
Growth spends money months before it pays you back. Five simple habits that keep the cash gap from closing a business that was doing everything right.
Growth doesn't kill small businesses on a bad idea. It exposes operational debt — and it breaks in a predictable order. Here's how to get ahead of it.
Gerber taught founders to build a business that runs without them. My new free book is about building one that can think for itself — and stays yours.
When owners feel overwhelmed, a senior hire looks like the fix. Usually it's a process failure in disguise, so diagnose the breakdown before you hire.
Deep work sprints make founders better at being indispensable. The discipline that matters makes you less essential — and that's the old E-Myth point.
Anthropic's Claude for Small Business is the best AI-employees pitch yet. But it can't define your work for you, and that was always the real barrier.
Being needed built the business. Around twenty people, it starts to cap growth. How to audit your week and choose what genuinely needs your judgement.
The E-Myth series finale. Gerber said build the system and step back. When the system thinks for itself, stepping back isn’t freedom — it’s neglect.
Capability maps, bounded intelligence, placement decisions — what building an AI-first business operating system looks like over twelve months.
Systems don't fail dramatically in AI-first firms. They drift quietly until intent and reality diverge. The founder's irreducible role is stewardship.
Takeaways from The E-Myth: how to decide where judgement belongs in your business, clarify roles, and build systems that actually work.
Job descriptions assume humans fill gaps. Bounded intelligence specifications don't. Here's the mechanics of delegation that works.
Procedures scale humans. Policies scale AI systems. The franchise model breaks when consistency comes from intent, not scripts.
Org charts show who reports to whom. Capability maps show where decisions actually happen. In AI-first businesses, only one reveals how work gets done
Gerber's technician, manager, and entrepreneur personas hold up. But they no longer map to people — they map to capability layers in AI-first firms.
Gerber taught founders to replace themselves with systems and people. AI changes what that means. Here's where the original insight breaks.