The Leverage Standard.

THE EXTRACT · UNGATED

Most businesses do not have an efficiency problem. They have a leverage problem. Efficiency asks people to do the same work faster; leverage asks whether a person should be doing the work at all. The distinction sounds academic until you price it: every recurring task a human performs that a system could perform is a tax, paid monthly, compounding against you.

The standard we hold is simple to state and hard to meet: any task performed the same way more than ten times per month is a candidate for a system, and any candidate left unbuilt must have a written reason. Not a feeling. A reason. “We haven’t had time” is the most expensive sentence in operations.

What follows is the doctrine in full: how to find the candidates, how to rank them by recovery, how to decide build-versus-buy, and how to keep the gains from quietly eroding, because they do, and almost nobody instruments for it.

“Every recurring task a human performs that a system could perform is a tax, paid monthly.”