Integrated Operations

Nothing fell. It broke anyway.

An education company spent years trying to work out whether marketing or sales was failing. It replaced managers on both sides. Its close rate sat at two to three percent.

Nothing was ever dropped between them.

Both teams were running qualification. Neither had agreed what qualified meant, in what sequence, or who finished it. The work was being done twice, and the second pass landed on somebody who had already stopped listening.

The received wisdom says work fails at the handoff. That belief descends from a statistic with no source. This book goes looking for it, and then shows what the evidence actually says.

• Why the eighty percent handoff statistic has no origin, and what the real number was
• The four definitions that have to be shared, and which one is wrong most often
• A test for one operating cadence that runs on messages you have already sent
• What happened when the close rate went up fivefold and fulfilment did not know
• A page listing what was cut during the writing, and why