I shared some thoughts from my experience using various 'operating systems' in another forum, and it generated some good discussion... I thought I'd share here too! ___ My own path here started with Michael Gerber and the E-Myth, and its case for systems and processes running through everything. I absorbed Harnish's work next, itself a synthesis of management thinkers like Collins, Drucker, and Welch. Over time, working across other branded tools, I started to see universals that cut across them, along with the gaps each one has. What I've landed on is that an operating system really comes down to three things: - a set of guiding principles, whether stated explicitly or not; - a paradigm of value creation and a taxonomy for talking about it; and - the practices that bring it to life (i.e. an effective weekly leadership meeting being just one example, the L10 from EOS being just one form of that) The guiding *principles* (I've identified a dozen or so) synthesize the strongest leadership thinking from Covey, Collins, Maxwell, and others. They start with the idea that a leader has to commit to personal growth before organizational growth can happen, and they end with the idea that excellence itself is an act of service. The *paradigm* and taxonomy center on treating value creation as teamwork, and they define terms like culture and values, strategy and market positioning, ICP and brand promises, and operating plan elements among many others. The *practices* distill to about ten universal, load-bearing practices: the basics like communication rhythms and effective scoreboarding. Another half dozen bring an organization into a mature, valuable state, things like forecasting routines and deep leadership development. A few more are optional but produce outsized value when an organization chooses to deploy them, including economic contingency planning and some open-book management techniques. Which practices you pick, and the order you deploy them in, depends on the organization's size and complexity and how much coordination the work actually requires. What I've found is that it goes in phases: first, bringing about coherence under pressure; second, converting that coherence into momentum; third, extending momentum into a competitive advantage that compounds. Together, I've come to call this the discipline of Value Excellence. There are a few things I haven't seen published anywhere else. Three I’ll share are: 1) Constraints are design inputs that release creativity, not just bottlenecks to eliminate. Declaring constraints in this way is the basis of true alignment. 2) Both people and process are required to generate value, and AI transformation is exposing just how weak most process documentation actually is. We’ve created an approach to tackle process documentation and prepare for future AI use. 3) Unit economics across the customer value cycle are poorly understood, especially in converting units of fulfillment into units of customer success, and those into units of expansion revenue. This one in particular highlights real upside most organizations are leaving on the table. That's roughly the lens I bring. I’m curious how it aligns with your experience, or doesn’t?