Clockwork, Revised and Expanded: Design Your Business to Run Itself

by Mike Michalowicz

At the end of eight hours, the first lumberjack was shocked that the second had produced nearly twice as much split wood. The first lumberjack asked, “Did your regular breaks allow you to rest and recover? To produce more, do you need to work less?” The second lumberjack responded, “No. During those breaks I worked the hardest, sharpening my axe.” Scaling a business is not about less work. It is about different work. You must put less effort into those outcomes, but more thought. The hard work is the thinking. This is not a flippant comment. Thinking, as in deep, calculated thoughtfulness, is the hardest work of all. And that is why we avoid it. It is easier to do work than to design outcomes. It is easier to keep chopping with a dull axe than it is to stop and sharpen it. The sense of time and production loss is too much. Yes, a sharp axe will help, but I can’t afford to stop chopping. The logic is obvious—we need a sharp axe. But the emotion of “just keep grinding” is what we need to overcome first.