To the owner of branch ten: your next crisis is already written

The night of the signing

Composite example, not a specific client

Thursday night, and you’ve just signed the lease for branch ten. At the istiraha your friends congratulate you, and on your phone the branch managers’ group is full of congratulations. You have one area manager you trust, a spreadsheet whose every cell you know, and you visit the branches yourself every week.

That system got you here. And that same system will soon grow tight on you.

The thobe

Remember your Eid thobe as a boy? Tailored to fit you perfectly one Eid, and by the next Eid it was short. The thobe wasn’t wrong, and neither was the tailor. You grew.

Everything you tailored for ten branches will be short at twenty: your personal attention, the one area manager, the WhatsApp group, the spreadsheet. That isn’t failure. It’s a size.

The only difference is that a boy knows he’s grown when his thobe is short. A group can wear the short thobe for a whole year, convinced the problem is the fabric.

What Greiner drew more than fifty years ago

In 1972 Larry Greiner published a map of how companies grow in the Harvard Business Review.¹ In his account a company passes through calm stages in which it grows, and each stage ends in a crisis. The idea that makes the map useful: the solution that ended the last crisis is exactly what creates the next one.

• The creativity stage, with the founder doing everything, ends in a crisis of leadership.
• The direction stage, with central management holding every decision, ends in a crisis of autonomy: managers want to decide.
• The delegation stage ends in a crisis of control: top management feels the far ends slipping away.
• The coordination stage, run through systems and head office, ends in a crisis of red tape.
• And the collaboration stage after it, whose crisis Greiner left unnamed.

Which means the old solution won’t cure the new crisis, however well you’ve mastered it.

Where you are on the map

You already know the autonomy crisis from last season’s letter: “The company moves at the speed of my signature.”² Either you’ve solved it or you’re solving it now: you delegated.

The price of delegation is the control crisis: when you hand decisions to managers, the branches quietly drift apart. Four episodes this season were about exactly that:

• The coffee at branch 30 that no longer tastes like branch 3’s, because the recipe travelled as a card and the branch didn’t travel with it.³
• The cheap employee who leaves before he’s learned, so the standard breaks with every new face.⁴
• The menu that grows on its own, item after item, each one taking profit from another.⁵
• The bonus that pays for sales and hopes for profit.⁶

The cure for the control crisis is coordination: systems, committees, a stronger head office. Its price is the red-tape crisis: a head office growing faster than the branches.⁷

And running through all of it, two tests that don’t care what your structure looks like: the weakest week of Ramadan, which flatters no branch,⁸ and the ideas you copy from survivors without seeing who fell.⁹

Why you see it late

Each of these crises reaches you first as margin, and only later as an organisational problem. The replication index falls before anyone calls it a control crisis. The G&A factor rises before anyone calls it red tape.

That’s why the season’s numbers exist: not to add to your reports, but so you can see the crisis on the screen before it reaches the majlis.

The Sunday-morning question

The whole season in one table

The “not yet” rule is the doctrine’s tenth thesis.¹⁰ And the sixth thesis says it plainly: if branch 30 can’t perform like branch 3, fix the system before you open branch 31.¹¹ Reading the seven numbers together on Greiner’s map is my own interpretation.

Finally

Brother, the next crisis isn’t a punishment for your success; it’s the sign of it. Only someone who delegated reaches the control crisis, and only someone who built a head office reaches the red-tape one. Whoever reads the map before arriving isn’t surprised. He prepares.

The map is Larry Greiner’s (1972), and every episode of this season was one of its stations, told from Riyadh.

With this letter, “Branch Thirty” is complete. Eight episodes, each in one line:

• Episode 1: the recipe isn’t the card, it’s the whole branch. Copy exactly first, and don’t open branch 31 until the replication index reaches your floor.
• Episode 2: the cheap employee may be your most expensive one. Measure who leaves in the first 90 days, and fix onboarding and the standard before you cut labour cost.
• Episode 3: every item you added took profit from another. One item in, one item out.
• Episode 4: what you pay for is what you get. No bonus on sales alone.
• Episode 5: Ramadan doesn’t flatter. Test every branch in its weakest week.
• Episode 6: you only see the survivors. A borrowed idea starts as a pilot, not an expansion.
• Episode 7: head office grows on its own. Compare its growth with revenue growth every quarter.
• Episode 8: every fix plants its own crisis. Read the map before branch eleven.

And the thread is one: what repeats as you grow is the system, success or mistake. So fix it while it’s small.

Season four is coming. I won’t promise its subject, only that it will start from a question actually being asked in your majlis.

Your brother, Seif