November 20, 2025

No accounting

Windmill

A jack in the box isn’t very good at accountability.

They hide themselves away, preparing for the day when they’ll spring into action. Everyone trusting that they’ll work as specified and that the effect will be startling, at least to some.

As managers, it can be tempting to defer to the jack in the box; the secretive expert who says, Trust me, I know what I’m doing.

When it works … without any effort on our part, without thought or planning or additional resources, they deliver … spectacular.

The problem?

When it doesn’t work.

When performance is below expectation, when there’s no performance. And there’s no accountability.

It’s binary.

There was no agreed plan that we could track and watch for variance. There was no ability to influence. There’s is no accounting.

And that goes for the person in the mirror.

Skippy strategy: Don’t defer to the jack in the box.

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Teams