EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System) is a fantastic playbook. In an ecosystem glutted with advice for business owners, EOS gives founders a structured way to gain traction. Instead of running the company out of their head, they get a cadence and tools that turn vision into execution. This kind of framework is an appreciating asset in the world of LLMs:

The Marketplace by Quy Ma

Frameworks Are the Next Gold Rush

TL;DR…

Read more

6 months ago · 211 likes · 60 comments · Quy Ma

But as a framework, EOS also has its limits.

It begins to creak as the company scales past 50 or so employees. But it really starts to break down when the leader is no longer the owner of the business. The fundamental issue is this: EOS is designed for owner-operators (what they call Integrators), not for CEOs with a board and shareholders. These two jobs share a superficial resemblance, but in reality? It’s apples and oranges.

You can see the distinction most clearly in private equity. Say a PE firm buys a founder-led company. The founder is at the same desk, but the job is now a very different one. There are now outside shareholders and a board with real authority. This transition is such a struggle that 65% of PE firms reported CEO turnover during the holding period, with a good chunk of those being unplanned.

Two different jobs

The gulf between owner-operator and board-accountable CEO is wide enough that a good framework needs to account for it.

For one, EOS assumes a single decision maker at the top (the Integrator), while the board-accountable CEO faces a more complex reality. In addition to accountability to the board, they also must build out an executive team and delegate authority and decisions down to them properly.

Here is how I would sketch out the biggest differences between the EOS-style owner-operator and the CEO of a company of 50+ employees:

EOS Worldwide itself notes that EOS “was not created for companies with investors and boards of directors.” It says the system can work in that environment, but requires customization. As great as EOS is, I think its strengths lie in helping owner-operators run an entrepreneurial company, while board-accountable CEOs need a system of their own.

An operating system for the chief executive

The Chief Executive Operating System is my take on that system. It is designed from the ground up to put a structure around the CEO who must run a company that has shareholders and a board. It is built for those particular challenges that characterize the CEO job once the company is past 50–100 employees. Those challenges are remarkably persistent all the way up to thousands of employees.

Bottom line:

EOS is an operating system for the owner-operator.

The Chief Executive Operating System is built for the CEO with a board, shareholders, and full executive team.

If you are a CEO with a board, a board member, or a PE firm responsible for portfolio-company leadership, the practical question is: Does the CEO have an operating system built for their real job?

If not, there are a few places to start.

1. Grab a copy of my book The Chief Executive Operating System for a full presentation of the framework.

2. Come to my CEO Masterclass this November.

3. Sign up for ChatCEO to see how we are putting the system into practice with AI.

4. Email me if you’d like to talk about training or implementation. I would genuinely love to have my inbox flooded with CEOs looking for help.

Subscribe now

What do Oracle, Adobe, and Kroger have in common? Well, they all had earnings calls last week, and they all were explicit about tradeoffs they are willing to make now to strengthen their position for the future.

• Oracle is spending at a scale that has raised persistent questions about debt and cash flow, although its latest results eased some investor concerns as AI infrastructure revenue accelerated.

• Adobe beat expectations but is intentionally holding back on pricing as it tries to bring a much larger generation of users into its products.

• Kroger cut its sales forecast as consumers pulled back, while continuing to reinvest cost savings into lower prices rather than simply protecting margins.

As we’ll see in the analysis below, each company is choosing where it believes accepting pressure today can create a stronger business tomorrow.

Oracle (ORCL)

Q1 FY2027 Earnings Call

Results: Oracle reported record quarterly revenue of $19.3 billion, up 30% year over year, as cloud infrastructure revenue surged 121% to $7.4 billion. The company raised full-year revenue guidance to at least $90 billion. That growth is requiring extraordinary investment: Oracle spent $28 billion on capital expenditures during the quarter and generated negative free cash flow of $5 billion, while maintaining its plan for $90 billion to $95 billion of FY2027 capex.

Oracle is finding ways to expand AI infrastructure without funding all of the growth itself

The scale of Oracle’s AI infrastructure buildout makes financing almost as important as demand.

Read more

Like a lot of people, I watched some college football this weekend. As a Louisiana Tech fan, I had more fun than most as I got to watch the Bulldogs dominate in an 80–6 game.

But the weekend was also a reminder of how much college football has changed.

More than 10,500 players across NCAA divisions entered the transfer portal during the 15-day window in January. Oklahoma State lost 64 players and brought in 54. West Virginia made 78 roster moves. Several other major programs turned over nearly as many players.

Coaches once had years to develop players and pass along the program’s culture. Now they may have a few months to turn a group of talented strangers into a team.

CEOs face a similar challenge — not with free agents but with AI agents. Business leaders have suddenly gained access to an enormous amount of intelligence and capability. But like a transfer player, AI arrives knowing nothing about how your particular organization operates. In both cases, the challenge is getting new talent up to speed and producing results quickly.

The system has to be teachable

A coach cannot assume that new players understand how his program works. He has to make the important things explicit:

• Strategy: What are we trying to do, and how do we expect to win?

• Language: What do our terms and signals mean?

• Standards: What does good performance look like here?

• Responsibilities: Who owns what, and how do we work together?

The system also has to be distinctive. Any coach can hand a player a generic football manual. The useful material explains how this team plays football. That’s where the competitive advantage lies.

That is increasingly true for companies as well.

AI arrives without context

AI can analyze a market, pressure-test a strategy, prepare a meeting brief, model alternatives, draft communications, and help track execution. The CEO can now even do this stuff him- or herself (maybe while taking in a football game).

But the AI does not automatically understand how your company creates value, which customers matter most, what tradeoffs you are willing to make, how your executives divide responsibility, or why a decision that looks sensible on paper will never work inside your organization.

Unless that knowledge has been clearly articulated and recorded, AI goes to work without it. The result may be polished, impressive—and totally useless. Asking a bunch of powerful agents to run hard in the wrong direction can in fact be a detriment.

Alignment starts with the CEO

AI researchers often talk about the alignment problem: how do we ensure that a powerful system pursues the goals we actually intend as a species? This is the societal discussion we are having now that can veer into scary territory.

But every CEO now faces a practical version of that problem inside the company.

AI becomes far more valuable when it can work from a documented operating system that includes:

• the company’s strategy and model for creating value

• its differentiated values and operating principles

• its three-year objectives and quarterly goals

• its decision rights, performance measures, and management rhythm

As I said before: More now than ever, this is where competitive advantage comes from. Your competitors can buy the same AI tools. They cannot copy the operating system you have built around your particular strategy, people, customers, and way of working.

The transfer portal rewards coaches who can quickly turn new talent into coordinated performance. AI will reward CEOs who can do the same.

Imagine that a brilliant stranger joins your company Monday morning. How quickly could you teach that person enough about the business to produce useful work?

Your answer is a good indication of how ready your company is for AI.

Subscribe now

I’ve got three fresh analyses of earnings calls from last week: Campbell’s, Ciena, and UiPath.

These three companies all entered their latest earnings calls from very different positions.

• Campbell’s is cutting costs, raising prices, and reducing its dividend after a difficult year.

• Ciena has more demand than its suppliers can currently support as AI drives investment in network infrastructure.

• UiPath is working to establish a role for itself in an enterprise software market being reshaped by AI agents.

Across the three calls, executives discussed how they are adjusting their organizations, investments, and business models to meet those conditions. Let’s see what we can learn.

The Campbell’s Company (NASDAQ: CPB)

Q4 FY2026 Earnings Call

Campbell’s is undertaking a broad financial reset

Campbell’s is launching a four-year program intended to produce $500 million in total savings by fiscal 2030. Approximately $150 million represents unfinished work from an earlier program, leaving $350 million in newly identified savings.

The program includes recently announced workforce reductions, a companywide procurement initiative, and further changes to Campbell’s manufacturing and distribution network. The company has already closed two potato-chip plants, although management said broader network changes will take longer.

Todd Cunfer, Campbell’s executive vice president and CFO, said the procurement effort will extend across the business:

“Literally every line on the P&L will have a large action around to try to reduce costs.”

The reset also extends to Campbell’s balance sheet. The company reduced its dividend and is considering issuing hybrid securities as it prepares to refinance a $500 million bond. It is also carrying additional debt and interest expense associated with its investment in Italian tomato-sauce producer La Regina.

Mick Beekhuizen, Campbell’s president and CEO, described the dividend cut as difficult but necessary. The decision preserves cash as Campbell’s attempts to reduce debt, absorb inflation, and continue investing in its brands.

The company expects savings to build gradually, with much of the benefit arriving during the second half of fiscal 2027. That timing will make the beginning of the year particularly difficult: Campbell’s expects a sharp first-quarter earnings decline, followed by sequential improvement and a return to EPS growth in the fourth quarter.

Price increases will protect margins while reducing volume

Campbell’s has communicated price increases covering approximately 60% of its portfolio. The increases average 4% to 5% and will begin contributing to results in the second quarter.

Management expects the increases to reduce sales volumes. Its financial assumptions use an elasticity rate of approximately 1.5, meaning that a 1% price increase would produce an estimated 1.5% volume decline.

Said Cunfer:

Read more

The loudest claims that AI will eliminate nearly all human work tend to come from a narrow group: people who build AI models and write software, and the people who cover them for a living.

This should not be surprising. Every new technology is first understood by the people closest to it.

The problem is that many of the people making sweeping forecasts about the future of work have spent their careers doing one particular kind of work—the exact kind of work that AI got good at first.

I have led companies most of my adult life. I have not written production software in decades. So I read these forecasts the way I read any confident prediction from a specialist: I respect the expertise, but I question the extrapolation.

Here is the extrapolation in question:

Great programmers are rare. They have one of the most cognitively demanding jobs in the economy.

…

Read more

Thursday’s earnings calls offered a useful snapshot of two very different parts of the economy. At one end, the AI-driven technology sector was still accelerating: NVIDIA shares jumped nearly 9% after the company forecast 70% revenue growth next year, while Salesforce rose more than 20% after raising its outlook and reporting stronger AI adoption.

At the other end, the dollar-store sector was benefiting from a much less hyped trend, with Dollar General and Dollar Tree reporting stronger sales while consumers continued looking for cheaper essentials.

Let’s take a look at calls from both sides of the spectrum.

NVIDIA (NVDA)

Results: NVIDIA delivered another extraordinary quarter. Revenue reached $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, including $89 billion from data center.

Read more

When we say that a person is “good at business,” what do we mean?

Maybe someone is good at business because they know how to sell. Sales certainly matter. But plenty of companies have generated impressive sales while destroying themselves in the process. If every dollar of revenue costs you two dollars to produce, more sales may just get you to bankruptcy faster.

A related answer is that being good at business means making a lot of money. That doesn’t quite work either. A company can generate enormous profits for a period and then lose them just as quickly. The opposite is true too: Some of the most successful companies in history (like Amazon and Uber) spent years losing money while they built something extremely valuable. We are seeing versions of the same phenomenon today as companies spend extraordinary amounts of money building the infrastructure for AI.

Another thing that springs to mind when we think of a typical “good businessperson” is risk. Maybe being good at business means hi…

Read more

Graphene has been called a wonder material for more than 20 years, with potential uses in everything from longer-lasting batteries and corrosion-resistant coatings to lighter aircraft components, stronger concrete, and more durable industrial materials. The harder problem has been making enough high-quality graphene, consistently and economically, to turn that promise into a business.

HydroGraph CEO Kjirstin Breure believes her company has an answer, and she’s helping build much of its next chapter in Texas.

Breure joined HydroGraph as its first employee and COO and soon went back to school for a master’s in materials science after becoming fascinated by graphene. She ultimately became CEO, in 2024.

Now based in Austin, Breure is leading HydroGraph through the transition from promising technology to commercial-scale production and overseeing a redomicile from Toronto to the Lone Star State. We talked recently about what makes its approach to graphene d…

Read more

The growth is concentrated in a few places. Companies responding to the ISM survey described data center products at full production ramp, semiconductor orders booming, and defense demand at an all-time high. In the same survey, medical, industrial, and consumer orders came in markedly lower. Machinery plants are running at 82.9% of capacity against a long-run average of 78.2%. Farm income is forecast to finish the year roughly $48 billion below its 2022 record.

Three companies with businesses in both the strong markets and the weak ones reported last week: Deere, Nordson, and Twin Disc. Here’s what they said.

Deere & Company (DE)

Read more

Read more

This was Flock’s response to a year of pressure from across the country. More than 50 agencies and jurisdictions have canceled, suspended, or rejected contracts since January, according to DeFlock. Cameras have been vandalized, and Republicans in Congress filed bills in July to restrict the technology.

Flock is privately held, so there is no earnings call. But three public companies that also sell technology to police and government agencies reported on the same day of Flock’s revised guidelines: SoundThinking, Rekor Systems, and Cellebrite. All three described facets of the same problem…

Read more

Would Einstein have made a good CEO?

We can’t say of course, but I think he probably would have been a disaster. Not because he wasn’t an elite-level intelligence, but because elite-level intelligence does not a great CEO make.

Einstein was unmatched as a theoretical physicist and scientific groundbreaker. His mind changed the world. But his deep expertise and the ability to sustain work on one seemingly impossible problem are just about the opposite of what the CEO job demands.

As a CEO, you need breadth over depth, delegation over mastery, judgment exercised through other people rather than applied directly to the work.

The trap so many CEOs fall into is thinking that their demonstrated expertise and intelligence—factors that made them such standout leaders in their career—will translate once their business card says “Chief Executive Officer.”

I see this often with executives who rise through a particular function. A great sales leader becomes CEO and continues to spend an outsized amoun…

Read more

The modern CEO is an expert buyer of software. You know the drill: You identify a process that is slow, expensive, or error-prone. You seek out the best software solution and listen to all the vendor pitches. Then you sign off on the purchase. It could be a new CRM, a new ERP, or a new applicant tracking system.

Now that AI has arrived, CEOs are reaching for the same playbook. But the old method of buying software doesn’t fit this new category of technology. The CEOs who treat AI as the next generation of process automation will only capture a fraction of its value while wondering what all the fuss was about.

AI Is a Different Kind of Purchase

I suggest a different mental model for CEOs. When you deploy AI in your company, you aren’t buy a tool. You’re hiring someone.

AI has much more in common with a smart, hyper-educated employee than it has with traditional software. A CRM has a defined function that does not change unless it’s on the vendor roadmap. But AI can absorb information, reas…

Read more

Quote of the Week

“The company has always been about patience and discipline, and I don’t see why we would abandon that mindset at this point.”
—Vivek Shah, CEO, Ziff Davis

“GEO has become the new SEO.”

—Vivek Shah

In a few short years, AI has revolutionized how we all use the Internet. Case in point: Google search now answers most questions on the page itself thanks to an AI summary. In many cases you don’t have to click a link at all.

The websites on the other end of those links have felt it. Data from Chartbeat published in March put the two-year decline in search referrals at 22% for large publishers and 60% for small ones. Referrals from AI chatbots have grown quickly but still account for less than 1% of the total.

This week we look at three earnings calls from companies who survive off that traffic: a publisher, a local reviews platform, and an advertising exchange. Here’s what their CEOs said.

Ziff Davis, Inc. (ZD)

Q2 2026 Earnings Call

Results…

Read more

There is a graphic making the rounds on LinkedIn called “Top 18 KPIs for CEOs.” It includes the metrics you might expect: revenue growth rate, gross margin, customer acquisition cost, churn, net promoter score, employee turnover, EBITDA, etc. It purports to show the full dashboard the chief executive should use to run the business.

It’s a solid list, but none of these are “KPIs for the CEO.” I know that sounds a little pedantic, but to position these items as “for the CEO” misunderstands what the CEO job actually is. And when a CEO thinks these are their metrics, they are usually headed for trouble.

Every One of Those Metrics Already Has an Owner

Let’s look at the list of KPIs for the CEO again. Notice that each of them already belongs to one of the six core functional areas of the business.

Read more

Quotes of the week

"While we didn't anticipate the current situation, we were prepared for it. In our markets, disruption is inevitable." —Darren Woods, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil

“There’s a huge temptation all around the world to deflect attention to the bad policies that governments have been implementing over time and scapegoat the industry.” —Woods again

Few corners of the economy have escaped the upheaval in the Middle East that has defined 2026, but the oil industry sits closest to it. With the Strait of Hormuz choked off this quarter, roughly 5 million barrels a day of global refining capacity sat idle, split between the Middle East, a Russia under Ukrainian drone strikes, and a China that stopped exporting fuel. Crude swung from $118 a barrel in late April to $72 in late June, while refining margins reached four-year highs.

That combination produced enormous profits for anyone still pumping oil or running a refinery. ExxonMobil, the largest US oil company, earned $14.5 billion…

Read more

When there is tension between a CEO and their board around decision making, the issue is almost never the content of the decisions. Usually, it’s ambiguity about who makes the decisions in the first place.

This ambiguity can drive CEOs into one of two failure modes. They might check with the board on every little thing, slowing the company down and signaling insecurity. Or they might act unilaterally on issues the board expects to weigh in on, eroding trust with the group that holds the CEO’s career in its hands.

I’ve sat on both sides of this table for a long time now, as a CEO reporting up, and as a board member watching someone else navigate it. And in so many companies, the real rules of engagement between CEO and board exist nowhere except in memory and supposition. Ask a CEO how much they can spend without checking with the board, and you will likely get a pause before you get a number. Ask one of their directors the same question and you may get a different number.

The governance …

Read more

People sometimes ask me why, after running companies for most of my career, I've chosen to spend this chapter of my life working on the CEO role itself. Why not retire to the board circuit, write the occasional check, and offer advice when asked?

It's a good question, and it comes down to two primary reasons.

Frustration

The first is simple frustration. Over four decades in business, I have seen, more times than I care to count, companies with everything going for them fail because of poor leadership from the CEO seat. These businesses had a real market, a product customers wanted, talented people who showed up ready to do great work—i.e., everything you need for a home run. But then the ball gets chopped into the infield for a single. Or worse, the company strikes out entirely. Everyone involved is left scratching their head: How did we mess up such a sure thing?

With all the other pieces there, the answer is usually: the CEO. What makes it frustrating to watch is that the CEOs who pres…

Read more

America has had transcontinental rail service since 1869, but no single company has ever owned track from one coast to the other. Freight crossing the country still gets handed off from a western railroad to an eastern one somewhere around the Mississippi, which adds days. Union Pacific’s roughly $85 billion bid for Norfolk Southern would end that handoff and put one owner’s track from Los Angeles to the Atlantic. The Surface Transportation Board accepted the merger application in May and is still reviewing it, and a decision isn’t expected until 2027.

Three of the big US railroads reported last week, and the merger features in each call. We have Union Pacific (the buyer), Norfolk Southern (the target), and CSX (the one large railroad …

Read more