What would happen if we send all of the managers away for a day…or more? This is one of the many counter-intuitive yet enlightening topics that are part of AgencyAgile’s leadership workshops, and also part of Jack’s new book, Unmanaged,Master the Magic of Creating Empowered and Happy Organizations, launching November 1st on Amazon. The answer may surprise you, or at least make you laugh, especially if you are a manager. Jack is joined by Steve Prentice in this podcast short on managers, managing, and productivity.
Lazy gets a bad rap. Managing and managers can be costly to your organization’s productivity (listen to episode 2.1, The Natural Tax of Managing) and in fact less
Can you be a better manager by stepping back and letting teams manage themselves? As strange as this may sound, the answer is yes. Often managers stop all over the
The answer is a pretty-much unqualified “yes.” Does it need to be that way? Of course not, but it is not easy. Meetings were horrible prior to 2020, and though
Many meetings are like unpleasant dinner guests who have come uninvited. They intrude on your productive time, drone on with unnecessary conversation, and you can’t wait for them to
Assemblers, architects, and the collapse of the formulation premium
Most of what we call knowledge work is formulation.
Not content production. Not information processing. Formulation — the act of applying individual
Speed has always been structural. AI just makes that impossible to ignore.
Most AI pilots return improvements somewhere around 10%. That's not nothing, but it's chump
Jack Skeels, Working paper - February 2026
Abstract
Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) explains firm boundaries and governance structures as mechanisms for minimizing coordination costs under uncertainty, opportunism, and bounded rationality.
If you follow the headlines, you would think the U.S. job market is unraveling. Mass layoffs. AI replacing humans. A future where hiring people is already a mistake. A
