And why your last six-figure equipment purchase didn't fix what you thought it would.

A steel manufacturer I worked at was in the middle of an oil boom. They were making money faster than they could count it. Smart leadership decided to reinvest some of that windfall into modernizing the plant — get more efficient now, so they'd be ready when the cycle turned.

Good idea. Sound thinking. The kind of move you write case studies about.

They brought in consultants to figure out which multi-million-dollar pieces of equipment to buy. One of the projects on the list was a steel uncoiler. The engineering team built the implementation plan. The removal of the old uncoiler and installation of the new one was scheduled for the upcoming two-week shutdown.

Then one of the production foremen pulled me aside.

"You know that thing isn't going to work."

Why? I asked.

"Because it's too big. The coils are going to pop off as they come in. Watch."

I asked who he'd told. He said: everyone. And what happened? Nothing. He'd been told that the brilliant engineering team had this handled. Back off.

I escalated. Went to the plant manager. Went to the VP of operations. Same answer. "Don't worry, we hired the best engineering team. They won't let us down."

So we left it alone.

Two weeks later, the shutdown ended. Equipment arrived on schedule. Installation completed in the window. Day of restart, the foreman called me.

"Phil. Come down here. You have got to see this."

I came down. We stood together and watched a giant steel coil get picked up by the new uncoiler. As it moved into the plant, it hit the concrete curbs. The steel popped off and dropped to the ground.

The foreman just laughed. "And they didn't want to talk to me."

The plant was down for a month. Twenty million dollars in lost product sales per day. Six hundred million dollars — gone. People lost their jobs. The engineering team was fired. The VP was fired. The plant manager got demoted.

All because nobody asked the foreman a question they should have asked.

That's a dramatic story. The scale was unusual. The pattern is not.

I've watched this play out at every scale of business since. A CEO of a $20M manufacturing firm buys a new CRM. Nine months later, the team is still using spreadsheets. A construction company invests in scheduling software. The PMs are still texting subs at 11pm. An O&G services firm hires a CTO from a Fortune 500. He builds a beautiful tech stack. Margins go down, not up.

In every one of these cases, the leader believed they had a capability problem. So they bought a capability. They wrote a cheque.

What they actually had was an execution problem. And you can't buy your way out of one.

Eliyahu Goldratt put it bluntly in The Goal: "It doesn't matter how efficiently you produce something if you can't sell what you produce." The whole point of the book is that local efficiency means nothing if the system around it is broken. You can have the world's fastest laser cutter and still ship late if the queueing logic upstream is garbage.

So the change in how I think about this work happened the day I stopped recommending things to buy and started asking why people weren't using what they already had.

That's what an implementation coach does.

The CEO's instinctive reaction, when I describe what I do, is almost always the same:

"Why can't their manager just tell them to use the new software?"

Fair question. Let me answer it.

Because managers are caught up in the daily whirlwind. They're firefighting. They're chasing the same forty-item list I wrote about last week. They don't have the time, the distance, or — frankly — the permission to dig into why a process isn't sticking.

Because internal leaders suffer from cultural blindness. You can't read the label from inside the jar. The CEO who hired everyone, who designed the org chart, who signed off on the CRM — that's the last person in the room who can objectively see why none of it is working. Not because they're not smart. Because they're inside it.

Because top-down dictates don't change behavior. If a manager pushes too hard without diagnosing the root cause, the team nods, smiles, and goes back to their old spreadsheets the moment the manager looks away. That's not insubordination. That's human nature when nobody asked them what was actually wrong.

The foreman in my story knew the uncoiler wouldn't work. He told everyone. Nobody asked him a real question. They asked him to back off.

A different organization — one with someone whose job was to actually ask the foreman a real question — would have caught it. Two weeks of redesign. Maybe a million dollars of rework. Instead of six hundred million dollars and three careers ended.

So the question worth asking is: what's the cost of not having someone whose only job is to ask the questions internal leaders are too busy or too close to ask?

You don't have a capability problem. You have a capacity problem. Your people already know what the tools are. Your foremen already know what's broken. Your front-line operators already have the answers.

What they lack is a structured way for those answers to reach decisions and turn into action.

That's the job. Not new ideas — your team has plenty. Not new tools — you've already bought too many. An implementation coach builds the execution layer between what your team knows and what your company does.

In practice, it looks like this:

Ask questions, don't give answers. Michael Bungay Stanier calls it the Focus Question: "What's the real challenge here for you?" Not "what should we do?" — that puts me on the hook for solutions I'm not qualified to design. The real challenge surfaces what the front line already sees and the C-suite has stopped seeing.

Find the real root cause. Toyota's Five Whys, used by Amazon and every serious lean operation. Why aren't they using the CRM? Because the feature was disabled. Why? Because the engineer didn't know how to use it. Why? Because the manager was too busy to train them. The problem isn't the software. It's a manager's training capacity. That's not solvable with a new tool. It's solvable with a different decision about how the manager spends their week.

Capture one action and follow up. Not five actions. Not a transformation plan. One: "What's the most important thing you want to do after this meeting? Just one thing." Write it down. Come back next time. Did it happen? If not, why not? That's where culture is built — not in the strategy deck, but in whether last week's commitment actually moved this week.

Connect it to EBITDA. Every action has to ladder up to margin. If it doesn't, we're not doing it. Building "a better culture" is not the deliverable. EBITDA improvement is the deliverable. Culture is how we get there.

Goethe — yes, Goethe — said it cleanest: "Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."

That's the gap. Knowing and doing are not the same thing. Most of your company is stuck in the gap. The role of an implementation coach is to systematically close it, one question and one action at a time.

The CEOs who hire me usually come to me after they've already bought the toys. The CRM is installed. The laser cutter is humming. The CFO is in place. Nothing has changed. They've finally accepted that the next cheque they write should not be to a vendor.

Some CEOs never get there. They keep buying. Each new purchase is a fresh hope that this time the tool will do the job. It won't. The foreman is still trying to tell them something. Nobody's listening.

I'd rather get fired for telling a CEO the new CRM isn't the answer than collect a fee installing the next one.

Stop buying tools. Start asking why nobody's using the ones you've already paid for.

That's where the trapped EBITDA lives.

One next step: This week, pick one tool or system in your business that hasn't delivered what you expected. Walk to the front line — not your direct report, not their direct report, the actual operator — and ask one question: "Why isn't this working?" Write down what they say. Don't fix it yet. Just listen. That's the first conversation in a different way of running your company.

Further reading:

• The Goal — Eliyahu Goldratt (North River Press, 1984). The novel that introduced the Theory of Constraints. Still the best 300-page tour of why local efficiency destroys global throughput.
• The Coaching Habit — Michael Bungay Stanier (Box of Crayons Press, 2016). Source of the Focus Question. Short, practical, operator-friendly.
• First Things First — Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill (Simon & Schuster, 1994). The clock vs. compass framing I referenced last week.

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