I think we've been lied to. Not by design. I just think we've been misled.
If you're a small business owner and you've thought seriously about process, you probably got there through Michael Gerber. Next to Gino Wickman, he's the foremost process guy for small business. The E-Myth Revisited is the Holy Grail for a lot of people.
He wrote it in 1986.
My point is: The example of the lady making pies in the pie shop just isn't applicable to a 21st century organization moving at the speed of light. The core insight holds up. The model around it doesn't.
The model said: capture the process, and you're 90% of the way there.
What's not true is the "90% of the way there" part. Because you still have to train people. And those processes are going to change on you. And here's the one nobody wants to hear: people don't want to read.
There's a whole other set of skills required to drive alignment inside an organization now, and they hit us recently enough that nobody wrote the book on them. Nobody got taught this in school. So people still think of process as a noun. A fixed bundle of paper. A folder of documents in the cloud.
It's a verb.
It is a function inside an organization. It's the active doing of capturing, then training, then measuring. Then capturing, training, and measuring again. In a cycle. Forever.
And that fallacy, that you document and you're done, has wrecked a lot of people's energy and motivation and confidence around this. They tried it once. They built the folder. Nothing happened. And they concluded that process just isn't for them.
I get why. If you were told the finish line was at mile one and you got there and nothing changed, of course you'd quit.
The most common version of this mistake I see is the quarterly rock. Somebody puts "document our processes" on the rock sheet, and the whole team treats it like a sprint. Ninety days. Then we're on the other side of it and we have these things and they're in the cloud and we're done.
It's the biggest mistake there is, and it completely misses the spirit of the thing.
When I say this is a verb, what I really have to signal is that it's ongoing. It's amorphous. It evolves. If your business is static, fine, do it once. But your business isn't static. It's 2026. Nobody has a business like that anymore.
And the ninety-day framing doesn't just get the timeline wrong. It leaves out most of the job. Documenting is maybe a third of what this actually requires. The rest is deploying it, promoting it, training on it, and measuring whether anybody's touching it.
Here's a test I use.
Describe the role to somebody and watch their face.
If they go, "oh, that sounds like a lot of work," that's not your Builder. Thank them, move on.
The person who goes, "wait, we're actually going to solve this? Like, really do it?" That's your person. You can see them light up. They already know that sticking things in the cloud is a waste of everybody's time. They're not scared of the ongoing part. The ongoing part is the whole appeal.
Because if it's a noun, it's a project, and projects end.
If it's a verb, it's a seat. And seats get filled.
