ORGANIZATIONAL ADVISORY
Your organization is slower than it should be. Let's find the structural drag and fix it.
I help leadership teams at agencies and complex, project-driven organizations cut through the misalignment, coordination overload, and decision bottlenecks that compound with every layer of growth — and that AI is about to make painfully visible.
THE PATTERN I KEEP SEEING
Growth should feel like momentum. Instead, it feels like punishment.
You added people but didn't get proportionally faster. Meetings multiplied. Decisions stalled. Handoffs became hazardous. The work that used to flow now requires coordination that nobody has time for.
This isn't a people problem. It's a structure problem. And fifteen years of working inside 200+ organizations has taught me that most leaders can feel it but can't name it — because the drag is structural, not personal.
Decision bottlenecks
Too many approvals, unclear ownership, leaders pulled into work that should be resolved two levels down.
Coordination overload
More time managing the work than doing it. Meetings that exist to compensate for missing clarity.
Rework & misalignment
Projects that go sideways because intent got lost between handoffs, or because nobody aligned on what "done" looks like.
WHY THIS IS GETTING URGENT
These problems pay for themselves to fix — and AI is about to make them impossible to ignore.
Organizational drag costs you before AI enters the picture. Rework, meeting overload, decision latency, talent frustration — these are real expenses with real margins attached. Fixing them produces measurable results immediately.
But AI changes the stakes. When production becomes cheap and fast, the bottleneck shifts to judgment, alignment, and decision speed. Organizations that haven't fixed their structural drag will discover that AI just amplifies the chaos — more output, but no better decisions.
The organizations that thrive will be the ones whose structures are ready for the speed. That readiness is what I build.
“AI speeds up the part of the process that was never the bottleneck. The bottleneck has always been judgment, alignment, and sense-making.”
I call today's AI Rhetorical AI — systems that are fluent without being wise. They produce plausible output at scale. They do not produce good decisions.
That means the premium is shifting — from who can produce the most to who can judge the best, coordinate the fastest, and align stakeholders under real pressure. The structural work I do is what makes that possible.
HOW I WORK
Advisory and consulting for leadership teams navigating real change
I work directly with leadership — CEOs, COOs, heads of delivery, transformation leads. The engagements are bespoke. The methods are battle-tested across 200+ organizations. Every engagement starts with diagnosis: I find what's actually broken before prescribing anything.
Diagnostic
Organizational Diagnostic & Executive Discovery
A fast, structured assessment of where friction, misalignment, and coordination drag live in your system. You'll see what's actually slowing you down — not what you assumed was.
Redesign
Operating Model & Delivery Redesign
Restructuring how work flows, how teams are organized, how decisions move, and how clients interact with the work. Pod-based models, cadence redesign, judgment handoffs, and the rituals that actually matter.
Advisory
Leadership Advisory & AI Readiness
Ongoing advisory partnerships for leaders managing complexity, growth, or the shift into AI-era operations. I help you think clearly — about structure, strategy, what to stop doing, and how to make your organization ready for the speed that's coming.
TRACK RECORD
Fifteen years of measurable, structural change
These aren't workshop highs. They're sustained operational outcomes.
Recent Thinking
Tame Collaboration Complexity
In collaborative organizations where teams are matrixed and workers multi-allocated, pod-based structures can increase efficiency by reducing the coordination overhead that drags everyone down.
No, Your Agency Isn't Going Away
AI unbundled the agency model and revealed which parts actually matter. The answer is better than you think — if you understand where judgment lives.
What Makes an Organization Run Fast?
AI may accelerate some things, but that doesn't mean the organization will go faster. Speed is a structural property, not a tooling property.
Jack Skeels
I help leadership teams fix what's jamming their organizations — the hidden structural drag that comes with growth, complexity, and the collision between old management models and new realities.
I started in industrial engineering and automation, built a 90-person consultancy, was a researcher at RAND, and ended up spending 15 years inside agencies, consultancies, and project-driven organizations, figuring out why smart teams get stuck. Along the way I founded AgencyAgile, worked with more than 200 organizations, and published my methods in MIT Sloan Management Review. I also wrote a book called UNMANAGED, which Kirkus called “a bracing, standard-resetting approach to doing management right.”
Today, as Better Company, that work continues — now expanded to address what happens to organizations when AI makes production cheap and judgment becomes the bottleneck. So good.
My clients tend to be dealing with some combination of growth that feels like punishment, delivery that's slower than it should be, and the sense that their current structure and processes are the things holding them back.
ABOUT
The structure you have is the strategy you're running.
If something here resonated with what you're experiencing, I'd like to hear about it. Book a 30-minute conversation, or tell me a bit about your situation below and I'll get back to you personally.
No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about what you're seeing.