What You’ll Find This Week

This week’s edition is a perfect example of why I love hosting podcast guests — it’s an incredible way to learn something new. My recent podcast with Jerry Grunewald introduced me to the Red/Green Operating Rhythm. It’s a framework that I hadn’t heard of prior to meeting Jerry, and as soon as he described it, I knew I wanted to write an article about it.

Finding time for innovation can be challenging for teams. “I have all of this other stuff to do!” Yes, there’s always other stuff to do. The Red/Green Operating Rhythm will ensure that your team is building a cultural focus on eliminating busy work and reinvesting that time into new opportunities.

Here’s what you’ll find:

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This Week’s Article

On Thursday, I published our latest podcast interview with Jerry Grunewald. Perhaps one of the most impactful things Jerry shared with us is his favorite framework for helping teams create time and freedom for innovation to happen. That framework is the Red/Green Operating Rhythm, and it's a textbook model for helping your team members eliminate waste in their day-to-day and apply their newly found time to upskilling, experimenting, and innovating.

The Red/Green Operating Rhythm is based roughly on Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (TOC). TOC says find the single bottleneck that limits output, keep it working on the highest-value work without interruption, align the rest of the system to support it, add capacity, then repeat. In his Ever-Flourishing work, Goldratt illustrated two complementary curves, red for improvement and growth and green for stability and harmony, and argued you must raise both together or the gains will not stick. Practitioners like Jack Vinson and Mark Woeppel documented and popularized this framing for modern operations and portfolio management.

Founders, innovators, and venture builders all know that there are never enough hours in the day to explore all of your bets and hypotheses. Day to day work gets in the way. Meetings expand. Reports multiply. The ideas that matter get pushed aside by the day to day needs of the business.

The Red/Green operating rhythm keeps teams focused on work that moves the business. It gives you a clear method to stop low‑value work, protect time for higher‑value work, and use that time to launch innovation and ship customer value. You free time from low‑value work, then use it for learning, innovation, and coaching‑led growth.

Think of your current workload as a bell curve.

The left side holds work that adds little value: busy work. The middle holds necessary work — the day-to-day of your role. The right side holds the work that creates the most value.

The Red/Green Operating Rhythm is simple. Remove busy work from the left side, then invest the recovered time on the high value right side.

Teams that run this rhythm convert reclaimed time into outcomes. New skills. Innovation projects launched. Customer‑facing features in market. Revenue created and costs removed. Faster cycle time and higher reliability.

Your red curve is the bell curve you just drew. It's your job as it exists today. It mixes vital tasks with a surprising amount, 20-30%, of activity that you could stop or redesign (busy work).

Your green curve is the work that compounds. Time spent on your green curve should create new value for the business or new capability for you, the contributor that could help you level-up later. That might be a compounding skill, like data automation, customer research, design for manufacturability, or partner development. It might be conducting an experiment with real users, priced and time‑boxed to determine whether it validates a hypothesis. It might be building a new, streamlined process that removes friction.

The signal that you’ve picked the right thing is straightforward: it makes the next project faster or it produces customer value you can see.

Leaders, managers, and contributors each have a role in supporting the rhythm. Leaders create a safe environment where team members feel empowered to cut work that no longer serves the mission. Managers act like coaches; their weekly question is direct: How is your green curve going? Contributors own their curves. They propose what to cut and what to build, then they show outcomes.

Two rules keep this honest. Subtract before you add. Reward outcomes, not theater. Use a simple filter to pick work. Why this, why us, why now. It ties effort to a user, to timing, and to value.

Make progress visible. Run a monthly demo hour and tell short value stories. Customer impact, dollars, or speed. Recognize real wins with scope, promotions, or cash awards. Save the applause for work that moves the business.

The Red/Green Operating Rhythm is simple: subtract work from the red curve. Protect green time on the calendar. Managers coach contributors to remove blockers and kill busy work. People upskill and ship innovations and improvements that customers notice. Those outcomes create value and feed the next cycle.

Use this 30‑day sequence to free up time and convert it into valuable innovation, skill growth, and shipped value.

Week 1. Make the curves visible. Spend one hour with each person to list weekly tasks. Place each task on a bell curve. Left is low value. Middle is necessary. Right is high value. End the session with three left‑side items to delete, automate, or reassign. Treat this as a design exercise. The goal is to free time for innovation.

Week 2. Remove and redesign. Run short value‑creation sprints. For each target, ask three questions. Does this need to be done at all. Can a script, sensor, or system do it. Is this left for me but right for someone else. Then act. Delete tasks that add no value. Automate the rest with simple tools. Move work to the right owner. Expect to free a meaningful slice of the week and invest it in innovation.

Week 3. Protect green time. Put four to eight hours of green time on the calendar for every person. Treat it like a customer meeting. Do not book over it. Managers use 1:1s to unblock and coach. They ask for outcomes, not status. The point is to change the work itself, not to create new reports.

Week 4. Ship and show. Hold a one‑hour demo. Each person presents one outcome from green time. Keep the story tight. Problem, change, value. Add rough economics when you can. A small change that cost five thousand dollars and returned one million is a win. A clever tweak that costs a million to save a thousand is not. Close by queuing the next two green items.

Measure the shift so everyone can see progress.

Don’t walk into the all-hands and announce that you’ve found new “innovation time” — nobody will believe it. Instead, focus on removing and/or redesigning red curve work first. Prove that the time can be freed up. Demonstrate to the org that leadership is serious about enabling busy work to go away.

Then focus that newly discovered time on fostering innovation. Judge by outcomes and learning, not by meeting attendance. Educate your team so they don’t confuse invention with innovation. Invention can be interesting. Innovation creates business value.

Finally, if there is no path to value, stop and pick a new green curve pursuit.

The Red/Green Operating Rhythm isn’t just a fancy slogan. It is a monthly rhythm supported by a mantra: Subtract first. Protect green time. Coach for outcomes. Share the wins.

Run this pattern for a quarter, and I can just about guarantee that your pipeline of shipped work will look very different, and your team will feel lighter while it builds what matters.

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