Ep. 98: Rewiring Your Organization - Breaking Systems to Build Better Ones

Episode Description

In this episode of Veteran Led, John Berry shares insights about organizational evolution and the courage to break working systems to build better ones. Drawing from his experience, John explains why leaders must view organizational growth as chapters, each building upon the last.​

He reveals how his company intentionally dismantled their administrative structure to become more agile and lethal, emphasizing that previous systems weren’t failures but necessary foundations for growth. John challenges leaders to recognize when systems become inadequate and take proactive steps to rebuild them before they fail.​

Episode Transcript

Welcome fellow Veterans. From the tip of the spear to in the rear with the gear. I went from active duty infantry to reserve component logistician. I’m your host, CEO, entrepreneur, trial lawyer, and lieutenant colonel retired, John Berry. The military lessons that I learned helped me grow an eight-figure business that has maintained consistent annual double-digit growth, landing on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America every year, for the past seven years, and has allowed me to continue to serve America’s heroes. When organizational leaders write books, they’ll often divide their experiences into chapters. The story of your organization can also be divided into chapters. Recently, we had to reprioritize and rewire our entire organization for growth. This was a new chapter, and we had to communicate it as such.

In the last chapter of our organization, we built a strong administration with a focus on governance. We put standard IT practices and training practices into place that would allow us to scale and prevent a rat’s nest of disconnected policies and procedures. But in this latest chapter, we had to rewire so that the main focus of IT and training were no longer servicing our administrative mafia, but instead directly reporting to our section leaders for key projects.

Some of the layers of bureaucracy we built in the last chapter had to be peeled away in this chapter so that we could become more agile and lethal. The way I communicated it was not that we had made errors in the last chapter of our organization. Quite the opposite. The last chapter was necessary to build a foundation for us to pivot and rewire the new chapter of organizational growth.

As leaders, we must be prepared to accept that what we build will eventually become inadequate or obsolete. Our goal is to recognize when in the future that will occur, and then intentionally break or rewire our organization before it stalls out. We break it intentionally so that we can rebuild it better, and we break it on our schedule so that we can account for all contingencies of rewiring and reprioritizing the efforts of the organization.

Think of building your organization in chapters. What happened in chapter three is necessary for chapter four, even if it means breaking down the systems and rebuilding them. Improve. Don’t do what I did from time to time, which was wait for a system to break until I improved it. Intentionally break your systems. When you start to see that they are no longer efficient or relevant, then build them better.

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