Read where the senior people physically stand on an ordinary day, not the org chart.

technique — attributed to Ben Erwin

At twenty-four, watching an energy company come apart from the inside, Erwin's takeaway was spatial rather than ethical: the people who had built the business were never anywhere near where the actual business happened. He has since made a habit of applying the same test to any organization he wants to understand, including his own, by checking whether leadership spends its time where the work occurs or where the work is merely reported on. The technique is diagnostic rather than moral: it treats physical location as a more reliable signal of an organization's real priorities than its stated structure.

For anyone assessing whether a company's leadership is actually engaged with its core operation.

diagnosis, organizational-health, observation, access