August 13, 2024.

Starbucks announces Brian Niccol as their new CEO.

The stock jumps 24.5% in one day. $21.4 billion in market value. Added in six hours.

Niccol hadn't started yet. He hadn't made a single decision. No workforce decisions had been made. Hadn't changed the menu. Hadn't even walked into the building.

Wall Street bet $21 billion on a name...and a proven process.

At Chipotle, Niccol had done something remarkable. He'd walked into a company in crisis. Reeling from an E. coli outbreak, plummeting sales, and a broken brand, he turned it around.

Revenue doubled. Profits up 800%. Stock up 773%.

And he did it by diagnosing first.

When Niccol finally started at Starbucks last September, he followed through on his first promise to the board when he accepted the role...

He spent the next two weeks behind the bar. With an apron. As a barista.

Taking orders. Making drinks. Watching the chaos in real time.

He saw the problem immediately: Mobile orders were destroying the in-store experience. Baristas were drowning. Customers who walked in felt invisible.

Three months later, he announced the "Back to Starbucks" plan anchored by a few key leveraged pillars: Simpler menu. Better staffing. Redesigned mobile ordering.

NFT Draft. 1998.

The scouts were split.

The media? The majority of voices were loud and certain.

Ryan Leaf was the guy. Bigger arm. Flashier tape. More "upside."

But in the quiet of the Colts draft room in 1998, Bill Polian saw something the numbers didn't show.

Peyton Manning walked into his interview with a legal pad full of questions, not about him or his future, but about how the Colts were designing their offense. He'd already memorized their playbook. He knew the protection calls. He asked about their backup center's tendencies.

On paper, the two quarterbacks looked identical. A coin flip.

But to Polian, "It wasn't even close. The difference was above the shoulders."

In the locker room, in the film room, on bad days, and under pressure plays? They couldn't be further apart.

Polian chose Manning.

The headlines called him cautious. Too safe.

But 15 years later, Peyton had 5 MVPs, 2 Super Bowls, and one of the sharpest minds football's ever seen.

Leaf? Four seasons. Unfortunate outcome.

Captions are auto generated

In 2009, Tim Ferriss set out to do something absurd.

He wanted to see if he could gain muscle faster than anyone thought possible. Without spending hours in the gym.

Most people train six days a week.

Ferriss trained twice.

Each workout was 30 minutes. He only did a few exercises. And he didn't change the plan once.

But here's the thing: He tracked everything. Sleep, glucose, insulin response, time under tension, rest periods, and muscle failure.

By day 28, he had gained 34 pounds of muscle. No steroids. No gimmicks. Just ruthless precision.

And while some still scoff at the title (The 4-Hour Body), the results were legit.

He'd proved something: You don't need to do more. You need to do what matters most, better than anyone else.

Captions are auto generated

In the early 1950s, on a cramped shop floor in Japan, a young engineer named Taiichi Ohno walked past a supermarket and found his revelation.

Instead of shelves stacked weeks ahead, items were restocked only when a customer took one.

He thought: Why should cars be built any differently?

Back at Toyota, the team began stripping back inventory, limiting pieces to what the next step needed. No more, no less. They introduced the kanban signal, and the principle of just-in-time (JIT) production was born.

Instead of machines running flat-out, they'd wait (silently) for the signal, start only what the customer needed now.

And when a defect appeared, they didn't bury it under workarounds. They stopped the line. They fixed the root cause right there. That became the other pillar: jidoka. Automation with a human touch.

What seemed counterintuitive (producing less to sell more) became Toyota's advantage. Fewer parts. Less waste. Faster flow.

The lean engine revved stronger than the mass-production giants.

Today, Lean Manufacturing is the gold standard. Nearly 70% of all factories have adopted lean methods. 70% to 90% of Fortune 500 companies use some form of lean principles. It moved beyond the factory floor into healthcare, software (Lean Startup), and service industries. When done right, lean initiatives yield an average 200% ROI within 12 to 18 months.

And now, the same logic is pulsing through GTM teams: it's no longer about adding more tools, more segments, more sequences. It's about removing what slows you down so you can move faster, clearer, with purpose.

Captions are auto generated

Before the Grammys. Before the long beard.

Before Rolling Stone called him “the most important producer of the last 20 years,”

Rick Rubin was just a kid in a college dorm room, producing raw hip-hop beats with LL Cool J on a four-track recorder.

But Rubin didn’t blow up because he chased hits.

He built them. Track by track. He treated songs like systems.

When he helped Jay-Z make “99 Problems”, Rubin didn’t flood the studio with ideas. He laid down one loop. Then another.

A riff. A pause. A punch. Everything modular. Repeatable. Stackable.

That’s how Rubin works.

He starts with the track stack first, and the breakthrough hit follows.

Today, we're swapping the boardroom for the studio to discuss how the best B2B campaigns are born from scalable, repeatable campaign strategies. And we're staring at the eight we use every day.

Welcome back if you had a long weekend. We're kicking this week off with the table that changed everything for Ikea.

In the 1950s, IKEA had a problem.

Furniture was breaking in transit. Shipping costs were crushing margins.

Growth was getting heavy…literally.

Until one designer watched a colleague do something simple:

He unscrewed the legs off a table to fit it in his car.

And that changed everything.

“What if we don’t ship tables at all?” “What if we ship pieces of tables?”

That was the moment IKEA stopped thinking in furniture. And started thinking in first principles.

Not: How do we ship this better? But: What actually makes a table a table?

Function. Form. Simplicity. Assembly. Everything else was tradition. Extra. Supersulfous in some regards.

In that moment, flat-pack was born. And a global empire followed.

Today on Sunrise: The Return to First Principles in Revenue Generation

Today, we’re unpacking something powerful: The return to first principles in revenue generation.

What are they? Why do they matter more than ever heading into 2026?

And how do they connect directly to our clients’ mission-critical priorities: Make Money. Save Money. Mitigate Risk.

This is the only way out of the environment we find ourselves in today.

Every week for several years, I drove my kids to swim practice.

Same time. Same route through Lakeview in Chicago.

And every time, right at the intersection of Clybourn and Wellington, it was there.

A wide, skinny billboard stretched across Clybourn staring back at me: a hilariously awkward teenage photo of a boy with braces and a bowl cut.

Below it? A single line: “We’ll help you get through the awkward teenage business years.”

That boy? Isaac Oates, the founder and CEO of Justworks, is using his own middle school mugshot to make a point.

It’s seared in my brain.

I get emails all the time from Rippling, Paychex, Deel, and Bamboo. But when an email from a Justworks rep, I can’t help but smile.

Because in one image and one sentence, they captured something no demo video ever could: That weird stage every growing business hits.

Too big for spreadsheets. Too small for the enterprise expectations. Payroll gets complicated. Benefits become a headache. Compliance starts to matter. A lot.

It’s the hormonal phase of scale. And Justworks nailed their positioning.

They staked a claim in the mind of the buyer. They own a perceptual space. An emotional one.

A moment in the business lifecycle that every leader feels, even if they don’t yet have the language for it.

More than a platitude on a slide deck, this idea lives in the bloodstream of the brand.

Welcome to Sunrise! We’ve just crossed 500 subscribers tuning in three times a week.

If you’re new here, we’re glad you’re with us.

For our 30th episode, we wanted to go big. Today, we’re breaking down the backbone of JumpSeat, our agency-wide approach to Agile GTM Sprints.

In early 2001, 17 software developers from different corners of the industry gathered at a ski lodge in Snowbird, Utah.

Many had no formal or prior ties; in fact, many were even competitors, representing approaches like Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, DSDM, Adaptive Software Development, and Crystal Clear.

But they shared a frustration:

The Shared Realization

For years, software development had been trapped in boardrooms.

Projects dragged on for months, sometimes years, under the weight of thick binders, rigid plans, and endless sign-offs. Teams shipped documentation instead of working software. Customers waited while the world moved on.

Many people might see rebels in hoodies in their minds, but they were anything but. They were seasoned practitioners. Veterans who had lived through waterfall’s molasses pace. And they’d had enough.

So they skied. They talked. They argued.

And somewhere between the slopes and the lodge, something clicked.

A manifesto took shape. Four values. Twelve principles. A spark that would set off a movement.