Operational Velocity

19 Episodes

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Ep 19. Couche-Tard & Circle K: 9,000 Chains of One

2026-10-1342:59

Email for Inquiries On 31 July 2026, Alimentation Couche-Tard, the company behind Circle K agreed to buy Poland's Żabka: more than 13,000 stores and around US$8.6 billion in equity value, the largest deal in its history. Just six days earlier, Seven & i, the owner of 7-Eleven, had pulled out of its own Żabka investment. A year before that, Couche-Tard had walked away from a US$47 billion pursuit of Seven & i itself. This episode opens up the operating system behind both decisions. We...

Ep 18. Eli Goldratt: The Goal, Theory of Constraints, OPT, Drum-Buffer-Rope

2026-10-0650:12

Email for Inquiries In 1984, a physicist wrote a novel to sell his factory software. It worked too well, but it cost him his company. Eli Goldratt's "The Goal" became one of the most influential business books ever written. By his own account, operations managers that read it got better results than clients who had bought his scheduling software. He refused to pretend otherwise, and his shareholders showed him the door.This episode tells that story, then opens the Theory of Constraints for o...

Ep 17. Lifco: Swedish Serial Acquirer, 275 Companies, 129%

2026-09-2956:14

Email for Inquiries Lifco is a Swedish serial acquirer that owns approximately 275 small niche businesses such as: dental products, demolition robots, crane attachments, recycling machinery and reports EBITA of 129% of capital employed excluding goodwill. In 2019, they mutually parted ways with their longstanding CEO and arguably the architect of their operating model. Since that time, they managed to triple their EBIDTA. In this episode, we unpack Lifco's story and more specifically break d...

Ep 16. Nucor: The Operating Standard that Never Moved

2026-09-2246:05

Email for Inquiries In 1986, a delegation from a German equipment maker walked into an unremarkable office building in Charlotte, North Carolina. Only twenty-two people worked in it. There was no executive dining room, no corporate jet, no chief technology officer and no R&D department. The man waiting for them, Ken Iverson, was about to commit roughly the entire net worth of his company to a casting technology that had never been run at commercial scale. A hundred companies' engin...

Ep 15. Aravind Eye Care: Two Tables, One Surgeon, 8x Throughput

2026-09-1547:15

Email for Inquiries An eye surgeon in southern India sits between two operating tables. She finishes one cataract operation, turns ninety degrees, and starts the next on a patient who is already prepped and waiting. Six to eight operations an hour, against a conventional norm closer to one. They did not make the surgery faster. They removed the waiting. That single design choice is the seed of an operating system that now performs three quarters of a million procedures a year, gives away rou...

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