Operational Excellence Is a Culture, Not a Checklist
Why performance, trust, and focus depend on the systems you actually use — not just the ones you document
We talk a lot about operational excellence like it’s a list of practices. As if you can standardize your way to speed. As if the answer is better project plans, more dashboards, tighter documentation. But real operational excellence? It’s not about the checklist. It’s about culture (yes I know I talk a lot about culture, because it is important!).
Excellence Is a Function of Clarity and Trust
Performance doesn’t scale with effort. It scales with clarity. People need to know what matters, where to act, and how decisions actually get made.
You don’t need more process. You need fewer open loops. You need signal.
Operational excellence lives in:
How cleanly a decision moves from input to action
How confidently a team escalates risk
How quickly people course-correct when something’s off
How often clarity replaces drama
And that’s culture. Not in the sense of ping-pong tables, free lunches, or office yoga, but in the sense of how work actually gets done.
If culture is how the system works when no one’s watching, operational excellence is the design discipline that ensures it works, even when the pressure is on.
At Palantir: Rhythm Without Bureaucracy
Palantir taught me to be allergic to dead process. It was a place that refused to let operational hygiene become theater. We didn’t have traditional business ops. We had tightly designed communication flows, strong escalation pathways, and one rule: own the outcome.
Meetings were constantly being evaluated for function and format. And meeting notes for client meetings were sent out to a meeting tag. Information was uncomfortably transparent, and no one had time for process that didn’t serve execution.
That ethos stuck with me. Not just because it worked, but because it created something rare: operational clarity without bureaucratic bloat.
At Zipline: Healthy Tension Between Product and Ops
At Zipline, operational excellence looked different — because it had to. We were a global company moving fast, with life-critical logistics and a safety-first mindset. But we were also scaling rapidly. That created constant tension between speed and certainty.
We built systems that made that tension visible:
Cross-functional planning cadences that exposed interdependencies
Lightweight milestone reviews focused on signal, not status
Feedback loops between go-to-market teams and flight operations to keep complexity grounded in reality
Those systems weren’t culture-adjacent. They were the culture. They shaped how teams built trust across time zones, how they made tradeoffs under pressure, and how they stayed aligned even as headcount doubled.
At Merlin: Signal Loops Over Surface Metrics
At Merlin Labs, operational excellence meant building trust in an environment where ambiguity was the default. We were building safety-critical autonomy. The stakes were high. The structure was still forming. And our best shot at momentum wasn’t process, it was clear, consistent signals.
Slack, not email, became the primary orchestration surface. Updates weren’t buried in inboxes. They were shared in relevant channels with linked metrics and tagged stakeholders so actions, escalations, and acknowledgments happened in flow.
The #safety channel was mandatory for everyone. Not symbolic. Mandatory. Because safety wasn’t just a compliance checkbox, it was fundamental to our success and thus a cultural constant; woven directly into how we communicated, responded, and learned.
And we didn’t stop at communication. We designed systems to reinforce the behavior we needed:
Team health reviews to surface friction early
Delivery velocity metrics to track sustainable pace
Decision friction scores to monitor where we were getting stuck
These weren’t just dashboards. They were meaningful signals that shaped how we worked together. They worked. Not because they were perfectly built, but because they created shared context. And that’s the real output of operational excellence: shared understanding, visible priorities, and the permission to move.
So What Does This Look Like in Practice?
Operational excellence isn’t about:
More meetings
Heavier documentation
Layered approvals
It’s about:
Fewer bottlenecks
Clearer signals
Stronger decision rights
Healthier pace
More time spent on judgment, not navigation
That’s why it’s a culture, not a checklist. You can’t audit your way into it. You have to build the systems that produce it, and then live in them.
Final Thought
It’s tempting to think of operational excellence as a maturity curve. But more often, it’s a design choice. You either build systems that reinforce alignment, trust, and velocity, or you build systems that create drag and confusion.
