#56: The 'Cube' Strategy

Here's a question that makes most leaders uncomfortable: What if your biggest strength is also your biggest weakness?

You built your company by being the person who could handle everything. Strategy, operations, hiring, firefighting… you were the Swiss Army knife that got shit done. It worked brilliantly when you had 10 people. It's killing your business now that you have 50.

The problem isn't that you've gotten worse at your job. The problem is that your job has gotten impossibly big.

While you're drowning in decisions that should be someone else's speciality, your competitors are building something you're not: modular leadership architecture. They've figured out what software engineers learned decades ago, complex systems work better when they're broken into specialised, well-defined modules.

Most leaders resist this because it feels like giving up control. But here's what they're missing: the best leaders aren't the ones who can do everything. They're the ones who can design systems where everything gets done excellently by the right people.

That's the "Cube Strategy." And it's time you learned how to build it.

The Leadership Capacity Trap

Let's start with some uncomfortable math. Your brain can hold about 7 items in working memory at once. Yet right now, you're probably trying to be the expert decision-maker for finance, product, operations, hiring, strategy, compliance, and whatever crisis emerged this morning.

You're not superhuman. You're just stubborn.

The Hero Leader myth is killing us. We've romanticised the founder who knows every line of code, remembers every customer's name, and can pivot from board presentation to technical architecture review without missing a beat. It's a beautiful story. It's also completely unsustainable.

Here's what actually happens when you try to be everything to everyone: everything becomes mediocre.

Your financial decisions lack the nuance of someone who lives and breathes numbers. Your product choices miss insights that a dedicated product mind would catch. Your operational efficiency suffers because you're thinking about strategy when you should be optimising processes.

But here's the thing… you feel like letting go would be irresponsible. After all, these are critical functions. Who else can be trusted with them?

This is the false virtue of control. You're not being responsible by holding onto everything. You're being selfish. You're prioritising your comfort over your company's performance.

The scaling wall hits every company at predictable points. Around 25 people, you can't personally know everyone's work. Around 50, you can't be involved in every major decision. Around 100, you're definitely the bottleneck, not the solution.

Smart leaders see this coming and architect around it. They recognise that their job isn't to be the best at everything… it's to ensure everything is done by the best people.

The cognitive load crisis is real. When you're context-switching between vastly different domains all day, you're not bringing your A-game to any of them. You're bringing your exhausted, spread-thin, "good enough" game.

Your competitors who've figured out modular leadership? They're bringing specialists' A-game to every domain while you're juggling.

The question isn't whether you can handle it all. The question is: what's the opportunity cost of trying?

Building Your Leadership Operating System

Think of your current role as a monolithic software application… everything bundled together, impossible to debug, and guaranteed to crash when you try to scale it. Time to refactor.

The first step is identifying your cubes. Not based on org chart logic, but on three simple questions:

Where does your personal involvement create disproportionate value?

These are your core cubes. Maybe it's strategy because you see patterns others miss. Maybe it's key client relationships because they trust you specifically. Guard these jealously.

What energises versus drains you?

Energy isn't simply your preferences. It's where you perform sustainably. If finance reporting makes you want to hide under your desk, that's not your cube. Full stop.

What's the strategic importance versus your natural strengths?

High importance, low strength? That's a specialist cube. Low importance, high strength? It might still be a specialist cube if your time is better spent elsewhere.

Here's where most leaders fuck up: they think "Not My Cube" means failure. It's actually strategic power.

Every hour you spend being mediocre at something is an hour stolen from being excellent at your core cubes. And mediocre leadership in critical areas actively holds back performance.

Specialist ownership beats generalist oversight every time. A dedicated finance person will spot opportunities and risks you'll miss. A focused operations lead will optimise processes you'd never think to question.

Each cube needs clear decision rights. What can they decide autonomously? What requires consultation? What needs your approval? Fuzzy boundaries create conflict and slow everything down.

Communication protocols matter too. How often do you sync? What information flows up automatically versus on request? When do they escalate?

For specialists, hire T-shaped people. Deep expertise in their cube, broad enough understanding to collaborate effectively with other cubes. You don't want brilliant idiots who can't play nicely with others.

Most importantly: hire for ownership mindset. You want people who feel genuinely accountable for their cube's success, not employees waiting for detailed instructions.

The Orchestrator's Evolution

Your new job description just got a hell of a lot more interesting. You're no longer the person who makes every decision, you're the person who designs the system that makes excellent decisions.

This is the shift from doer to designer. Instead of diving into the weeds of each problem, you set the context and constraints that enable your cube owners to solve problems better than you ever could.

Your role is to set vision alignment across cubes without micromanaging execution. You define what success looks like, not how to achieve it. You ensure quality through metrics and outcomes, not oversight and approval chains.

But there's a hidden cost here: the orchestration tax. Coordinating multiple specialists takes energy. Communication overhead is real. Interface management isn't free.

The key is building efficient systems that minimise this tax. Clear decision frameworks reduce back-and-forth. Standardised reporting eliminates ad-hoc information requests. Well-defined escalation paths prevent everything from becoming urgent.

Accept some complexity to avoid worse complexity. A few extra coordination meetings beat having every decision flow through you.

The competitive advantage timeline makes this investment obvious:

Short-term: Faster decision-making because specialists can act within their domains. Higher quality outputs because expertise is focused.

Medium-term: You attract and retain better talent because top performers want ownership, not micromanagement. Innovation accelerates because specialists can push boundaries in their fields.

Long-term: Organisational resilience. Your business doesn't break if you take a vacation or pivot strategy. Adaptability increases because you can reconfigure cubes as needs change.

The beautiful part? This approach scales fractally. As you grow beyond what a single orchestrator can manage, you create meta-orchestrators who manage portfolios of cubes.

While your competitors are still trying to hire superhuman leaders who can do everything, you're building something sustainable: a company that works excellently without depending on any single person's heroics.