I help leadership teams redesign how their organizations work — the structure, the processes, and the culture that connects them. My focus is agencies and consultancies in the 20–150 person range, where growth created as many problems as it solved.

It started with a simple question: why is it so hard for smart teams to get good work done? I first explored that question in the late 1990s at RAND, and the answer — then and now — wasn’t a lack of talent or effort. It was the way the work was structured: unclear scope, chaotic collaboration, costly over-management, and a resulting productivity loss that reduced quality and slowed everything down.

AGENCYAGILE & 200+ ORGANIZATIONS

That insight led me to found AgencyAgile in 2011 — a company built to help creative and professional service organizations move faster, with less friction and more autonomy. I’d spent years inside agencies and consultancies, at Sapient running their 105-person LA office and at BLITZ leading delivery operations, and I kept seeing the same patterns: smart teams trapped by structures that weren’t designed for the work they were actually doing.

AgencyAgile became a proving ground. Over 15 years, we worked with more than 200 organizations — agencies, consultancies, and project-driven teams of all kinds — developing and refining methods for redesigning how work actually flows. The core innovation was Workstream Pods: small, empowered, cross-functional teams that replaced the traditional handoff-heavy model. Many of those organizations still use the model a decade later.

That work was published in MIT Sloan Management Review, and it became the foundation for my book UNMANAGED — a five-time award winner including the Axiom Gold Medal for Independent Thought Leadership.

BETTER COMPANY

Today, as Better Company, the work continues — now expanded to address the organizational redesign that AI demands. Not AI adoption. Not AI tooling. The harder, more important question: how must the organization itself change when production becomes cheap and judgment becomes the bottleneck?

We still make teams work better, faster, and happier. But now we also help leaders rethink structure, process, and culture for a world where the same organizational designs that help humans collaborate well turn out to be some of the best ways to adopt and deploy AI for real, sustained value.

RAND CORPORATION

I’ve served as an advisor to RAND Corporation across three separate engagements over more than 25 years — each time invited back to help them think about their own organizational future. The current engagement focuses on the implications of AI for work process, organizational structure, and competitiveness. RAND is where I learned to think about organizations as systems — where structure creates behavior, coordination has real costs, and the difference between a good design and a bad one shows up in everything from morale to margin.

BACKGROUND

I came into this world as an industrial engineer, grounded in Deming, Lean, and the Toyota Production System. I co-founded PDIT, a data science and program management firm that earned two Inc. 500 awards and a Deloitte Fast 50 award. I founded Sinox Health, a healthcare product company built around a patented sinus care product I invented. I taught at the Pardee RAND Graduate School on systems thinking, organizational behavior, and strategic transformation. My MBA is in Finance and Entrepreneurship, from USC’s Marshall School of Business.

I write regularly at jackskeels.com and on LinkedIn.