Further reading
The Six Systems, the questions inside them, and the way the Breathing Room works are built on published work by people who spent their lives studying how businesses actually run. This page says who, and what each of them showed.
The foundation
Published work
Gerber's work, first published as The E‑Myth in 1986 and revised as The E‑Myth Revisited in 1995, showed why most small businesses fail: the person who is great at the work assumes that being great at the work is enough to run a business built on it. His answer is the foundation under everything here: work on your business, not only in it, and build systems that run the business so the people can do the work.
This lineage is personal. I trained directly with Michael E. Gerber. The Six Systems are not his framework, but they stand on the ground he cleared: a business is a set of systems, and a system you can name is a system you can fix.
Part by part
Marketing
Published work
Schwartz published Breakthrough Advertising in 1966, and its five stages of awareness still govern how honest marketing works: a person is unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, or most aware, and a message written for the wrong stage lands on nobody. When the Breathing Room looks at how you talk about what you sell, this is the framework it is reading against.
Marketing · The pitch and the position
Published work
The idea that a business must own a position in the customer's mind, not just a product on a shelf, is Al Ries and Jack Trout: "The Positioning Era Cometh" in Advertising Age, 1972, then Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, 1981.
On how to say the position out loud, I use two writers who disagree, and the disagreement is the useful part. Geoffrey Moore, Crossing the Chasm, 1991, gives you a positioning sentence to fill in. April Dunford, Obviously Awesome, 2019, argues the fill-in-the-blanks sentence assumes you already know the answers, and shows how to find them first. When the Breathing Room walks you through your pitch, it is walking that argument: Dunford's discovery, then Moore's sentence.
Sales · The offer
Published work
The offer questions lean on Osterwalder, Pigneur, Bernarda and Smith, Value Proposition Design, 2014: what jobs your customer is trying to get done, what pains they carry, what gains they want, and whether your offer actually relieves and creates them.
Behind that sits Jobs to be Done, and it has two authors the popular version wrongly merges: Anthony Ulwick, What Customers Want, 2005, built the measurable, outcome-driven school, and Christensen, Hall, Dillon and Duncan, Competing Against Luck, 2016, built the narrative one. They are different instruments. Knowing which one you are holding is part of reading them honestly.
Fulfillment
Published work
Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, 1990. Work happens at three levels, organization, process, and job, and the failures concentrate in the white space between them, where one hand passes to another. When a fulfillment question asks whether your delivery is written down and how you know the client was satisfied, it is hunting the white space.
Management
Published work
Management is everything that has to happen to make sure the objectives are met, which makes it the managing of risk. That is not just my definition: ISO 31000:2018, the international risk management standard, defines risk as the effect of uncertainty on objectives. The same idea in standards language.
Kaplan and Mikes, Managing Risks: A New Framework, Harvard Business Review, 2012, split the field usefully: preventable risks, strategy risks, and external risks each need different management. COSO's enterprise risk framework, 2017, is the third leg. The categories a small business actually feels, financial, information and technology, people, are standard practice across all three.
Money
Published work
Churchill and Mullins, How Fast Can Your Company Afford to Grow?, Harvard Business Review, 2001, showed that every business has a self-financeable growth rate you can compute from your own operating cycle, and growing faster than it consumes cash even while the business looks healthy. Churchill and Lewis, The Five Stages of Small Business Growth, HBR, 1983, mapped which problems are normal at which size. The money questions come from both: not just are you profitable, but is your rhythm sustainable.
Intelligence
Published work
The idea that improvement is a cycle rather than a fix comes from Walter Shewhart's work on quality in the 1930s, carried forward and made famous by W. Edwards Deming as the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle. Their point is the same one Intelligence makes on the Six Systems page: an organization gets better by feeding what it learns back into the way it works, on purpose, every time.
When I say Intelligence closes the circle, that is a ninety-year-old idea from the people who rebuilt manufacturing with it. I am applying it to a business small enough to feel every turn of the climb.
Books
Built on the belief that
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