Productivity
Work the System Summary & Review: Document the Machine Once
Work the System summary: Sam Carpenter’s three documents that turn firefighting into a machine you can improve — plus a TGR 7-day…
Read Summary →Sam Carpenter
"The operator who documented an 80-hour week into a machine that ran without him."
Sam Carpenter is an Oregon entrepreneur who built Centratel, a telephone answering service that ran 24 hours a day, then nearly destroyed his health keeping it alive. After years of 80-hour weeks, he stopped treating every fire as a unique emergency and started treating the company as a collection of systems that could be documented and improved. Work the System (first published 2008; fourth edition 2021, with Josh Fonger) is the manual from that turn: a Strategic Objective, General Operating Principles, and Working Procedures. He still operates from Bend, Oregon, and coaches owners who have become the bottleneck in their own machine.
1 book featured·Founder of Centratel·Work the System
Books by Sam Carpenter
Our in-depth summaries and reviews of his work
Key Ideas & Recurring Themes
Your business is a collection of systems
Repeating work is a machine. If you do not name it, you live inside every exception.
Three documents run the machine
Strategic Objective, General Operating Principles, and Working Procedures — in that order.
Errors are system errors
When something fails, fix the procedure the same day instead of blaming the person.
Notable Quotes
"If you don't control the systems, they control you."— Work the System
Related Authors
Book Author Sam Carpenter
Work the System Summary & Review: Document the Machine Once
Work the System summary: Sam Carpenter’s three documents that turn firefighting into a machine you can improve — plus a TGR 7-day start.