Early in my career, I worked on mergers and acquisitions from the IT side. My job wasn’t just assessing systems, platforms, and application portfolios. It was also evaluating the people behind them. That often meant identifying duplication, finding new landing spots for retained IT staff within our primary outsourcer’s organization, or facing the difficult reality that there might not be a new role for someone. It was one of the hardest responsibilities I ever had, and it taught me early on that so much of business success comes down to the operating model. How do groups come together to solve problems? What is the runbook for how work gets done? Where does accountability sit, and how do you know when something is finished?