I do not talk about this at work, and I am slightly reluctant to write it down. Philosophy in a business context usually arrives as decoration, a quote on a slide before the numbers. What I actually use is much smaller than that. It is a sorting rule, and it saves me several hours a week.
01
The rule
Some things depend on you. Most do not.
A regulator changes the rules on who may perform a procedure. A competitor opens across the road. The currency moves and your imported consumables cost a fifth more. A device vendor launches something your CEO reads about in a trade article on a Sunday.
None of that is yours. What is yours: the standard you hold, the process you run, the evidence you collect, who you develop, and what you do on Monday morning.
The rule is not to stop caring about the first list. It is to stop spending the working day on it. I have watched capable people burn a quarter on a regulatory change they could not influence, producing analysis nobody acted on, while the thing they could have fixed sat untouched.
02
Where I actually use it
The Sunday evening sort. Before the week starts, whatever is on my mind goes into two columns. Anything in the not-mine column gets one line: what I will do if it happens. Then it is closed. This takes ten minutes and it is the difference between a week I run and a week that happens to me.
The pre-mortem, before any launch. Assume it is six months later and this failed. Write down why. This is the negative visualisation the Stoics used, dressed in business clothes, and it is the single most useful meeting I know. Nobody wants to run it. Everybody who has run it has found something.
The view from above, during a crisis. A franchisee is furious, a case has gone badly, a deck was rejected in front of people. Step back far enough to ask what this will matter in a year. Usually the answer is that the specific incident will matter very little and the pattern behind it will matter a lot. That reframe is what lets you address the pattern instead of defending yourself.
Reserve clauses on commitments. Not "we will launch in March" but "we will launch in March, unless the certification runs long". Saying it out loud in advance costs nothing and removes most of the drama when March moves.
03
The decision journal
This one I would recommend to anyone in an operations role.
When I make a decision that matters, I write four lines. What I decided. What I expect to happen. What would tell me I was wrong. When I will look again.
Then months later I read it. This is unpleasant, because memory is generous with itself. I have found decisions I remembered as careful that were plainly rushed, and one or two I remembered as lucky that were actually well reasoned. Without the journal I would have learned the wrong lesson from both.
The line that does the most work is the third one. Naming what would prove you wrong before you have any stake in the outcome is the closest thing I know to an honest mind.
04
What it is not
It is not detachment. You still care that the case went badly, and you should. The Stoic position was never that things do not matter, only that your reaction to them is your own responsibility.
It is not stoicism in the modern sense either, the one that means enduring things silently. In operations that habit is actively harmful. A manager who absorbs every problem without escalating it is not disciplined, they are a single point of failure who has convinced themselves it is a virtue. I have been that person and it took a while to notice.
And it is not a substitute for competence. No amount of philosophical composure fixes a process you have not designed.
05
Why it fits this work in particular
Operations is a job where most of what determines the outcome sits outside the room. Doctors you do not employ, clinics you do not own, markets whose rules you did not write, patients whose lives are their own. You cannot control the network. You can control what you send it and what you ask back.
That is a genuinely uncomfortable position, and I think it is why so many operations leaders drift into either micromanagement or resignation. The sorting rule is what sits between those two. Hold the standard, run the process, collect the evidence, and let the weather be weather.
Questions people ask
How does Stoicism apply to operations management?
It gives you a sorting rule. Regulation, competitors, currency and demand are not yours. The standard you hold, the process you run, the evidence you collect and how you respond are yours. Work the second list and treat the first as weather.
Is this just positive thinking?
The opposite. It involves writing down what could go wrong before it does, accepting that some of it will, and preparing for that version rather than the one you hope for. It is closer to risk management than to optimism.
What is a decision journal?
A short record of a decision at the moment you make it: what you chose, what you expected to happen, and what would prove you wrong. Reviewed months later it shows whether your judgement is improving or whether you are just remembering selectively.