About Jack Skeels | Better Company

Running Sapient’s LA office opened my eyes to how challenging agencies are to run and how broken they can feel. So I went back to the research and built a model from first principles: reduce the chaos, raise productivity, make agencies places where people actually want to work. It worked the first time I tried it, which surprised me more than anyone. Over the next twenty or thirty agencies I refined it. Over the hundred after that, something else happened: the work became a conversation. Every leadership team I sat with taught me something the model hadn’t predicted, and the model got better because of it.

I founded AgencyAgile in 2011 to do something about what I kept seeing. Over 15 years we worked with more than 200 organizations, building and refining methods for how work actually flows. The core innovation was Workstream Pods: small, empowered, cross-functional teams replacing the department-siloed, waterfall model. Many organizations still run it a decade later, the outcome I’m proudest of. The work was published in MIT Sloan Management Review and was the foundation for my book UNMANAGED.

Better Company exists because of something I kept rediscovering: the work I love the most is working directly with the teams. As much as I tried to transfer the skills into other coaches, and at times with great success, almost all of the most remarkable work that happened inside AgencyAgile happened when I was in the room. I love it. It is the most rewarding experience I know. Better Company is how I do that work now, directly, with the leaders and teams who want it.

What I’m working on now is the question AI has put in front of every agency: what will clients still pay you for when a machine can do most of the work? What I’m seeing is two things: value the client can see, and deep expertise built on purpose. Helping leaders build both is most of what I do now.

“Jack has had the single biggest positive impact on my agency of any initiative I’ve ever tried. Revenue is up. Profit is up. Client satisfaction is up. Employee engagement is up. My happiness is up.”
Bret Starr, CEO, The Starr Conspiracy

“A bracing, standard-resetting approach to doing management right.”

— Kirkus Reviews on UNMANAGED

The author delivers his insights with an effective combination of readable prose and clear-eyed pragmatism. His experience is evident on every page and should prove invaluable to readers in any managerial roles. … This book will do very nicely as a new [compass].

Award badges: Hustle & Heart Gold Winner, Axiom Gold Winner, Big Book Award Winner, National Indie Excellence Finalist, Goody Business Book Awards Winner

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Key Concepts from UNMANAGED

The Manager Tax

Your best specialist got promoted. Now they micromanage, dominate meetings, and do other people’s work. You lost your best producer and gained a bottleneck. The book explains why this happens and how to break the pattern.

Why, What, Go, Grow

Most managers over-control Go (execution) while starving the other three. When teams own the Why and What, the Go takes care of itself, and Grow finally gets room to happen.

The Plateau, the Chasm, and the Death March

Every project starts on a Plateau of Optimism, crashes into a Chasm of Despair, and climbs a Death March. The cause? Scope built by managers instead of teams. The fix changes how projects begin.

NOCO

Naturally-Occurring Chaotic Organization. The default state of every project-driven firm. Multiple managers, shared resources, competing priorities. If this sounds like Tuesday at your agency, it’s not a people problem. It’s a structural one.

The Ignorance Gap

The distance between what a team needs to know to do the work well and what they actually know when they start. Every rework cycle, every missed deadline, every scope surprise traces back to this gap. The fix is structural, not informational.

The ACE Model

Alignment, Coordination, Empowerment. The three things every team needs from its organization. Most agencies over-invest in Coordination (meetings, status updates, approvals) and under-invest in Alignment and Empowerment. Rebalancing these three is where most of the productivity gains come from.