Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

The 3 Reasons Your Operations are Failing | Tom Root

12 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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Tom Root identifies three reasons operations fail: ineffective management, inadequate training, and broken systems. A Mail Order warehouse hiring workers for one day to six weeks shows that when management and training aren't the problem, the system design itself is what breaks performance.

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From an operations point of view, there are three things that create a performance problem. It may be a management problem that I'm not managing effectively. It may be a training problem. I'm not training effectively. Or it could be a systems problem. Right. The system is somehow broken in a manner. I like to point out that at Mail Order, we don't have the first two. So when you take a job at Mail Order during the holiday, particularly in the warehouse, the maximum length of your experience is going to be about six weeks. That's like the longest. And we will have people that will come in and they'll work one day with us. That's not that uncommon. We don't prefer it, but it's not uncommon. From a management point of view, every person that's hired in that environment knows that that job is going away.