A live series on the patterns that undermine execution.

Nine 90-minute Friday sessions for CEOs, founders, and senior executives. September 18 through November 13, online.

The premise behind the series.

Our frame for this series developed over a decade of consulting work with mid-market leadership teams. What kept surfacing was that execution problems rarely came down to strategy or capability. They came down to specific, recurring patterns in how decisions moved, failures were processed, and ideas traveled or didn't. Naming those patterns and working them directly became the intervention.

This series takes nine of those patterns and works each one in a live 90-minute session. The format is not a lecture and not a workshop. Each session runs the diagnostic on a specific pattern, examines what it looks , and works the specific move that changes it.

Sessions can be taken individually, by tier, or as the full series.

A Venn diagram with four circles labeled Culture, People, Process, and Strategy. The overlapping areas are labeled Learning, Innovation, Alignment, and Execution, which is at the center where all four circles intersect.

The framework at the heart of the sessions.

The nine sessions map to a working framework that has emerged from consulting engagements with mid-market organizations. Three domains — Strategy, People, Process — sit at the center of what any organization does. Three intersections between those domains are where organizations most reliably break down: Alignment (people and process), Learning (people and strategy), and Innovation (strategy and process). Culture is the environment all of this operates within. Execution is what the whole structure exists to produce.

The series is organized into three tiers of three sessions each. The first tier works the individual leadership patterns that shape everything downstream. The second tier works the three domains as load-bearing systems. The third tier works the intersections where those systems either function together or fail together.

"Ed led a thoughtful and insightful manager training for our managers that sparked meaningful conversation and gave us practical tools we could apply immediately. His approach is grounded in curiosity, observations, and empathy, which made the session engaging and actionable. I would highly recommend Ed to any organization looking for a Leadership Consultant or Executive Coach."

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Registration Options

Section 2· The Machinery

Strategy, people, process. The systems that bear weight — or do not.
The middle three sessions address the organization's load-bearing systems. A real strategy gives directional guidance in situations the plan did not anticipate. A senior team is only as strong as the conditions it can withstand. Process either enables people to handle the unpredictable or becomes a tax on the work itself. Each session runs the diagnostic on one system and asks whether it will hold when it needs to.

A person walking outdoors, holding a laptop, with a clear blue sky in the background. The image promotes strategic planning under pressure.

Strategy Under Pressure

Does our team know what to do when the plan runs out?

Most strategies fail the same test. They offer little guidance when a decision comes up that the plan didn't anticipate. This session builds the directional intent our team can use in the moment, and the test for whether they know it.

Section 3 · The Points of Failure

Where the system comes apart.
The final three sessions explore the intersections between load-bearing systems—the seams where organizations most reliably break down. Cross-functional handoffs. What actually happens after a failure. Whether ideas reach the leader or stop travelling upstream. These are not culture problems. They are failure modes with specific mechanics, and you can work on those mechanics directly.

A person walking outside holding a large folder or binder, wearing a jacket and a hat, with a blue sky background and a circular logo that says "Lead from the Front."

Fix the Functional Handoffs

Why sales, ops, and finance keep talking past each other.

Cross-functional friction naturally rises as dependencies between departments and functions grow. This session maps where handoffs break down in our organizations and outlines the moves that turn adversarial functions into ones that work together.

A person wearing a coat and hat, standing against a blue sky with clouds, holding a book or tablet, with text overlay about learning from mistakes on a website.

Learn From What Went Wrong (and Right)

Why the same failures keep coming back under different names.

Most of us have a learning problem we do not call a learning problem. We run post-mortems that review rather than extract insight. This session adjusts the diagnostic: what gets said in the room after a loss, what gets said outside it, and whether our strategy ever adjusts based on what we learned.

A woman standing outdoors, holding an open book, with a view of a blue sky and some clouds in the background.

Get Ideas Moving Again

What has our team stopped bringing us?

The diagnosis usually points outwards when leaders say their organizations are not innovative. If our reflex on incoming ideas is skepticism, the team downstream has learned to stop bringing them. This session works the reception pattern directly, and the move that gets ideas travelling again.

A person standing outdoors against a clear blue sky, holding a laptop.

Break Through the Plateau

The skills we stopped building because we were winning elsewhere.

Two kinds of acumen determine our ceiling: the business itself, and the people who run it. Many of us have overdeveloped one and stopped noticing the other. This session names the ceiling we have hit, why it is invisible from inside our strong side, and what to build to move past it.


A person in outdoor clothing walking against a blue sky with a few clouds, carrying a notepad or tablet, with a circular logo in the upper right corner that says 'Lead from the front'.

Stress-Test the Bench

The team got us here. Will they get us there?

Senior teams get evaluated against the conditions we already survived, not the ones coming. This session stress-tests us against the next eighteen months. What will hit us, who on the bench can handle it, and where we need to develop, hire, or move before the crisis exposes the gap.

A person in dark clothing holding a map or book, walking against a blue sky with some clouds, on a website banner encouraging reducing bottlenecks by improving delegation.

Stop Being a Bottleneck

Why delegation keeps failing, despite our best efforts.

Most delegation fails at the handoff, not the intent. The task moves, but the decision stays. This session builds the mechanics of delegation: what to hand off, how to structure the handoff, and where the veto lives—so the work actually leaves our desk.

A person wearing a dark jacket and hat, holding a newspaper or pamphlet, walking outside under a clear blue sky.

Fix the Friction

Why our process feels like a tax on our work.

When a process feels like a tax, it usually is one. But the fix is not a less or leaner process; it is a process that handles the predictable so we can handle the rest. This session names the single source of friction costing us the most right now, and what to do about it before we leave the room.


The Sessions

TIER 1 · Individual Development

Reflexes, plateaus, bottlenecks.
The first three sessions focus on the leader personally. What we default to under pressure. Where we have quietly stalled without noticing. What we are still holding that no one else has been asked to carry. These patterns shape the behavior of the organization downstream, and they are difficult to address from inside the seat.

Silhouette of a person walking outdoors against a blue sky, with a logo that says "Lead from the Front" in the top right corner, and text that reads "Realizing our Reflex: Why our defaults cost us more than we think" and "ebmeridian.com".

Realizing our Reflex

Why our defaults cost us more than we think.

When we're under pressure, we often take on an extra meeting, rewrite the deck, or directly step in to solve the problem. It feels like leadership. It's why our teams keep escalating what they should own. This session names our defaults, what they cost us, and how to decide when to step in and when to step back.

A man with gray hair and a beard sitting on a chair against a dark background, wearing a dark blazer and shirt, with his hands resting on his lap.

Meet Ed Brzychcy

Ed Brzychcy is a consultant, executive coach, and speaker specializing in leadership development, organizational design, and strategic implementation for middle-market companies across a range of industries. His work centers on the operational patterns that determine whether organizations execute on what they intend, and the specific interventions that change those patterns.

Prior to consulting, Ed served twelve years in the U.S. Army Infantry, retiring in 2011 as a Staff Sergeant and squad leader after three deployments in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He received his MBA from Babson College in 2016 and has since served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice in Organizational Behavior at Babson. He is a TEDx speaker

Ed lives in Waltham, Massachusetts. He publishes weekly writing at leadfromthefront.ebmeridian.com and hosts the Frontline Leaders video and newsletter on LinkedIn

Questions attendees have asked.

The first session begins Friday, September 18. Registration is now open.

Questions? Contact Ed directly at ebrzychcy@ebmeridian.com