The frontline runs your business.
Sure, the C-suite sets the direction. Stakeholders make the decisions. But the frontline turns your strategy into everyday action. They own the relationship with your customers. They pick up the slack when things break, when staffing is short, and when the unexpected happens.
Frontline employees make up 80% of the working world. Yet they’re barely part of the conversation. We experience the frontline every day in the places we shop, eat, stay, and seek care. We may see the work, but how often do we make the effort to understand the person behind the uniform and what it takes to do their job well?
Yesterday, I released The Frontline Enablement Playbook — the first practical guide for equipping deskless teams to execute with clarity, confidence, and impact. It pulls together everything I’ve learned over 20+ years supporting the frontline across roles, functions, and industries. Across 650 pages, you’ll find hundreds of field-tested practices, dozens of case studies, and 35 real-world stories that reflect what it takes to do this work.
It’s an important book — possibly the most important book about workplace performance in the past 20 years. But a book has limits.
A book captures a moment in time. The themes and practices endure, but the workplace will keep changing. There’s a lot more to say about frontline enablement than even a book this size can cover.
So I’m starting DESKLESS.
It’s a newsletter about how work gets done right on the frontline. This is for the people who rely on frontline teams to drive outcomes — Ops, HR, L&D, Comms.
We'll explore the connection between business results and human experience in today’s workplace. We'll dig into how organizations set their frontline teams up for success, where the gaps between strategy and execution emerge, and what the best operators do differently. We'll draw on timely themes and stories from frontline workplaces across industries like hospitality, healthcare, retail, logistics, manufacturing, grocery, and more.
When you help the frontline do their best work, the business reaps the reward. When people have clarity, tools, and support, they show up with confidence, consistency, and pride every day. Every shift is another chance to get it right, make small improvements that add up, and help someone feel connected to the bigger picture.
On the frontline every shift counts.