This is a special edition LitNuts newsletter to let you know about a very special offer:
Get the highly rated The Control Standard: How to Own Outcomes, Reduce Surprises, and Become the Person Leaders Trust
You're busy. But is the work actually under control?
In most growing organisations, the felt loss of control isn't a discipline problem. It's a drift problem. Work starts clear and slowly goes vague. Owners are implied, never named. Decisions stall. And the surprises that land late were visible all along — no one owned the act of raising them.
The Control Standard is a practical operating standard for the people who keep work moving: ambitious operators, new and emerging managers, and the leaders who coach them.
It shows how to convert uncertainty into something usable — an owner, a date, a decision, an escalation path, a fallback — so you become the person leaders trust with what matters.
Seniority is earned by making work easier to trust.
You'll learn how to:
- Tell real control from mere activity — and stop mistaking busyness for progress
- Own outcomes, not just complete tasks
- Communicate upward so senior people can actually steer
- Delegate and coach without micromanaging
- Catch drift and surprises early, before they become expensive
- Spot repeated pains and turn them into better systems, mechanisms, and habits
- Become easier to trust with important work
Grounded in 16 years of real delivery, not management theory. Short, concrete, and built to hand from manager to direct report.
For ambitious contributors, it is a guide to becoming easier to trust with important work. For line managers, it is the book you wish your direct reports had already read.
For readers of The Making of a Manager, Extreme Ownership, and The Coaching Habit who want the standard beneath them all. From $0.99 – SHOP NOW /
About the Author - Andrew Ward
Andrew Lee Ward is a UK tech entrepreneur, author, and international powerlifter. He is the founder of Scorchsoft, a Birmingham-based software development agency he has run for more than sixteen years, helping growing businesses use software, AI integrations, workflow tools, portals, and data platforms to solve real operational problems.
His work is driven by a simple belief: every business is becoming a technology business, whether it thinks of itself that way or not. Through Scorchsoft, Andrew helps organisations turn market opportunities into software products, and internal business pains into systems that improve how work gets done.
The Control Standard grew out of Scorchsoft’s own operating practice: a body of guides, principles, and hard-won lessons developed through years of client delivery, one-to-ones, project reviews, and the ordinary pressure of running a growing service business. Andrew writes from practice rather than theory, with a focus on helping people own outcomes, reduce drift, and become easier to trust with important work.