SOSX®, AI-enabled systems thinking, for any sector.
The SOSX book series
Just Good Business
The business is a system: growth, pivots and the ecosystem you actually operate in
Written for the people who run or advise a small or medium-sized business. It accompanies Just Good Business.
A companion to Seeing the Whole System, applied to the thing most readers already run or advise: a small or medium-sized business, and the ecosystem it lives in.
It is the most accessible book of the series: it assumes no engineering background, no modelling background, and no patience for jargon. It opens with the spreadsheet that lies, then rebuilds the picture properly: the four things that flow through a business, the loops that make growth compound and stall, the stocks you survive on, the shape of concentration risk, and the leverage points where a change actually changes things, ending with the weekly what-if and a hard look at vanity metrics.
The shape is the series' shape: the picture first, then the practice, then the machine. Part II is seventeen chapters of the numbers work most owners were never taught (contribution and what one more job actually adds, tracing overhead to the work that causes it, pricing as a flow you control, the cash pipeline, budgets that teach, forecasting without fortune-telling, power and interest, pivots, decision trees and the weekly what-if) all of it doable in a spreadsheet, tonight. Part III comes last, and describes what a machine should and should not do around your accounts.
It stands on its own; you do not need the central book first, though the two are better together.
Inside the book
Part I, Your business as a system
Chapters 1–8. The ecosystem you actually operate in; the four things that flow through a business; the loops that make growth compound and stall; the stocks you survive on; the shape of concentration risk; sudden failure and sudden take-off; the iceberg; and the leverage points where a change actually changes things.
Part II, The practice
Chapters 9–25, and the part to read with your own numbers open: map your business in an afternoon; find your real customer system; portfolio honesty, keep, grow, renegotiate, review; the service mix; contribution, and what one more job actually adds; tracing overhead to the work that causes it; pricing as a flow you control; the cash pipeline; budgets that teach; forecasting without fortune-telling; the growth adjacencies your map exposes; who can actually stop this, read as power and interest; pivots; choosing between options with decision trees and scenarios; the weekly what-if; how small teams decide badly; and the vanity metrics to stop believing.
Part III, The machine
Chapters 26–30. How AI should behave around your accounts: every number computed, never guessed; the Customer Compass proof point; the six steps retold for a business question; what the machine carries method by method; and Just Good Business, the service that runs the whole method with the attention cost carried by a machine.
Part IV, One spine, many domains
Chapter 31. The same discipline, everywhere else: the survey that connects this book back to the rest of the series.
Plus a glossary and further reading in the appendices.
From the series’ shared figure library, the same illustrations you’ll find in the book.
And for the whole argument in one place, start with the central book: SOSX: Seeing the Whole System.