At the end of 2025, my leadership team at Telaeris decided on our company strategy the next year. As I put in place the pieces to enact this strategy across the company, I organically came up with two adjectives that I thought describe the right process for getting things done. In the last few weeks, these adjectives expanded from my original two to four.

This seemed like something that would be found in a business book except that they make a terrible acronym. But I thought the ideas were still valuable enough to share. The four adjectives below encapsulate my theme for business operations in 2026.

Agency: This is the who that will be responsible for getting something done. We had a bad habit of assigning items to teams, not people. Having agency make people feel more personally responsible for getting stuff done.

Urgency: It is important for the team to know when a task should be expected to be completed. Too often we would say we wanted something done, but didn’t say when. Without an expected due date, it was easy to cycle on the final part of the project instead of buttoning things up quickly.

Accountability: If you want to achieve a goal – reading the bible daily, being able to run a marathon, writing a book, or beat an addiction – having an accountability partner will help. Its shining a light on your actions and we all want to look good when examined. To do this at Telaeris, we have decided to make both the who and the when visible for tasks and goals we want to achieve. This allows us to be accountable to our peers, clients, and partners, but for our purposes this is mostly so we can shine brightly as we share our accomplishments with our co-workers.

Priority: At my company, and I’m sure at others’, there are always pulls away from what people “should” be working on. People trying to do the right things, but end up on tangents that are not the most important. Just this morning, I saw a little bug and said to myself “that should only take 30 minutes to fix”. Those thirty minutes easily turn into a few hour distraction as I fall down another rabbit hole. Staying on task and having an ordered, priority list helps employees get the stuff done that should be done first.

I’ve found focusing on these to be a great value. I hope the ideas can inspire other people to improve their business operations.