Build a business that doesn’t run you.
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You don’t need a bigger team. You need a clearer rhythm, one your people can actually keep.
Most small businesses don’t fail from lack of effort. They fail from quiet, daily friction: missed promises, last-minute heroics, talented people burning out while the owner works seventy-hour weeks just to keep things from falling apart. Run on Rhythm turns that chaos into a calm, repeatable operating system built on one simple spine, Proper, Preparation, Prevents, Poor, Performance.
Story-first and refreshingly free of guru certainty, each chapter hands you tools you can install this week: the Four-Line Plan, the 80% capacity rule, the weekly Risk Radar, the Cadence Kit, and a blameless way to learn when things break. Every practice is a reversible experiment, with a way to tell if it’s working and a safe way to back out if it isn’t.
15 chapters walk each P through story, tools, and drills. A back-of-book 12-Week Field Guide turns the framework into a runnable program.
A plain-language look at why the system works. Living things, and the groups they form, get by by predicting what is about to happen, sensing what actually happens, and updating both their understanding and their surroundings to keep the gap small. Perception and action are two halves of one loop. The 5Ps are that loop, taken seriously, as a way to look at a team or a company and notice where the loop is being crushed and where it could be set free. UNI is a lens, not a product, and this edition turns it into a practice: turning opportunity into durable value without using up the people, trust, and attention it takes to keep creating it. No equations. Plus a back-of-book 12-Week Field Guide that turns the whole framework into a runnable program.
“A living being is always trying to make sense of the next moment. It predicts what is about to happen, senses what actually happens, and updates both its understanding and its surroundings to keep the gap small. From a thermostat, to a bird catching a moth, to a person crossing a street, to your own body, it is one shape at four sizes. Your business is simply the next rung up that ladder.” — Chapter 0, Run on Rhythm 2E
An honest note. Run on Rhythm uses active inference and the free energy principle as a public teaching lens. It does not claim the framework is proven to be the correct theory of mind, that a business is literally a brain, or that any of this has been demonstrated in the way the science has been studied. When we say a company “predicts” or “prefers,” we’re using a translation, not stating a law. If you want the careful math, the foundational texts by Parr, Pezzulo & Friston (MIT Press, 2022) and the fenced, unrefereed working preprint (Zenodo) are where they live. Independent expert review of the preprint is still pending, and we say so on purpose. The strength of a lens is not that it explains everything, but that the specific habits it points you toward either lower your overtime and rework, or they don’t, and you get to find out which.
Print paperback and hardcover are queued for wide bookstore distribution through Draft2Digital and IngramSpark. The audiobook is queued for Findaway Voices (Spotify, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Storytel, libraries via OverDrive). If you want to be notified when the print editions ship, write to Michael.