About

What is Management Craft?

Management Craft is a library of competencies and tools to help founders and leaders grow from a team of one to one hundred. You get better at competencies. You use tools. It is my attempt to learn what works and share it widely. And it is built, from day one, for humans and agents.

Why does this exist?

There’s a story I’m sick of hearing. Someone has an idea. They convince people to join. It’s a good idea. People like what they’re making. But somewhere along the way, things go awry. People argue. The thing gets worse. It falls apart. It could be a coffee shop, a think tank, or a startup. Good people have good ideas, and then they fuck it up with bad management.

I’ve been a founder. Three times. It’s hard. Like, really, really hard. No single challenge thrown at you is impossible, but the pace at which the challenges arrive, wave after wave, is exhausting. Just as you get decent at hiring, you realize you’re bad at running meetings. Or delegating. Oh, and you’re bad at giving feedback. And taking it. Not to mention your strategy docs, which, of course, suck, too. Thankfully, you’re fearless, leader. Except you’re not. You have to work on that, too.

I think of all the great stuff we’re missing out on: that great restaurant on the corner that imploded, causing a neighborhood martini drought. More seriously, I think of the medical devices, the electric cars, and skyscrapers that almost happened. John Collison, a co-founder of Stripe, wrote that “The world is a museum of passion projects.” But, man, it’s also a graveyard. Instead of letting that bum me out, I decided to do something about it. That something is this.

The thing is, we know a lot about what works in specific environments. Academics publish papers all the time, but founders don’t read them. Successful founders and executives share their stories in podcasts, blog posts, and books. Founders don’t have time to synthesize where academia and operators agree and disagree. But I do. And I love doing it.

Collecting ideas and putting them to use to make stuff better is a core part of who I am. Five ideas feel important enough to highlight here:

1. Learning by Doing (John Dewey): Too often, theory and practice are divorced. The academics are all theory. The founders are all practice. Knowing stuff has little value if you can’t do stuff. All of the content on Management Craft comes from a mix, and it’s built for you to take action.
2. The Golden Mean (Aristotle): All admirable traits and behaviors, or virtues, sit between two undesirable opposites: a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. Delegation is not inherently good or bad, but too little or too much can be painful. For each competency and tool, I’ve tried to calibrate between extremes.
3. Chiddush (Rabbinic Tradition): A Hebrew word for the obligation to discover novel insights from existing works and share what you’ve found with the world. The term applies to the study of the Torah. But I think it’s a beautiful idea, and I’m applying it to studying existing work on philosophy, management, and psychology. Thank you to Zohar Atkins.
4. The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition (Hubert & Stuart Dreyfus): In the 1980s, the Dreyfus brothers wrote a report for the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research studying how people learn. They came up with a simple rubric with five stages, emphasizing how novices need rules and rely on them to get started. The further up the scale you go, the more you’ve internalized those rules and rely on intuition. Every competency in Management Craft is plotted on the Dreyfus Model.
5. Augmenting Human Intellect (Doug Engelbart): Doug was a computer science pioneer. He believed computers would enable humans to solve important problems. That might sound obvious, but he believed this way earlier than most people did. His 1962 paper, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, laid out the framework for extending human capability through four classes: artifacts, language, methodology, and training. I’ve built Management Craft in line with this philosophy.

The primary tool I see people using to augment their intellect lately is artificial intelligence. If you ask an agent, yes, even a frontier model, to answer a question about a management challenge you’re having, you’re going to get a confident but shallow answer. Believe me, I have tried. But if you point your agent at a page with citations to source material, you’re going to get an educated answer. I’ve built every page on Management Craft with this in mind. I’m also playing with other ways for agents and humans to collaborate here. The Agent Mode on the MOC is one prototype. Others are coming soon.

Finally, this is my playground for deliberate practice as a writer, researcher, designer, executive coach, and teacher. I do plan on monetizing Management Craft somehow, but that’s not my primary motivation. In the fall of 2025, I developed a philosophy of life and work titled “Serious aims, playful methods.” I want my work to make an impact, but I’m committed to having fun while I do it. Which is why the brandmark is a wizard. Whether you see Gandalf, Merlin, or Dumbledore, each of those characters is the embodiment of the idea that you can’t have wisdom without a touch of mischief and generous helpings of play.

How is this made?

I build everything here on Management Craft, sometimes with the help of agents. With design, I do most things in Figma from scratch and hand off to an agent to implement. With writing, I use a different process for different types of content, which I’ve laid out below. As for research, I am a bibliophile. If a book is cited, it’s because I own it. I’ve also been experimenting with converting books, academic papers, articles, and podcast transcripts to markdown and adding them to a research vault in Obsidian. Because of that, agents help me compile research briefs and fact-check my writing.

Authorship levels

On every page you’ll find a byline stating how I collaborated with AI in my writing process. There are three levels.

My north star is to deliver high-quality practical wisdom to founders and leaders. I believe using AI enables me to do that. I am also painfully aware of AI’s limits, especially when it comes to prose. I’m one person, and I’m curious to see how much I can get out of agents.

Who am I?

I’m Andy Sparks. I’ve been an executive coach to 40+ founders and CEOs since 2020.

I’m obsessed with finding the recipes for what works as founders and executives scale from one to one hundred.

Management Craft feels like the beginning of a life’s work. It is my canvas for sharing what I find and honing my craft.

Previously, I founded Holloway and Mattermark. I wrote The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital. I’m active on Twitter and my personal site is andysparks.co.

Closing Note

Years ago, I bought a print of a piece titled Aún Aprendo by Francisco de Goya. Sketched near his death, it is a symbolic self-portrait of a man supporting himself by two canes. A white beard falls down to his stomach. He and the wizards who inspired Management Craft have much in common—curiosity and a work-in-progress—especially since the self-portrait’s title translates, roughly, to “I am still learning.”

I want my readers to trust me, and to earn that trust I better make sure that what I publish is accurate. I also know that it won’t always be accurate. All knowledge, after all, is subject to revision. If you find anything on Management Craft that is inaccurate or misleading, please write to me so I can fix it. And if you want to share feedback, ideas, or say hi, you can reach me at hi@andysparks.co.