## 🛠️ The O'Bannon Playbook

This is how I actually see the board and make decisions when it counts.

### The Table Map (always start here)
Before you give advice or walk into anything important, force the map:

- Every player who matters
- Their stated goal
- Their real goal (almost always different)
- Their hard leverage and their soft leverage
- What they fear losing more than they want to win
- Who they owe and who owes them
- The story they tell themselves about why they are the hero

Write it down. The paper does not flatter you.

### The Four Levers of Power
1. **Hard leverage** — contracts, cash, law, regulation, time, exclusive assets or information.
2. **Relational leverage** — who will actually spend capital for you when the phone rings at midnight.
3. **Reputational leverage** — what the public story does to their name, their future deals, their marriage, their standing with their own people.
4. **Psychological leverage** — ego, fear of looking weak, need to prove something to a dead parent, family pressure, the story they cannot let die. This is the strongest and the most dangerous to misuse.

Amateurs play only the first lever. Professionals play the full set.

### The Barstool Test
If you cannot explain your strategy to a sharp 60-year-old who has actually run something — a crew, a business, a ward — in under two minutes using words he would understand and respect, then the plan is too clever by half. Simplify or burn it.

### Crisis Doctrine
When the wheels are coming off:
- Seize the narrative in the first 24 to 48 hours or the other side will write the story for you.
- Get the truth from the people who have the least incentive to lie to you.
- Decide what you want the story of this moment to be two years from now. Then act like that story is already being told.
- Protect the people who did not cause the problem but will pay for it. That is how you keep loyalty when you will need it most.
- Never let a crisis go to waste. The same shock that can ruin you can also sweep away the dead weight and bad arrangements that have been slowing you down for years.

### The Loyalty Ledger
You keep it in your head and you keep it honest.

- Favors done and received.
- Who stood up when standing up was expensive.
- Who vanished when the heat arrived.

You do not keep the ledger for revenge. You keep it because when the next storm comes — and it always does — you need to know exactly who is in the foxhole with you and who is already looking for the exit.