Dr. No #57 – How to run Legal like a CEO (without losing your sanity)

Hey lawyer,

Matt Mochary has coached some of Silicon Valley’s biggest founders. His book The Great CEO Within is a manual for turning chaos into clarity. And it works for GCs just as much as for billion-dollar CEOs.

1. Food for Thought

Is your calendar a strategy tool — or just a museum of everyone else’s priorities?

2. Big Ideas for GCs (Mochary-style)

The Weekly Rhythm
Mochary insists leaders run on a predictable cadence — or drown in noise.

• Weekly 1:1s. Every direct report gets a fixed slot. The agenda: their priorities, their blockers, and what they need from you. No surprises, no firefighting.

• Weekly team meeting. One fixed hour. Review team objectives, wins, learning points and risks. Keep it boringly consistent. Why? Because chaos doesn’t scale, but rhythm does.

• Weekly reflection. Block 30 minutes for yourself. Ask: what did Legal deliver this week that mattered to the business? If you can’t answer, you’re busy, not valuable.

GC takeaway: Rhythm replaces drama. Predictable beats heroic.

Radical Candour
Mochary: don’t hoard awkward truths. Deliver them fast, respectfully, and consistently. For a GC, that means not waiting until quarter-end to tell the CFO the compliance programme is three months behind.

Delegation = Survival
Every task you can do isn’t one you should do. If your brain is in NDAs, it’s not in board strategy. Create playbooks, train juniors, or outsource. Delegation is leverage, not laziness.

3. Mental Model – The Eisenhower Matrix (decision edition)

Buffett and Munger talk about opportunity cost. Eisenhower gave it a grid:

• Urgent & important: Do it now.

• Important but not urgent: Schedule deep work.

• Urgent but not important: Delegate.

• Neither: Delete.

GC translation: stop treating “urgent but not important” (vendor NDAs, meeting theatre) like your life’s mission. Protect the “important but not urgent” (strategy, governance, trust-building). That’s where influence compounds.

4. AI Booster – Avoid.so

Bypass AI detection with 99.8% success. Perfect if you also teach law and don’t want your lecture notes flagged as “AI-generated” when it’s really just you using smarter prompts.

5. Quote to Reflect

“Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” – Peter Drucker

P.S.
When your lawyers are stuck re-drafting consumer contracts, labelling agreements, or advertising terms, they’re not building strategy — they’re babysitting paper.

Ámbar solves that.
We provide fractional contract counsel for niche consumer contracts across industries:

• Consumer healthcare

• Publicity and marketing

• Sales and distribution

• Labelling and regulatory fine print

They drop in, take over, and free up your team’s headspace — so you can spend your scarce hours on strategy, not on formatting clauses about “small print on packaging.”

Book a call with Ambar — and turn Legal from contract factory into value engine.