The Strategy That Reaches the Floor · Chapter Two

The Ball Thrown Back

The middle is where a target is most often lost, because the only direction it is allowed to travel is down.

Ammanuel Santa Anna · ORCID 0009-0008-3244-0306

Chapter Two of The Strategy That Reaches the Floor: Where a Plan Is Lost Between the Board and Monday Morning.

Abstract

The middle is where a target is most often lost, because the only direction it is allowed to travel is down. It is ten to seven on a Thursday evening in November, and the regional manager is sitting in her car in the car park of the third hotel she has visited today. The engine is off. The windscreen has begun to mist at the edges, and the light from the hotel's lobby falls in a long yellow square across the tarmac beside her. On her phone is the email she has been waiting for since September: next year's targets for her twelve hotels, one line each, agreed by the executive team that afternoon. She is asked to cascade them to her general managers by Monday. She reads the list twice. Ten of the lines are hard and fair. Two are not. Both belong to hotels where she spent an hour this week, and at both the general manager walked her past a housekeeping rota that already runs two people short on a Saturday.

Read the PDFRead the whole bookdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989183

Cite this chapter

Santa Anna, A. (2026). The Ball Thrown Back. In The Strategy That Reaches the Floor. Luminous Prosperity Inc. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23989183

@incollection{santaanna2026the2,
  author    = {Santa Anna, Ammanuel},
  title     = {The Ball Thrown Back},
  booktitle = {The Strategy That Reaches the Floor},
  chapter   = {2},
  publisher = {Luminous Prosperity Inc.},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.23989183},
  url       = {https://business.hautelumiere.life/library/the-strategy-that-reaches-the-floor/02-the-ball-thrown-back/}
}

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Every chapter of The Strategy That Reaches the Floor

  1. Chapter OneThree Priorities on a Carddoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989181
  2. Chapter TwoThe Ball Thrown Backdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989183
  3. Chapter ThreeThe Number That Stood Indoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989185
  4. Chapter FourThe Review That Reported Greendoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989187
  5. Chapter FiveThe Strategy You Already Followdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989189
  6. Chapter SixThe First Ninety Daysdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989191
  7. Chapter SevenThe Field Manualdoi:10.5281/zenodo.23989194

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The licence

Free to read, share, quote, translate and teach, non-commercially, for ever, under the Luminous Library Licence 1.0. Every other right is the Author’s. Deposited on Zenodo in the Luminous Prosperity community.