The Catalyst Problem™

About the Book

Your organization has the talent. The funding. The customers. So why does everything take so long?

The feature everyone wants has been “two weeks out” since October. Nobody opposes it. Nobody ever opposed it. It simply doesn’t ship. If you’ve sat in that meeting, you know the most frustrating part: there is no villain. The people are capable. The budget is approved. Everyone wants the same outcome. Yet the work moves like it’s underwater.

The Catalyst Problem offers a new explanation, borrowed from chemistry. Organizations are collections of reactions. Every decision, launch, fix, sale, and customer interaction is a transformation that either happens or quietly fails to happen. What determines the rate isn’t talent, effort, or motivation. It’s activation energy: the barrier between “should” and “happening.”

Leaders, processes, documentation, systems, culture, and trust act as catalysts, lowering those barriers so work can move. As organizations grow, however, they often do the opposite. They raise barriers while poisoning the very catalysts that once made them fast. That compounding drag is The Catalyst Problem, and it explains why great organizations, precisely because of what made them great, gradually slow themselves down.

Through documented cases, you’ll discover:

• How a GM plant went from worst to best with the same workers in the same building.
• The Thursday meeting that helped save Ford by making truth inexpensive.
• How fear inside Nokia contributed to losing the smartphone race.
• Why Kodak invented the digital camera but couldn’t act on it.
• Berkshire Hathaway’s $1.5 billion handshake, and what trust removes from the cost of doing business.
• The eleven lines of code that broke the Internet, the checklist born from a bomber crash, and the trading firm that failed because it lacked the right kind of friction.

You’ll also learn practical tools you can use immediately, including the Vacation Test, the Persistence Test, the Two Levers of Leadership, and the Catalyst Audit: a simple method for tracing one stalled reaction from beginning to end and identifying every barrier in its path.

This is not another seven-step management system. There is no maturity model. No leadership manifesto. No checklist for your next offsite. Instead, you’ll gain a new way of seeing organizations. Once you begin viewing work as reactions, leaders as catalysts, and friction as activation energy, you’ll never look at meetings, approvals, or handoffs the same way again.

“Great organizations are not the ones that push the hardest. They are the ones with the least in the way.”

About the Author

Enric de Venoix is a writer, strategist, and single father who has spent his career watching capable organizations move slower than the people inside them, and asking why. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree, is a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, and has earned numerous certifications in artificial intelligence, information technology, operations management, and related fields. Throughout his career, he has solved complex problems through systems thinking and process improvement, translating complex ideas into practical frameworks that produce measurable results across both physical and digital environments.

He believes that most organizations are capable of far better outcomes than they are currently achieving, and that the gap between where they are and where they could be is usually a systems problem rather than a personal one. The core idea behind The Catalyst Problem is simple: organizations do not slow down because their people stop trying. They slow down because no one is watching what stands in the way.

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Last updated: August 2026