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Most business reviews are really performances.
We open the dashboard, point at the green numbers, explain away the red ones and move on. Everyone in the room, even if the room is only you, agrees to a story. I know that performance well. In the first part of my story I wrote that I was managing perceptions more than I was managing my business. A review that only measures results can become one more way to manage perceptions.
This is a reflection, not a method. I want to borrow one idea from recovery and see what it does to a quarterly review. Nothing here speaks for any recovery program, and none of it replaces the help of people who do that work.
What is a moral inventory, and why borrow it?
It is a written, honest accounting of yourself.
Alcoholics Anonymous publishes its Twelve Steps on its website. The fourth reads:
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Two words do the work. Searching means you do not stop at the first, comfortable answer. Fearless means you look even where it hurts. Step 10 returns to the same idea later: to keep taking personal inventory and to admit promptly when we are wrong.1
Why a business needs it
Most quarterly reviews ask what happened. Few ask who I was while it happened. Yet in a business run by one person or a handful of people, your conduct is part of the data. Delays you caused, promises you broke and conversations you avoided all show up as numbers later, with the cause stripped off.
What does the inventory look like in a business?
Four columns, written by hand or in a plain document, not a spreadsheet you can hide in.
| A typical business review | A business inventory |
|---|---|
| What were the numbers? | What did I promise, and what did I do? |
| What went wrong in the market? | What am I holding against someone, and what was my part? |
| Who should we blame or credit? | Where was I dishonest, rushed or avoiding? |
| What is the plan? | What do I owe, and what will I do differently? |
Column one: commitments
List what you committed to this quarter, to clients, to partners, to yourself and to the people close to you. Mark each as kept, partly kept or broken. Do not explain yet. Just be accurate.
Column two: resentments
Write down who or what you are angry at: a client, a vendor, a competitor, a platform, yourself. Then, beside each, write a plain sentence about your part. Maybe the part is small. Maybe it is only that you stayed silent when you should have spoken. The exercise is not to excuse anyone. It is to find the piece you can actually change.
Column three: results
Now the numbers. Put them down without adjectives. What the quarter produced is what it produced.
Column four: my part
This is the column most reviews never have. For each result and each broken commitment, ask: where did I contribute? Where did I avoid the thing that mattered? Write it as one honest sentence.
Bishop T.D. Jakes preached the same principle in a sermon posted on July 2, 2025, on the Men of Faith channel, in the middle of a message about changing course.3
VideoMen of Faith on TBN
T.D. Jakes: DON'T Be Afraid of Change; God Is at Work in Your Life | Men of Faith on TBN
A 26-minute sermon on change and responsibility, built on the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar.
His line, at 15:58: "Until we take responsibility for the mistakes we made, we cannot change course." That is column four in one sentence. Everything before it is description; this is where the change starts.
What does fearless honesty feel like in practice?
Quiet, and a little unpleasant at first.
It is not self-punishment
Some people hear "inventory" and picture a beating. That is not honesty. It is a different kind of performance, the performance of guilt. A good inventory ends with specific actions, not a mood. You see the pattern, you name it and you decide the next small right thing.
It makes room for the trials
The book of James tells believers to count trials as joy, because the testing of faith produces perseverance, and to let that perseverance finish its work so you may be mature and complete.2 I do not read that as a cheerful slogan. I read it as a claim that hard quarters do work on you if you let them, and that the work is lost if you look away from it. I wrote more about hard seasons in Endurance.
How do you run it?
- Set aside an hour with no screens except one document. Put your phone away.
- Write the four columns, in order. Keep each entry to a sentence or two.
- Read it once without editing. Notice what you want to soften.
- Circle three items where your part was clear, and decide one action for each.
- If something is owed, schedule the call or the message this week.
- Put a ten-minute check on your calendar each week to take a short inventory and admit anything new.
Then act on it
An inventory that does not change behavior is a diary. The value is in the small right actions that follow: the late reply sent, the honest message to a client, the project you stop pretending is fine.
Why this belongs next to the numbers
In HONEY, the word I use for a stable, nurtured, expanding company, the foundation is not a tactic. It is truth. I wrote in the story I have shared that you cannot build a stable company on top of a fractured soul. A quarterly inventory is a small, regular way to keep the foundation honest.
If any of this lands close to home, you can read the longer account in Talented, Impactful, and Alcoholic, Part 1 and Part 2. I add no new details here. If the posts or this piece raise something you want to talk about, you can write to me through the contact page below.
You cannot manage what you will not look at.
Keep building.Ekai
Questions people ask
What is a moral inventory?
In the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, Step 4 reads, 'Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.' It is a written, honest account of one's own conduct, motives and part in what has gone wrong.
How can a moral inventory apply to a business review?
It adds a question most reviews skip: what was my part? Alongside numbers, you write down commitments kept and broken, resentments you are carrying and the decisions that were yours.
Is this a replacement for recovery support?
No. This is a reflection on borrowing one principle for a business review. If you are struggling with alcohol or another addiction, a qualified professional or a recovery community can help in ways an essay cannot.
How often should I do an inventory like this?
Quarterly works well for a business review, with a short check each week. The Twelve Steps also describe continuing to take personal inventory and promptly admitting when wrong.
Sources
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