your team is guessing. your AI is guessing harder.
People don’t think the way you think.
Slack messages with no clear ask. Emails that require a decoder ring. People bringing you problems instead of solutions. Recommendations so misframed you’d rather just do it yourself.
Your people don’t move at the speed you move. They don’t take the same level of initiative, ownership, and urgency that you do. And no matter how many times you explain it, the pattern repeats with every new hire, every new collaborator, every new tool in the stack.
What if you could fix that in 30 minutes?
Not with another all-hands or another onboarding deck. With a single document that downloads how you actually think, decide, and operate, so everyone and everything around you can work WITH you instead of having to read your mind.
I call it a CEO User Manual.
In an AI world of README files, this is the foundational one.
Your CEO User Manual
This is for you if you need to scale beyond your calendar.
A functional leader. A startup founder. A business unit exec. A subject matter expert.
Anyone whose way of operating shapes how others work.
Your User Manual is a structured document that makes your way of thinking and working principled, legible, and installable into the DNA of your team, your company, and most importantly – your agentic AI.
It goes deeper than what people can observe from the outside.
The User Manual makes explicit:
How you make decisions. Principles vs preferences, so people know what’s negotiable
What you need from others. What you expect from the people around you
How you communicate. Format, sequence, and how to deliver bad news vs good news
What energizes you. What produces your best work and what drains it
What triggers you. The specific things that set you off your center
Your honest unfiltered truths. Quirks, pet peeves, what people need to know about you
This document does three things at once:
It trains your team (human and AI)
It scales your thinking across the organization
It becomes a foundational operating document for every AI agent acting on your behalf
That’s what makes it the highest-leverage document a leader can create.
This is one of the first exercises I do with every client I work with.
What changes when you create a User Manual
For starters, your team can immediately level up their game.
In January, I onboarded a few new team members. Honestly, it was going painfully slow at first.
But the moment I gave them my updated User Manual, they started showing up in a whole new way. Their daily slack messages and weekly reports were the most structured, clear, and actionable I’ve ever received. They felt empowered to play a much bigger game. And the velocity of execution immediately jumped. Every week they share what they shipped, what they’ve learned, where they’re stuck, and where they need my input.
Productivity didn’t just improve. It multiplied.
Similarly, when I fed my User Manual into my Claude, all of my AI prompts and agents performed better.
My way of thinking and ways of working are now embedded in every system I interact with. The decisions it drafted reflected my actual principles. The communication carried my style. The priorities aligned with how I actually operate, not generic patterns.
With AI, we are all the personal CEO of our own world.
Learning to think like a CEO and training your AI to think like you is no longer optional.
Language is the new code base. And the team with the clearest language wins.
Universal principles and personal truths
The best User Manuals have two layers:
The universal layer. First principles, decision-making heuristics, how to frame a problem before solving it, how to distinguish signal from noise, what workability means in practice. This is the stuff that upgrades how anyone around you makes decisions. When someone reads this layer, they become a better thinker and operator regardless of context.
The personal layer. Your voice. Your quirks. Your specific triggers. Your love languages for receiving information. The 5-7 things you’ve learned the hard way in your career. Without this layer, the document reads like a generic leadership template. With this layer, people read it and think: “This is so you. I kind of knew it intuitively, but now it’s explicit.”
Both layers matter. The first gives people your operating system. The second gives people you - your most authentic self.
How to Create a User Manual for Yourself
I’ve built an AI prompt that walks you through the whole thing. See below.
The quick and dirty version will take you 10 minutes to output. The customized version will take you 30 minutes to produce.
Copy this prompt + see my own User Manual as a reference.
Use this Exact Prompt
Based on the concept of a “CEO User Manual” as defined and illustrated in the attached input, create a personalized User Manual based on everything that you know about me, my role, and how I think, work, decide, and define success. Use Michael Margolis’ CEO User Manual as an output reference that you can train on. Take note of his structured thinking. How might this philosophy and principles inspire how I level-up the performance of my own people: communications, ownership, alignment, collaboration. While you can borrow or steal anything from Michael’s, ensure that 30% of my manual is customized to my voice, philosophy, and personality, and makes my org different and unique. Rule: every bullet point or concept must be well defined with a clear why or description of what it looks like behaviorally, otherwise it will be lost in abstraction. Any reader needs to instantly recognize ME and know what to do after reading my user manual. Create a V1 Manual and then ask me questions to better personalize and refine the output for greatest excellence.
Follow these step-by-step directions:
Open your LLM tool of choice (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc).
Copy/paste the above exact prompt at the top of your new chat
Also copy/paste this entire newsletter’s text (this gives your AI the full detailed context)
Attach mine Michael Margolis User Manual v2.1 as a reference for AI to train on (Download in .MD or .DOCX format)
Then run the model and see what it generates!
V1 will take you 10 minutes.
Review v1 output and answer all the questions it has given you to further fine tune this CEO user manual as your own
V2 will take you another 20 minutes if you want to dial it in further.
When done, turn your User Manual into a READ ME file in .MD format (this is just plain text that is AI machine readable).
The test: could someone read this in 10 minutes and understand how I think and work without a single meeting?
Share it with one person you work closely with and ask: does this match what you know of me? Close any gaps.
Ask your AI to add the User Manual to memory, and use it as context for all future interactions
This is the most valuable single doc you create to unlock your AI.
One word of caution: I shared my new User Manual with three members of a peer advisory group. Within 48 hours, all three had created their own for their teams, but with 90% of my language still in it. The document worked. But it wasn’t theirs. Use my User Manual as a reference for structure and depth, not as a carbon copy. The exercise is about documenting and installing how you think across your team.
Reply to this email and let me know what you discover or find most useful.