Hey Prof. they are making me do the grunt work. I want to lead, strategize, I am an MBA after all!

A common refrain I hear from lots of new and budding executives is about the preference for Strategy related work over Ops or the daily grunt work that keeps businesses ticking. Many of us regard strategy as the hot area to drive industry modifying thinking and make our professional mark. The foot soldier work by contrast is seen to be for the nameless and faceless mass, who will never make it to the C-suite. Almost like a corporate caste system in a sense.

What does running a business require?

In my experience running a business requires hundreds and thousands of activities functioning in sync, akin to a world-class orchestra. Sales forecasting, brand promotional planning, customer relationship management, procurement of raw and packaging materials, handling receivables, to take just a few examples, must mesh together in a never-ending cycle that brings goods and services to customers when and where they want them, and at prices and costs that create customer value and satisfaction while turning a neat profit for the firm. 24/7.

Strategy building or Ops?

Much like a solitary out-of-place music note that invokes the ire of an orchestra conductor, the business processes and activities of a firm must run round the clock without missing a step. Making sure that everything runs like clockwork is what Managers are focused on all the time. The heart of the corporation is in these moving parts, and technology often facilitates precise and unvarying duplication of repetitive tasks.

For example, customer orders have to be executed in full and on time. Meeting both conditions means reorders. Missing one means discussion, debate, explanations. All this stuff shows up in your P&L with negative signs. Nobody got promoted or paid a bonus for a negative sign.

When something does go amiss, executives have to drill down to the root cause of the problem and fix it. Reams of data will mask clues that only a patient and experienced corporate Sherlock Holmes will uncover. Despite sophisticated analytics, it is the managerial insight that must pinpoint the cause of an errant issue and propose steps to eliminate its recurrence, down to the bare minimum or less. Technology reduces millions of data points to patterns and trends and visual representations. It does not, however, give answers. That’s for the men and women who live in the trenches to come up with.

Further afield are the strategy formulating generals who look at the big picture, visualize the products and services and business models of the future, choose where to place bets after critically assessing organizational capabilities, navigate resource constraints and build up the firm’s master plan for sustained success. These strategy wizards rarely do only this job and no other. Strategy building is almost always a cross-functional process that draws subject matter experts from different levels of the organization and tasks them with assessing ongoing and future business possibilities and recommending the best approach to cash in on those opportunities.

To be clear, most strategy formulation is done by managers as an additional responsibility to their core jobs in Finance, Marketing, R&D, and so on. So, not always is there a distinct and defined boundary separating Strategy from Ops or day-to-day business management. I have to emphasize that rarely, if ever, do executives work on high-impact Strategy projects without having solid experience in managing business operations.

Whether I was a Product Manager or a Managing Director, more than 80% of my time was spent on running daily ops. For sure, I did formulate brand and business strategies and enjoyed it enormously. But I also analyzed sales data, studied the competition, wrote market research briefs, ran performance appraisals, made field visits and worked with my colleagues across all functions and levels to sort out niggling issues so the business could roll along as per plan. This was challenging and stimulating work too.

The final words...

Don’t make the mistake of demeaning routine business activities while glamourizing the sexier strategic projects. The best strategy is usually based on a sound understanding of business which comes from driving the daily details. It is when you are flawlessly running your business and consistently keeping the nuts-and-bolts dancing to one song, that you will qualify to work on the futuristic projects you’ve been dreaming about.

Now that you’ve emerged from the clouds and your feet are firmly on the ground, both of them, get back to work.

From the author's desk:

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