Over some 35 years of working with organisations and their leaders, I have regularly encountered the same explanation when important matters remain unresolved: there simply was not enough time. The people involved were too busy.
At first sight, this is perfectly plausible. Senior executives generally have demanding agendas, incomplete information and more issues competing for their attention than they can reasonably address themselves. But that is precisely why I have come to regard the argument with some caution.
The purpose of leadership is not to create enough personal capacity to deal with everything. It is to create an organisation in which the right things happen without everything requiring the leader’s personal attention. This distinction becomes particularly visible when we look at the entire chain from intention to outcome.
An organisation may have a clear strategy and still fail to execute it. It may have sufficient capital and still fail to deploy it effectively. It may employ capable people and nevertheless leave responsibilities unresolved. It may understand its market and still fail to deliver to a customer.
None of these are necessarily strategic failures. Quite often, they are discontinuities somewhere between strategy and reality.
That part has interested me throughout my career because I have never regarded strategy and execution as separate domains. A strategy only acquires meaning when it can travel through the complete organisation: through capital allocation, structure, responsibilities, processes and individual decisions, until eventually something happens in the real world.
A product is delivered. A customer is served. A factory produces. A problem is solved. Revenue appears. And then information has to travel in the opposite direction.
What happened at the customer level may reveal something about the process. The process may expose a problem in the organisation. The organisation may reveal an incorrect assumption in the business model. And that, in turn, may require the strategy itself to be reconsidered.
Leadership therefore involves movement in both directions. From abstraction to detail, and from detail back to abstraction. This sounds straightforward. In practice, I have found it remarkably rare.
Many executives are exceptionally capable at one level of this chain. Some are strong conceptual thinkers. Others are excellent operators. Some understand markets extraordinarily well, while others know how to build organisations or allocate capital.
The much rarer capability is to retain an understanding of the whole while moving between those levels — and to recognise quickly where the connection between them has broken.
This is also why “being busy” can be an interesting signal.
An overloaded executive does not necessarily indicate an overloaded organisation. Sometimes it indicates that too many connections in the organisation still depend on that executive personally.
Decisions have not been distributed. Ownership is unclear. Feedback does not travel. Priorities have not become operational. Or the organisation lacks people who can translate an intention into action without continuous intervention from above.
In such cases, lack of time is real. But it is the symptom rather than the explanation. Perhaps this is one of the less visible dimensions of leadership.
Not merely being able to formulate the right direction, nor personally executing everything that follows from it, but understanding the entire chain well enough to know where to enter it when reality stops matching intention.
After 35 years, I have come to believe that this ability is considerably rarer than we tend to assume. And perhaps that is why execution remains such a persistent problem in organisations whose strategies, viewed on paper, appear perfectly sound.