The crucial little things no CEO can afford to miss
Ignoring processes when planning business growth is like changing the headlights and expecting the car to go faster.
From the CEO’s chair, the horizon expands, but the details vanish.
Nothing seems to be working
Sarah pulled over to the curb. A gentle wind chased golden leaves across the lawns—autumn had spoken out loud.
Silence and calm lay all around her. In the business district, where her company’s office stood just fifteen minutes away, such peace was unheard of.
Matthew, the legend of the industry, lived here. In 2015, he led his company to the heights of success. Two years ago, he retired.
Sarah met Matthew at a conference where he served as the keynote speaker.
Summoning her courage, she approached Matthew after his talk to seek his advice. He answered all her questions and handed her his business card. “If you have any questions, just reach out to me. I’ll be happy to help,” he said.
Now, Sarah needed his help again. She emailed Matthew, and he invited her to his home office.
Matthew—a trim man with silver hair and a short beard—greeted Sarah on the porch. He led her into a sparsely furnished office and offered coffee.
“What brings you to me?” Matthew asked, settling into the chair behind the desk. “Where should I begin…” Sarah said thoughtfully. “In short, nothing seems to be working out for me.”
Strategy, goals, and processes
When the board appointed Sarah CEO, the chairperson said, “We expect you to make this old business young again. We need growth—fast growth. Otherwise, we’ll lose everything we’ve built over twenty years.”
Sarah rolled up her sleeves. She and her team crafted a new strategy—bold goals, broad vision, and big plans.
The team cascaded the goals down into objectives. Everyone seemed to know what to do. But now, ten months later, most goals remained where they had begun—on paper.
“What am I doing wrong?” Sarah asked.
“Did you get into the processes?” Matthew said.
“Processes?” Sarah raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, processes,” Matthew nodded. “That’s usually the real problem. Processes are actually one of the five key pillars of growth architecture.”
Goals are vertical. Processes are horizontal
Matthew set his coffee cup on the desk, rose, and moved to the flip chart. Picking up a red marker, he drew a few quick lines. “I bet your goals look something like this.” A rough pyramid took shape on the paper.
Sarah nodded.
“But your processes are horizontal. Or rather, they flow in all directions—like this,” Matthew said, adding a few lines with a blue marker to his drawing.
“When you ignore processes in your strategy, you only see part of the picture,” he said as he returned to his chair.
“It’s hard to believe it now,” he continued, “but many years ago I was overweight. When I decided to lose weight, I started with the obvious—went on a diet and hit the gym,” he said, crossing one leg over the other. “But the results were far from great. More coffee?”
Sarah shook her head.
“So I started wondering—why was I gaining weight in the first place? I read about weight loss, watched myself closely, and I realized the cause was my anxiety. It’s a more complex process than it seems. What I needed wasn’t a treadmill, but a change in my mindset.”
Sarah listened intently, though she still couldn’t see where Matthew was heading with this.
“Take customer delivery, for example,” Matthew went on. “It’s also a complex process with lots of smaller steps that cut across almost every department—HR, IT, finance, you name it. If your strategic goal is, say, ‘speeding up customer delivery,’ you’re most likely just chasing low-hanging fruit. You remove the biggest—and most obvious—obstacles, but overlook the small details.”
He sipped his coffee.
“You may install the best logistics software in the world,” Matthew said, leaning back in his chair. “But undertrained staff in accounting or an outdated document management system at the warehouse can kill the whole project outright. I learned this lesson when I was CEO—the hard way.”
“So, what do you advise me to do?” asked Sarah.
“Map out your key processes. Pick the ones that have the biggest impact on customer value. Dive deep into them and check every detail. Then rewrite your goals. For example, use ‘change the customer-delivery process to cut delivery time from … to …’ instead of ‘speed up customer delivery from … to ….’”
“Many strategies have failed because company leaders saw processes as merely ‘tactical’ or ‘operational,’” Matthew continued. “But a company operates by managing the processes that create customer value. Strategy is simply how you change those processes—to create even more value.”
“Executives rarely see small details. Front-line employees rarely see the whole picture. So, executives make decisions – like installing new logistics software – but they don’t work because they overlook small but crucial details. Front-line workers just do what they’re told,” Matthew smiled, “And the results are often disappointing. By the way, that’s why startups sometimes beat large companies — the founders notice details that big CEOs overlook.”
Sarah looked out the window. Tree branches swayed in the wind, shedding the last of their brown leaves. A gray cat crept across the lawn, glancing cautiously from side to side.
She had never thought about goals from that angle before; Matthew’s words had a ring of truth…
Do Sarah’s problems sound familiar? I faced them myself when I was CEO—and I know how costly they can be.
That’s why I built the course Architects of Business Growth: to show you how to grow your business faster by linking processes directly to customer value and fixing what really holds you back. You’ll walk away with a clear framework you can apply the very next day.
Hundreds of CEOs have already used this approach to streamline their companies—and you can be next.
Take a look at this bit from the introductory lesson.
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