The Efficient Treadmill: Why High-Speed Execution is Wasting Your Overhead

Have you ever felt like you are world-class at “doing things right,” but you aren’t “doing the right things”? You’re running fast, but staying in place.

Why do Operations Leaders Face Stagnant Growth? 

In my career, I have witnessed countless leaders face this mountain every year: how to grow the bottom line without incurring more costs or improving the organization’s efficiency. Why is it that they are facing this same mountain year after year and having an amnesia moment about it each time? Is it because they feel like their lot in life is to be Sisyphus? To wake up every morning, walk outside, and start pushing a boulder up the hill? Sounds terrible, but oddly, this is what many leaders do. 

The biggest reason this happens is that they believe efficiency is the ultimate goal of business. Although efficiency is important in any endeavor, you have to understand first that ensuring you are doing the right things first is much more important than trying to do things right and do things with a high level of efficiency. Leaders who think this way also believe that their workers need to be maxed out on their productive time while on the clock. If you stopped for a moment and focused on the right things first, you wouldn’t have high-speed processes serving zero strategic purpose. 

By adopting Portfolio Alignment, you eliminate wasted overhead and unlock high-impact growth. This is one of the first things that I recommend CEOs and Senior Leaders take the time to do. Building a Strategic Plan doesn’t need to be difficult, and it isn’t. But we make it exponentially more difficult when we insist that the processes we have in place are perfectly fine and require no adjustments before layering the Portfolio on top of them. Do the work of aligning the Portfolio and the Processes, and you will see the need to focus on efficiencies drop off fairly quickly as you start to see the outcomes you want.

Efficiency is a Multiplier 

Efficiency is a multiplier; if you multiply by zero, you still get zero. So when you audit your Process, here is 1 thing to consider: Strategic Intent. Instead of optimizing a weekly report no one reads, kill the process entirely and reallocate that speed to your top-tier growth goal. This ensures your team’s energy is spent on “needle-movers,” not just “box-checkers.”