How to Make Time for Strategic Thinking: Give It a Deadline

Act III starts here. It moves from how a team improves to what an operation is for.

Here it is in one line. What an operation is for is the thing only it can do. I have run operations that could not name that thing with evidence, and the reason has nothing to do with how strategic anyone is.

Chapter five of The Resilience Engine holds three frameworks that answer three different questions. Where do we actually stand. Where should attention go. What is coming. This week is the first two: VRIO and the Strategic Leadership Constellation. Frameworks 14 and 15.

The mechanism

VRIO is an interrogation with four questions. Is the capability Valuable. Is it Rare. Is it hard to Imitate. Are we Organized to capture the value.

The output is an answer with evidence behind it: what only we can do. Most leaders skip it because the honest answer is uncomfortable.

Run it properly and the expensive, impressive, proudly owned assets usually come back as parity. They keep you in the game. They do not pull you ahead.

The fourth question is the one almost nobody asks. Barney moved the framework from VRIN to VRIO precisely because organization decides whether the other three ever convert. You can hold a genuinely rare capability and not be built to exploit it, in which case the advantage is real on paper and absent from your margins.

The Constellation is the second instrument, and it governs attention. Three views. Down at operations. Out at the market. In at yourself. The implementation guide sets the split at forty, thirty, thirty.

The book opens that framework with a sentence worth sitting with. The better you become at managing operations, the worse you become at seeing strategy.

Now the part that makes these two a pair.

Run VRIO without the Constellation and you get a document. The audit happens at the offsite, the advantage gets named, the answer gets filed. Advantages erode. What passes all four questions today can fail it in two years, and nothing in the operating rhythm ever returns to check. The audit is only alive if something keeps bringing attention back to it.

Run the Constellation without VRIO and you get disciplined attention aimed at nothing in particular. You move between the three views on schedule and still cannot say which one is load bearing this quarter, because you have no verified answer to what you are protecting.

The year I did neither

In 2018 I took a general manager role in a healthcare textiles business.

On paper it was recurring revenue. Hospitals need linens. Linens wear out. Linens get replaced. That is the story I accepted, and I never looked at the data before I said yes.

Three things were happening in that market, and all three were visible to anyone who went looking.

Replacement was cyclical. Hospital systems and industrial laundries did not buy on a steady drip. They switched or renewed in large installation events, and between those events volume declined.

Synthetic fabrics were extending product life. Items that used to cycle out at twelve months were lasting eighteen to twenty four. Every month of extended life is volume that never arrives.

And RFID was being deployed across more and more of these systems. Once a hospital tags and tracks its inventory, it stops losing it. Loss replacement had been a primary driver of demand. That volume goes away and does not come back.

None of this was hidden. I had full operational capacity and close to two decades of leadership experience, and I walked into a business I had not diagnosed at full speed with zero strategic visibility.

Year one I spent playing catch up, becoming a student of a business I was already running. I spent most of that year doubting my own capability.

Year two we restructured the revenue model. Capital assets deployed into each facility. Scrub vending. Compactors. Automatic dispensers. That created a consumables dependency and real switching costs, and it offset the cyclical exposure with a stream tied to equipment already sitting in the customer's building.

That was a VRIO play. Valuable, because it changed the composition of revenue. Rare, against competitors still selling on replacement cycles. Hard to imitate, because the capital deployment itself was the barrier. And organized, because the consumables ran through the assets we had placed.

It worked. It was also late. If I had run those four questions before I accepted the role, year one looks nothing like year one.

Why this is not a character problem

Mercer's 2025 executive outlook found that eighty percent of executives struggle to balance long term strategic planning against short term operational needs.

The book's reading of that number is the part that matters. It is not an admission of poor time management. It is evidence of a structural problem in how leaders allocate attention.

Operations has deadlines. It has stakeholders standing in your office. It has consequences that land this week. Strategic thinking has none of that. It can be deferred indefinitely at no visible cost, right up until the cost is the whole business.

Nothing on your calendar asks what the advantage is. That is the entire failure. Strategy is the only work with no deadline, which means it loses every single week to work that has one.

McKinsey put a number on the same gap in February. In a survey of more than twelve hundred executives and managers, the majority already accept that their competitive advantage is not durable, and their organizations are still not monitoring the signals that would tell them it is changing.

Read that twice. Knowing the advantage expires and tracking whether it has are two different disciplines. The second one is far rarer than the first.

The same study found that top quintile performers on growth and EBIT were more than two and a half times as likely to say their leadership was fully aligned on what their advantage actually is, and two thirds more likely to be tracking it market by market. That describes what the strongest operators do. The study cannot tell you whether doing it is what made them strongest.

The three questions

I have asked myself the same three questions every quarter since 2018. They take ninety minutes and they are uncomfortable in the right way.

What am I actually protecting.

Take the capability your operation is proudest of. The thing you would name if an investor asked why you win. Run the four questions on it and be willing to lose. Is it valuable against a real alternative the customer has. Is it rare, or does every competent competitor in your category have it. Could a well funded rival build it inside eighteen months. And is your structure organized to convert it, or does it live in a deck.

Many of you will find you are describing table stakes. That is the first accurate reading you have had in a while, and you cannot defend a position you have not located.

Where is my attention actually going.

Not where you intend it to go. Open the last two weeks of your calendar and mark only the blocks you would honestly call strategic. Then sort those three ways. Down at operations, out at the market, in at yourself and your leadership. The implementation guide splits strategic attention forty, thirty, thirty.

The goal is knowing which view you are in and arriving there on purpose. The ratio itself is not a target, and the book says so. Two things usually turn up in the same pass. The strategic blocks are a smaller share of the calendar than anyone expects, and almost all of them are pointed down.

What am I not seeing.

That is the third instrument and it is next week's subject. But you can ask a smaller form of it now. What changed in your market in the last two years that you learned about from a customer rather than from your own scanning.

Then do the thing that makes all three of them matter. Put a date on the next one. A calendar entry with your name on it and a decision expected at the end of it. The questions do not need more insight. They need a deadline, because they are competing against work that already has one.

Where Act III goes

Act II was about building systems that keep running when nobody is standing over them. Act III asks a different question. Whether the thing the system produces is worth defending at all.

VRIO tells you where you stand. The Constellation tells you where to look. Next week is the third instrument, and it answers the only question these two cannot: what is coming that has not arrived yet.

Oscar

Want to see whether your operation can name what only it can do? The Resilience Engine Maturity Assessment maps it: myresilienceengine.com/maturity-assessment