Reading · Adrian Fleming · RSS Amplifier

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Are you doing the right thing badly, or the wrong thing well? The question takes a minute. Skipping it can take the business down.

Operational excellence has a ceiling, and the ceiling is the business underneath it.

You can run a commercially broken business with breathtaking efficiency. It will fail anyway, just very smoothly.

When a business starts to struggle, the operator goes to work. They tighten the operation. They cut the waste, sharpen the process, restructure the team, lift the execution. They do, in other words, the thing they are good at, harder. It is a natural response and often a brave one.

And sometimes it is aimed at completely the wrong problem, because not every problem a business has is an operational one, and operational effort applied to a commercial problem does not solve it. It just makes the failure tidier.

OPERATORS REACH FOR THE OPERATIONAL LEVER BECAUSE IT IS HERS

This is human, and worth saying without judgement. When something is wrong, people reach for the tool they know.

The operator’s tool is execution. Process, structure, efficiency, discipline, delivery. It is their craft and their competence and the thing they are trusted to handle. So when the business is in trouble, the operator instinctively frames the trouble as an execution problem, because an execution problem is one they know how to fix.

The framing is not chosen dishonestly. It is just the shape of the world as seen from the operator’s chair. To a person whose lever is operations, every problem develops a suspicious resemblance to an operations problem.

SOME PROBLEMS ARE NOT OPERATIONAL AT ALL

Here is the distinction that matters, and it is a clean one. There are two kinds of problem a business can have.

An operational problem is when you are doing the right thing badly. The offer is good, the market wants it, the pricing works, and the business is simply executing poorly. Slow delivery, waste, errors, chaos. Operations is exactly the fix.

A commercial problem is when you are doing the wrong thing, regardless of how well. The offer is weak. The pricing is wrong. You are selling to the wrong customers. The market has moved and the business has not. No quantity of clean execution touches any of that, because the thing being executed is itself the problem.

Operational excellence makes you better at what you do. It is silent, completely silent, on whether what you do is worth doing. And a commercial problem lives entirely inside that silence.

OPERATING HARDER ON A COMMERCIAL PROBLEM MAKES IT WORSE

This is the part that should stop an operator cold. Applying operational effort to a commercial problem is not merely useless. It is actively expensive.

Picture a business with a weak offer. The operator, reading it as an execution problem, drives the operation harder. The team gets leaner and faster. Delivery tightens. The process hums. And the business is now extremely efficient at producing and selling a thing the market does not really want.

You have lowered the cost of the failure and raised its volume. You have scaled the broken thing. The team is exhausted, the dashboards look respectable, the unit economics of the wrong product have never been cleaner, and the business is still going to fail, only now it will do so at speed, on budget, and with everyone working very hard right up to the end.

OPERATORS KEEP DOING IT BECAUSE THE ALTERNATIVE IS UNCOMFORTABLE

If this is so clear in hindsight, why is it so common. Because admitting a commercial problem costs the operator something.

An operational problem sits inside the operator’s control and competence. Naming it is almost flattering, it says “here is something I am equipped to fix.” A commercial problem sits outside that. It often belongs to the founder, or the strategy, or a decision made years ago. Naming it means saying the issue is not the thing you are best at, and that more of your craft will not help.

So the operator keeps polishing. Not from stupidity, but because polishing is doing, and doing feels better than standing in a meeting and saying the offer itself is the problem. The discomfort of the truth keeps the business busy with the wrong cure.

DIAGNOSE THE KIND OF PROBLEM BEFORE YOU ACT

The fix is a single question, asked honestly, before any effort is spent. Are we doing the right thing badly, or the wrong thing well.

If the honest answer is the right thing badly, then the operational toolkit is exactly right, and you should reach for it with confidence. Tighten, sharpen, execute. That is the job.

If the honest answer is the wrong thing well, then put the operational toolkit down, because it cannot help and using it will only cost you. Your job in that moment is not to optimise. It is to name the commercial problem plainly, to whoever owns it, and to force the commercial conversation that the business has been avoiding. That is harder and far more valuable than another round of efficiency.

Most operators skip the question entirely and reach straight for the tool. The question takes a minute. Skipping it can take a business down.

THE REFRAME

None of this diminishes operational excellence. A well-run operation is a genuine and valuable thing, and when the problem is operational there is no better person to have than a great operator. It means operational excellence has a ceiling, and the ceiling is whether the business underneath it is commercially sound.

Your value as an operator is not only that you can execute brilliantly. Plenty of people can execute brilliantly. Your value is that you can tell which kind of problem is actually in front of you, and that you will say so honestly, even when the honest answer is that the fix is not the thing you are best at.

That is a discipline, and it is a different one from operational craft. It takes the clarity to separate the commercial from the operational, and the nerve to name a commercial problem rather than quietly optimising around it. The best operators build that judgement deliberately, or they bring in someone who reads the commercial side, so the business gets the right kind of fix rather than just more of the available one.

Do that, and your operational excellence gets pointed at problems it can actually solve. Skip it, and you will keep delivering flawless, efficient, beautifully run journeys to exactly the wrong destination.

You cannot operate your way out of a commercial problem. The first job is always to work out which kind of problem you are holding.

I created this Substack for business owners working too hard for too little return.

Each article draws on 30+ years as a business owner and angel investor to help you diagnose what’s really holding your business back, cut through the noise, make sharper commercial decisions, reduce avoidable risk, and act on the opportunities that actually matter.

Apply what you read, and you’ll stop confusing effort with progress. You’ll see your business more clearly, make better calls, and start fixing the problems costing you money, momentum and confidence.

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