Making Time for Strategy: Why Owners Need Distance from Daily Business

Why is there never time for strategy?

On Monday a morning for strategy is in the calendar. At half past eight a customer calls about a late delivery, at ten an employee calls in sick, and at eleven the bank wants a document. By noon the morning is over and strategy is postponed to next week. Next week the same thing happens.

Many owners experience this pattern and interpret it as a personal weakness. They think they need to be more disciplined. This article pursues a different question: Why does daily business crowd out work on strategy, and how much distance is necessary and realistic for an owner?

To answer it, we first clarify the terms and introduce a classic thinking model. Then we look at how chief executives actually spend their time, weigh two views, and describe a rhythm for everyday use.

What does strategy work mean in a small business?

Strategy here means the few decisions that determine where the business heads over the next few years. Which customers, which services, which markets, which investments, and what the business deliberately does not do. Strategy work is the time in which the owner prepares, tests, and adjusts these decisions.

It is distinct from daily business: everything needed so that today's deliveries, sales, and invoices get done. It is no less important. But it announces itself, while nobody demands strategy work. No customer calls because the owner has not thought about pricing strategy for three months.

The article From Founder to Business Owner describes this difference with the formula of working on the business and not only in it. This article asks why that is so hard.

The thinking model: Gresham's law of planning

The financier Thomas Gresham is associated with a sixteenth-century observation: bad money drives out good. When coins with low and high precious-metal content circulate at the same time, people keep the good ones and spend the bad ones. In the end only bad coins are in circulation.

In their 1958 book “Organizations,” James March and Herbert Simon applied this idea to managerial work. Their Gresham's law of planning states that daily routine drives out planning. Tasks that are familiar, clearly defined, and urgent prevail over tasks that are open, new, and without a deadline. This happens not because anyone considers planning unimportant, but because routine always has an occasion and planning never does.

Experiments confirm the mechanism. Zhu, Yang, and Hsee (2018) showed that people often choose the task that seems urgent, even when the important one objectively pays off more. The article Time Management for Owners describes this urgency effect in detail, including an independent replication with more than 2,000 participants.

Strategy does not lose to what is important. It loses to what is next.

How do chief executives spend their time?

In a famous 1973 study, the Canadian Henry Mintzberg observed chief executives at work. He described their activity as brief, varied, and fragmented. Instead of planning in peace, they switched at short intervals between conversations, phone calls, and interruptions. This picture shaped research for a long time.

Bandiera, Prat, Hansen, and Sadun (2020) re-examined the question with a much larger sample. For one week they recorded all activities of 1,114 chief executives of manufacturing firms in Brazil, France, Germany, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, through daily calls to the executives themselves or their assistants. In total they recorded 42,233 activities.

Two results contradict the image of the harried executive. Only 4 percent of the time went to activities classed as emergencies, and less than ten percent of appointments planned in the morning were canceled. The week of these executives was thus largely planned. The question is not whether they plan, but what they plan for.

This is where the third finding comes in. The authors distinguished two behavioral patterns. Some spent more time in meetings with several functions and with top management. The authors call them leaders. Others spent more time in one-on-one meetings with the core business, such as production, and on plant visits. The authors call them managers. Companies headed by leaders were on average more productive, and it took about three years for a new chief executive to make a difference. But the authors stress that the differences are explained mainly by poor fit: not every company needs the same type.

The limits of this study matter for owners of small businesses. It looks at manufacturing firms whose chief executives have assistants and management teams. An owner with twelve employees often has no top management team to meet with. What carries over is the idea that the structure of the week results from conscious decisions and that what the time is spent on makes a difference.

First view: strategy needs distance

The first view follows from Gresham's law of planning. If routine drives out planning, planning must be protected from routine: through fixed slots, a different place, a day without the phone. In this view, strategy arises in calm, at a distance, on the basis of numbers and assumptions that are tested.

Research on planning in small businesses supports this view. In a meta-analysis, Schwenk and Shrader (1993) found a small but positive relationship between formal planning and the performance of small firms. The article The Annual Strategy Check describes what such an afternoon with five questions can look like.

Second view: strategy emerges in daily business

The second view disagrees. Mintzberg and Waters (1985) distinguished between deliberate and emergent strategy. Many strategies are not designed at a desk but form out of many individual decisions in everyday business: from a customer asking for a new service, from an order that goes surprisingly well. In this view, an owner who moves too far from daily business loses touch with precisely the signals from which a good strategy emerges.

For small businesses this view carries particular weight. The owner is often the person with the closest contact to the most important customers. The findings of Bandiera and colleagues on fit support this: for some companies, a chief executive who works close to the core business is the better choice.

I consider both views right, but for different parts of the work. Signals arise in daily business. They are evaluated at a distance. An owner who is only in daily business collects signals without sorting them. One who withdraws completely sorts without getting new signals. What follows is not withdrawal, but a rhythm.

The Distance Rhythm: three fixed slots

The Distance Rhythm gives strategy work three slots at different intervals. It takes Gresham's law into account by scheduling the slots firmly, and the second view by explicitly collecting signals from everyday business.

1. Treat slots like customer appointments

   Enter the three slots a year in advance. Only move them if you would also move a customer appointment.

2. Change location

   Do not spend the monthly half day at your desk in the business. Another room is enough, as long as nobody is standing in the doorway with a question.

3. Arrange cover

   Decide who makes decisions during this time and in which cases you can be reached. How to organize cover is described in Arranging Cover.

4. Start with a question

   Begin every slot with a concrete question, such as: “Which customer group grew last quarter, and why?” Open-ended brooding without a question is tiring and rarely produces a result.

5. End with a decision

   Close every monthly slot with a decision or a review assignment with a date. How strategy is then implemented in everyday business is described in Implementing Strategy.

What follows beyond the question of time

The idea reaches beyond the calendar. An owner who never gains distance still makes strategic decisions, only on the side and under pressure: when a large customer leaves, a competitor cuts prices, or a key employee resigns. Strategy then arises from reactions. Distance does not prevent such situations, but it ensures the owner sees them coming earlier. Thinking through several possible developments leaves you better prepared, as the article Scenarios Instead of Forecasts shows.

Distance is also a question of recovery. The article The Owner's Workload describes a study finding that French small business owners recover less well than employees, especially when it comes to switching off. An owner who never steps out of daily business loses not only the strategic view but also energy.

The limits of the argument: not every business needs a lot of strategy work. In stable markets with loyal customers, the annual strategy check is often enough. And the Distance Rhythm is a proposal, not an established method. What is established is only that routine drives out planning if you let it.

Conclusion: why does the owner need distance?

The question was
daily business crowds out work on strategy and how much distance is necessary and realistic. Gresham's law of planning answers the first part: routine always has an occasion, strategy never does. That is not a lack of discipline but a mechanism that affects everyone.

The answer to the second part is a rhythm instead of withdrawal. Signals arise in daily business; they are evaluated at a distance. The study by Bandiera and colleagues shows that the week of even very busy chief executives is largely planned. So the question is not whether an owner has time for strategy. The question is whether they schedule it before routine does it for them.