The Demon Of The Temporary Hides In Every Business

It’s a common story: the business owner or management team fills in for operations.

Especially in organizations with limited funds and staff, like small and medium-sized businesses or startups, it’s a very common story.

All the more so when it’s part of an innovative activity.

Operations and innovation are not opposing concepts. Small innovations are embedded in operational work, and operational work is scattered throughout innovation work as well.

Now, the scene described above, where “the owner fills in,” is proof that operations aren’t running smoothly, even if only temporarily.

Here lies “the demon of the temporary.”

What kind of situation counts as temporary?

For example: a staff member calls in sick, an urgent delivery comes up, trouble occurs at a site outside the office and staff get pulled in, or a task arises that hasn’t been assigned to anyone. Several of these tend to happen at once, and that too is a common story.

If the owner fills in every single time a staff member calls in sick, that’s a bad sign, and staffing needs to be rethought. If it’s simply an urgent delivery, the company should be able to push a lower-priority delivery to the next day and get through it with existing staff. If it’s simply staff being pulled to an external site, the company should be able to adjust staffing from another department. If it’s simply some nitpicky task that came up, that kind of thing happens fairly often, so a system should already be in place—positions like “general affairs” or “secretary”—so that staff member can handle it.

But when these things happen simultaneously, the company can’t handle them all, and the owner ends up pulled into operational work.

Even so, it’s a common story.

The trouble starts when the interpretation of “temporary” keeps expanding, almost imperceptibly, with an attitude of “well, just this once,” “these things happen,” “guess it’s like that again this time…”

That is when great caution is needed.

This means “the cost you’re assuming is wrong.” Or it means “your company is actually running at a loss,” or “your company’s loss is bigger than you think,” or “your company’s profit is smaller than you think.” Because more investment—in personnel costs, in building systems—is actually needed. Skimping on that only achieves the appearance of cost reduction. In other words, it’s a slow bleed.

What the owner should actually be thinking about is either reviewing the operational workload and increasing staff to match it, or rethinking the operational flow and department structure. And in line with that, they will also need to adjust future funding plans, bonuses, purchasing funds, sales plans, and business strategy. No one but the owner or management team can do this on their own. Devoting brainpower to that is their job.

Just when it’s finally their turn to step up, it’s not the moment to be out on the floor doing operational work, breaking a good sweat, and enjoying a refreshing beer afterward. That laziness will, in the future, come back to strangle the employees.

That said, where this gets tricky is the pattern mentioned earlier: “operations within innovation work.”

Naturally, countless operational tasks exist in the middle of an innovative process. And sometimes, in the course of handling operations, you stumble onto material that connects to innovation. I remember when I was in the US, I built a business plan, did the design, did the prototyping, built everything from the hardware to the web application myself, and even worked the booth explaining it at an exhibition. My French-American friend was quite surprised, asking, “Are you seriously doing all of that by yourself?”

Overall it counts as innovation, but the inside of it is full of operations. In America, where division of labor is highly developed, it’s not really customary for one individual to handle everything from end to end in a situation like that.

Along similar lines, an Indian colleague once told me, “Kuz does the design and holds the soldering iron himself? That’s unusual.”

That said, this “operations within innovation” framing is, in many cases, nothing more than wordplay. Most of daily life is filled with activities that are not innovative. This depends on the job type, the position, and of course the individual. But taken as a whole, most of daily life is operative.

This isn’t meant as some pessimistic observation. The reason you can buy a rice ball at the convenience store every day, the reason you can reliably get a hot coffee from a vending machine, the reason trains run on time—all of these come down to the high quality of operations.

Long live operations.

But society cannot run on operations alone. Someone is needed to think about making the convenience store delivery system more efficient, someone to come up with a system for predicting stockouts in vending machines, someone to develop an IoT device for monitoring train drivers’ health. And someone is needed to build the financial plans for those projects, and someone is needed to dream up and hustle to launch the business in the first place.

Coming back to the case at the beginning: the owner or the management team is precisely the party that must offer some kind of answer to the fact that “society cannot run on operations alone.”

So, in most cases, it’s still not something to be praised when the owner engages in operative activity.

I too, of course, had my younger days, my days as a junior staffer (and that’s not so distant a past), staring down an oscilloscope debugging things until late at night, grinding through CAD corrections nearly in tears, trying anything and everything and measuring over and over when I couldn’t find a good fix for noise problems.

Honestly, it was fun.

I know how good ramen tastes when you grab it during a break from working late into the night, and I remember the pleasant rush of dopamine facing a mountain of piled-up tasks.

There are even times I want to go back to that.

But we must not forget that, at this point, that mindset is not something to be praised.

There’s other work now. After all, I’m in this position because I wanted it.

Of course there are times to do operational work in an emergency response. But even then, you must never overstep. It’s only natural that no one will praise you for it, it’s perfectly fine if no one thanks you, and you should be careful never to act smug about it (or to let others perceive you that way). You must do it while staying conscious of getting back to your real work as quickly as possible.

In a culture like Japan’s, which strongly demands homogeneity, this tends to get romanticized as, “Wow, what a warm company, having the higher-ups out on the floor.”

This is a big mistake.

What needs to be said instead is: “No, you’re just slacking off on your (real) job.”

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/09/1486/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.