An employee asks the CEO of ACME Corp how he plans on increasing revenue this quarter. The CEO pauses, looks left, looks right and then turns deadly serious.

“Oh that’s easy. Upper management is going on a retreat to Cabo, you know, in Mexico. We’re going to spend five whole days in meetings, crucial meetings to get at the root of what has been holding us back this year. We’re going to dive into what has been keeping us from unlocking this organization’s potential. We’re going to tackle it, that thing that has been keeping us behind our competitors all this time.” He pauses and with a flourish usually reserved for circus performers or idiots he says, “The mission statement!”

The employee blinks, the lights dim, the audience laughs and we’re all left scratching our heads.

This sort of comedy of errors makes up most of the way popular culture looks at business. Unfortunately, it also makes up the way that quite a few businesses are run. What irritates us about scenes like this is the disconnect between the solution and the problem. It’s the big idea from the top that looks great on paper but only makes sense to someone who has no clue how the business is run. How in the world will a mission statement, paid for out of the corporate coffers effect the day to day lives of employees who were never even involved in the process of producing it? Worse, how can an artificially created corporate culture affect the embedded culture that exists outside of corporate-retreat land?

The answer is that in almost all cases it can’t and everyone involved knows it.

It’s hard to admit that the actual day to day tasks of business are simple. It’s hard for managers to recognize that often there isn’t a whole lot to manage. Your jobs are to sell one more unit of whatever it is that you sell, or to make it easier to sell one more unit of whatever it is that you sell, or make the job of the person doing that selling less painful or to create a better thing to sell in the first place.

The way to do this often involves small, elegant changes to the way things are structured like removing a step from the website checkout process or giving employees a twenty minute break around mid-day so they aren’t so burned out. It also involves a huge number of tiny things that people rarely see and no one can take direct credit for: Coke can sell more Cokes if the guy on the truck moves the machine so that it sees more foot traffic, Amazon can sell more books by shifting the check out button another inch above the fold.

What’s hard about this is that the changes that matter most are often unsexy, unnoticeable and tend not to be the sort of thing that gets the change-maker a corner office and her own bathroom on the tenth floor.

Unfortunately, it’s those kinds of changes that actually matter. It’s making one small tweak after another every single day that eventually adds up to the kinds of seismic shifts that drive organizations forward. It’s having the courage to run the ball a few yards rather than going for the big play that keeps the team in the game. As a creator, it’s the willingness to push through those dull, painful but important bits of building that over time will lead to success.

If you want to be a hero, sometimes you have to be willing to take a back seat and just do the work.

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