I had the rare opportunity to work with one of the most respected consulting firms of their time— Thomas Group Consulting.
This was long before Facebook and Google. Back then, problem-solving was hands-on, field-driven, and grounded in first-principles thinking. Thomas Group was a Texas-based elite team of about six exceptional individuals—former CEOs and seasoned operators—who consulted for some of the world’s most demanding organizations, including McDonnell Douglas and GE.
Working with them gave me a unique lens into operational precision, leadership under pressure, and the kind of structured thinking that never goes out of style. What follows are a few distilled insights from that era—translated into bite-sized, relevant principles for today’s fast-moving world.
FIREFIGHTING ≠ OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
Insight from Field Consulting
- Observation: In many reactive operational environments, teams spend most of their energy on firefighting—responding to unplanned crises caused by lack of foresight, ownership, or contingency planning.
- Behavioral Pattern: Teams often mistake this chaos-driven hustle for productivity. The exhaustion, frantic effort, and “end-of-day high-five” moment create a false sense of accomplishment.
- Reality Check: This energy isn’t value-creating—it’s value-protecting at best, and value-eroding at worst.
- Core Issue: Firefighting is often a symptom of systemic gaps in planning, risk management, and process control—not a badge of operational excellence.
- Consulting Principle: Replace heroism with systems. The best-run operations don’t need heroes—they need process discipline, Plan Bs, and decentralized ownership.
EMOTIONAL LOYALTY VS. OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
Strategic Blind Spots in Leadership
- The Pattern: In long-standing teams, emotional loyalty often develops—especially in high-trust environments. While this trust is critical for morale and cohesion, it can silently evolve into tolerance for inefficiency.
- The Risk: Loyalty clouds judgment. We continue to back individuals, systems, or processes not because they are effective—but because they have a history with us. This creates a gap between actual performance and perceived value.
- The Masking Effect: Underperformers become protected by narratives like “they’ve been here since the start,” “they’ve been loyal,” or “they mean well.” Over time, this loyalty-driven justification leads to stagnation.
- Critical Juncture: Every organization hits a point where sentiment must give way to strategy. If hard decisions are delayed too long, it becomes a systemic drag—emotion suppressing evolution.
- Consulting Principle: Maintain high empathy—but not at the cost of high standards. Relationships are important, but results are non-negotiable. Reassess regularly, and have the courage to restructure when alignment no longer exists.
ANTICIPATION WITHOUT CONTROL = ORGANIZATIONAL PARALYSIS
Avoid Energy Sinkholes in Strategic Waiting
- The Trap: Teams often fixate on external events or decisions they have zero control over—waiting in hopeful anticipation for a breakthrough, announcement, or external trigger.
- The Consequence: This passive waiting creates a dangerous illusion of involvement. In reality, it’s energy leakage. Days are spent in speculation, morale quietly erodes, and execution stalls.
- The Hidden Cost: Burnout increases—not from action, but from emotional exhaustion. Teams become distracted, disconnected from daily priorities, and unproductive under the guise of “being ready.”
- Consulting Principle: Focus on the controllables. Define a base plan, assign ownership to what can be influenced, and park the uncontrollables. Check in at intervals—but don’t orbit around them.
- Execution Mindset: Real leaders operate on parallel tracks: monitor the horizon, but drive the road in front of them. Anticipation without action is inertia.
SUCCESS BIAS IN PROCESS EVALUATION
Why Ignoring Failure Metrics Undermines Real Efficiency
- The Pattern: In most teams and organizations, there’s a natural tendency to focus on what worked—approvals received, deals closed, goals ticked off. This creates a success bias.
- The Blind Spot: What often goes unmeasured is how many attempts it took to get that success. How many reworks, escalations, retries, or errors were absorbed along the way?
- The Illusion: A single success masks multiple inefficiencies. The system appears effective, but in reality, it may be resource-heavy, slow, or unreliable.
- Consulting Principle: Always measure friction, not just flow. Count the number of successful outcomes on the first attempt, and treat all retries, escalations, and manual interventions as operational debt.
- Improvement Mindset: The goal isn’t just outcome—it’s clean outcome. The real efficiency of a system lies not in how it finishes, but in how well it finishes on the first go.
Ben
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