Mastering the Base Game
One of the great engineering feats of the last century is undoubtedly the Panama Canal. The first attempt to connect Europe and Asia by water was led by a group of French adventurers headed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had already played a key role in the construction of the Suez Canal.
The project, the remains of which can still be seen on Panama’s Atlantic coast, had driven thousands of investors to ruin. The original plans aimed to cut through the mountains to connect the two oceans and create a saltwater canal. This ambition proved unrealistic.
A few years later, in 1904, the Americans took over the project. Rather than digging a passage at sea level, they envisioned a vast semi-artificial lake in the center of the country, connected on both sides by a series of locks allowing ships to ascend the 26-meter elevation difference.
The idea, which looked promising on paper, turned out to be a living hell. Workers were dropping like flies from malaria. Less than two years after his appointment by President Theodore Roosevelt, the site manager resigned in utter despair.
John Frank Stevens, the self-taught engineer who replaced him, took a step that today would be considered counterintuitive in any executive committee. He halted construction for more than 18 months.
Ignoring pressure from his superiors to resume work, he mobilized his thousands of workers to build functional support infrastructure: latrines, aqueducts, barracks, cafeterias, and roads.
His reasoning, which he presented directly to the President of the United States, boiled down to one conviction: No monumental project can succeed if the basic conditions for success are not met. History has proven him right.
This story often comes to mind in my work as a strategic advisor.
The executives I work with have, quite rightly, grand ambitions: international growth, digital transformation, acquisitions, and brand repositioning. These are companies that think big, and that’s what sets them apart.
But once on the ground, the same pattern repeats itself from one project to the next. The workshop is a mess. Tools aren’t where they should be. The CRM contains duplicate, outdated, and unusable data. Customer follow-ups depend on the memory of a single person rather than on a system. The most basic internal processes—the ones that require no brilliance, have simply never been taken seriously.
These shortcomings never make the headlines of a strategic plan. No one stands up at the annual meeting to demand better organization of the workshop or more rigorous data management in the CRM. And yet, it is precisely these foundations that determine whether the grand ambition will hold up.
A company that fails to master the basics pays for this negligence, not immediately, but inevitably.
Take the workshop, for example. The 5S method, popularized by Toyota and now an industry standard in manufacturing, shows a 50 to 90% reduction in the time spent looking for a tool or part once the space is properly organized. For example, a client company of the Business Development Bank of Canada reclaimed 10% of its floor space after rigorously implementing 5S, in addition to seeing a measurable improvement in team engagement.
The same phenomenon is quietly at work in CRM. A McKinsey study found that poor data quality leads to a 20% drop in productivity and a 30% increase in costs. Other industry research estimates that sales representatives waste up to 27% of their time correcting or searching for erroneous data in their sales tools—the equivalent of a full day each week.
A poorly maintained CRM is therefore not just an administrative nuisance. It is a hidden expense, funded by the very time the sales team should be devoting to customers.
The same logic applies to digital systems in the broad sense, document management, shared files, and internal tools. McKinsey estimates that employees spend an average of 1.8 hours per day searching for information, nearly a quarter of a workday. IDC, for its part, puts the productivity loss attributable to document management issues at 21.3%. Conversely, the McKinsey Global Institute notes that rigorous information organization can reduce this search time by 35%.
The problem is not merely operational. It is also a matter of management’s attention.
These issues are systematically viewed as trivial by senior executives. Organizing a workshop, maintaining a clean CRM, and ensuring the rigor of a digital filing system seem to fall into the realm of minor, delegable tasks, unworthy of an executive committee’s time.
That is precisely the mistake. These elements are not peripheral to performance; they are at its core. An organization that neglects its fundamentals ultimately pays the price for that neglect in its profit margin, its speed of execution, and its ability to sustain its own ambitions.
Streamlining processes, structuring document management, standardizing the use of digital tools, and standardizing customer follow-ups are never projects that inspire an executive committee. Yet it is this unglamorous, groundwork that determines an organization’s ability to accommodate its own growth.
History remembers only the great dreams that have been realized, such as the Panama Canal. But the success of these projects first required creating the necessary conditions for their completion. For companies, just as for major engineering projects, ambition is never enough without mastery of the fundamentals.