What are you missing while you're firefighting?

Even necessary fires can burn away strategic clarity.

THINK ON IT: What are you missing while you're firefighting? 

Your day is packed. Issues escalate. Fires flare up. Everyone needs a decision, a resource, a green light—right now.

You’re not alone. Most B2B leaders operate in a reactive rhythm. The urgent displaces the important. Decisions get made in compressed timeframes. Strategy becomes a quarterly offsite topic rather than a daily discipline.

But there’s a cost to this constant reactivity. Not just in stress or inefficiency—but in missed strategic insight. The kind of insight that separates firms that plateau from those that break through.

A few weeks of firefighting might feel like survival. A few quarters of it is drift. And over time, that drift becomes decay.

Even necessary fires can burn away strategic clarity. That’s why this Strategic CEO Substack exists—to help you regularly surface and act on the strategic levers that often go ignored in the daily rush.

Here are seven high-leverage practices that frequently get overlooked—not because they aren’t valuable, but because they don’t scream for attention:

• Win/Loss Analysis. Do you know—really know—why you’re winning or losing deals?

• Customer Exit Interviews. What are your former customers trying to tell you—and are you listening before they leave?

• Ideal Customer Reassessment. Is your business still focused on your best-fit customers, or has it drifted?

• Offer Redesign. When was the last time you challenged whether your offer still fits today’s market reality?

• Emerging Trends Analysis. Are you spotting the shifts before they show up in the data?

• Sales Messaging Audit. Does your sales message reflect what your most important buyers care about RIGHT NOW?

• Strategic Account Reviews. Are your top clients evolving—and are you evolving with them?

Most B2B firms neglect these practices—or conduct them too sporadically to be useful. Fewer than half conduct win/loss analysis regularly. Strategic account reviews, ICP updates, and emerging trends analysis are even less frequent, often done ad hoc or not at all.

Don’t let firefighting become your default operating system.

Pick one of the practices above and get going—you don’t need to do them all at once.

And if you need help to decide, read the Act on It section below where I outline the indicators of which practice may be most needed right now. (Premium Members only. Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to over 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)

"What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

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