Diet and Exercise…

In my mid twenties I started working with a trainer. Smart guy. First session he didn’t hand me a program. He asked what I wanted.

I said stronger. And lose the belly.

He said he could do the first one. Building muscle would help with the second. But he was clear about it: if I kept eating the way I was eating, we’d be building a very strong guy with a belly. He could run me into the ground three days a week and the belly would stay. The gym was his department. The kitchen was mine.

Diet and exercise. We have all heard it. And still most of us (me included, for a long time) treat it like one thing that happens to have two words in it, then put all the effort into the half that’s more fun to talk about.

Business works the same way.

Exercise is how you work. Systems, processes, habits, the daily grind of getting product out the door. The SOPs, the cycle counts, the maintenance schedule somebody actually follows. The effort. This is the part operations people love, because it’s the part you can control, measure, and improve.

Diet is what you work on. Which products you make. Which channels you sell them through. Diet is a choice, and it gets made somewhere above the shop floor.

And companies feed themselves junk food all the time.

Not junk food for the customer. That’s a different thing. If your core business is burgers and fries, then burgers and fries are a perfectly healthy diet for you. McDonald’s is not confused about what it eats.

Everybody likes cake. Especially marketing.

Say you run a company that sells dinner rolls. It’s humming along. Social wants something to talk about. Marketing wants to manage a graphic design team. Somebody says it out loud in a meeting: let’s make cake! Fun!

But the company doesn’t make cake. Doesn’t store cake. Doesn’t transport cake. Doesn’t sell cake. The customer wants cake, but wants to pay for rolls.

Junk food costs you calories to digest and gives you nothing back.

The two halves don’t substitute for each other, either. A company with the most dialed-in operations on the planet, selling the CEO’s passion project, is a guy who trains six days a week and eats like a raccoon. Looks busy. Going nowhere. The reverse is just as common: a brilliant product, a real market, and a company that can’t ship on time, can’t hold a spec, can’t keep the line running for a full shift. Great diet, never leaves the couch.

I spend most of my days on the exercise side. But the thing my trainer understood (and the thing it took me a long time to accept) is that he could only do so much. He could make me stronger. He couldn’t make me lean. The best operation in the world can’t out-train a bad product decision.

What a balanced diet looks like is up to you. Everybody likes cake.