Are you running or building? 🏃 🏗️

RUN or BUILD?!? How to do both - but not at the same time - in the final stretch of the year

As we enter the last 4 months of the year, we are feeling the tension between two equally critical responsibilities:

• Running the business: hitting our targets, managing ops, ensuring execution (like this newsletter!)

• Building the business: making space for what’s next: crucial hires, a vision that keeps us motoring, new products

Perhaps you are feeling the same? The trap is obvious: Q4 demands urgency (NOW!). It’s tempting to to push BUILDING to next year’s strategy offsite. Or to be half-arsed about it… But if we focus just on RUNNING, we risk hitting our numbers while starving the org of its future…

The answer? Do both. BUT NEVER AT THE SAME TIME.

Here are 3 effective ways to to balance RUNNING and BUILDING:

1. Create very separate meetings

Don’t let future-building be squeezed into leftover time. Establish a parallel rhythm:

Weekly ops reviews = RUN.

Bi-weekly innovation huddles = BUILD.

Protect both in the calendar with equal seriousness. Name the meetings that way.

Leaders who consciously hold two clocks prevent the urgent from consuming the important. If someone comes up with a new idea in RUN, ask them to table it in the BUILD meeting. Our brains are not designed to jump between these two mindsets…! Which is why it can help to separate them out.

2. Frame Q4 wins as a launchpad for what's next

Link immediate targets to the future. For example:

“Hitting revenue this quarter funds our ability to invest in new tools next year.”

“Every customer success story today is an insight into the painpoints we’ll solve next year.”

This reframing gives the team permission to celebrate execution but connect it to a bigger time horizon…

3. Delegate RUN

Business leaders often hold on too tightly to operational tasks. If your managers are worth their salt, they should own the bulk of RUN. If they free you up by even 20%, it’d give you space to think about partnerships, markets, and ideas that might shape next year. 

What if you were able to reframe the end of the year not as a race where you and your team have to drag yourselves across the finish line, but as a runway for next year? 

You need to land Q4 smoothly and accelerate into 2026. It’s annoying but it'’s also true. RUN and BUILD aren’t opposites; they’re twin engines. The art of leadership is doing both - but not at the same time.

If no one comes to you for answers, what makes you worth following?

For centuries, leadership has carried with it an implicit assumption: the leader knows more. Subject matter expertise has been the foundation of leadership authority.

But as AI becomes faster, deeper, and more accurate than any individual, the idea of 'leader as expert' is crumbling. That can create a real identity crisis for leaders who have relied on this as their path to power.

We are currently developing a leadership programme for a large consultancy that addresses this exact void: If no one comes to you for answers, what makes you worth following?

Our hunch: The leader's value-add might come less through providing THE answer and more through offering clarity, confidence, judgment, energy or trust… Or their ability to read the room…

AI can’t build belonging. People follow leaders who give meaning and courage when uncertainty looms… That’s where you come in: What would you include in a programme like this?

We'll share more here once we have the first results!