Beyond Firefighting: A BPO Leader's Guide to Crafting a 'Real' Strategy Post

When you step into a new leadership role, the "30-60-90 day plan" is a familiar expectation. But too often, these plans become a frantic checklist of activities rather than a coherent strategy for change. As a leader, you are always expected to be a change agent, and for that, you need a system—not just hope.

This is why I made a systematic approach to strategy a core part of the LeanAI framework.

You can't just bulldoze your way into a new role and pray for the best; you need a reliable method for shaping the future of your department or even as an enterprise.

Why Most "Strategies" Are Just Fancy Wish Lists

You've probably been there: presenting your quarterly "strategy" only to be told, "That's a plan, not a strategy." Frustrating, right? Especially when you spent weeks building it.

Richard Rumelt calls this "Bad Strategy" in his book Good Strategy Bad Strategy. It's not about lack of effort, it's simply lack of clarity.

Bad strategy is a collection of buzzwords ("we need to be more agile and customer-centric"), a wish list of goals ("increase CSAT by 15%"), or a failure to confront the actual problem.

It feels productive but doesn't lead to breakthrough results because it never identifies the core challenge worth solving.

Think of it like trying to fix a car's engine by washing the exterior repeatedly—lots of activity, zero impact on the actual problem.

The Strategy Kernel: The LeanAI Framework for Strategy

To avoid this trap, I use Rumelt's Strategy Kernel—a three-part structure that forces clear thinking and creates logical, actionable strategy. Here's how I applied it to transform a major business unit with measurable results.

Part 1: A Clear-Eyed Diagnosis

Good diagnosis simplifies overwhelming complexity by identifying critical obstacles. It's not about stating the obvious ("CSAT is low"), it's should be about finding the why that nobody's addressing.

When I took over that new function, I made sure my diagnosis was sharp and surgical, cutting directly through the problem pattern: we were trapped in reactive firefighting, stemming from two core challenges:

• Data Chaos: Critical performance data scattered across over 400 manual reports and disconnected spreadsheets. This consumed almost 2,000 working hours monthly in manual preparation and prevented fast, evidence-based decisions. Our operations spent more time building reports than analyzing them.

• Fragmented Expertise: Talented managers solved problems within their teams, but we lacked common language or systems for continuous improvement. We kept solving the same problems repeatedly—like fixing the same leaking pipe in different floors without realizing the building's plumbing was fundamentally broken.

Part 2: A Guiding Policy

Guiding policy is your overall approach to overcoming diagnosed obstacles. It's not a goal; it's a method that rules out other paths and focuses resources.

Based on our diagnosis, our guiding policy was to "Build a Scalable Engine for Excellence."

This dictated that every decision had to support two foundational pillars:

1. Systematize Our Data: Centralize data into a single source of truth to automate reporting and enable advanced analytics. Turn these data into a strategic asset, not a manual burden.

2. Systematize Our Talent: Create unified "Lean Culture" by making process excellence a core leadership competency of our organization; and build a pipeline of certified internal problem-solvers who drive sustainable change.

Notice what this policy ruled out: