The Most Contrarian Move in Business Right Now: Doing the Boring Work
I saw two posts yesterday in very different places that really hit home.
The first was here in LinkedIn from my former colleague Sam Dvorchik, who attended the Operating Partners Forum in New York. He went expecting wall-to-wall AI discussions. Instead, the dominant theme was blocking and tackling: talking to customers, reviewing call recordings, positioning, sales certification, storytelling, management rhythm. The successful operators were laser-focused on fundamentals because those basics are where competitive advantage actually lives.
The second was an Instagram post about Formula 1 pit crews helping save infant lives at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Surgeons watched a Ferrari pit stop and realized their post-surgery handover process—where seven infants had died in succession—was chaos compared to the disciplined choreography of a seven-second pit stop. Every Ferrari crew member had one job. Communication was entirely verbal. Actions were tightly sequenced. Someone was in charge.
Here's what struck me: both stories are about the same thing. The unglamorous foundation that determines whether organizations scale or stumble. I call this Business Architecture.
The Architecture Nobody Sees
While serving as COO of a multi-location tour operator, I've spent a year building what most people would consider boring: hierarchical business function frameworks, RACI matrices, process documentation standards, data governance protocols. We mapped every business function from trip operations to customer experience to financial controls, creating a numbered taxonomy that lets us discuss each granular function without ambiguity.
It's not sexy. It won't make headlines. But it's the difference between running a $5M business and scaling to $20M without everything breaking.
Most companies skip this step. They jump straight to solutions—implementing Salesforce, launching AI tools, hiring consultants—without first understanding what they're trying to systematize. It's like calling a Ferrari pit crew when you haven't decided who's holding the wrench.
What Business Architecture Actually Is
Business architecture isn't org charts or process flows. It's the explicit, documented understanding of how your business creates value. It answers:
What functions does your business perform?
How do they connect to each other?
Who owns what decisions?
Where does information flow?
What breaks if this person leaves?
For the tour operator, this meant creating a complete business function framework with four major domains (Customer & Market, Operations & Delivery, People & Culture, Finance & Administration) decomposed into progressively specific sub-functions.
This taxonomy became our common language. When someone says "we have a problem with 6.1.1.4," everyone knows we're talking about travel requirements in the pre-trip experience. No confusion. No misalignment.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The gap between companies with solid architecture and those without is widening. Here's why:
Technology moves faster than organizations can absorb it. Without clear business architecture, you can't evaluate whether a tool solves a real problem or just creates expensive distraction. We evaluated Salesforce not by its features but by mapping its capabilities to our business function framework. Which functions does it support? Where are the gaps? What integration points matter?
Scaling requires repetition. You can't repeat what you haven't defined. Great Ormond Street couldn't improve their handover until they documented what actually happened versus what should happen. Same principle applies whether you're moving infants or processing customer bookings.
Distributed teams need shared understanding. When your team spans U.S. states and European countries, you can't rely on osmosis. Architecture creates the explicit shared mental model that makes coordination possible.
Competitive advantage comes from execution, not ideas. Everyone in hospitality can identify good customer service when they see it. The difference is whether you've systematized it so it feels consistent and authentic. The customer experience documentation covers everything from experience insights carried forward from previous trips to action planning from survey feedback. The organizations that do these things consistently will earn customer trust, scale more easily, and earn more revenue - and put out fewer fires...
The Ferrari Principle
The Formula 1 pit crew taught the hospital team something fundamental: you can't improve what you can't see, and you can't see what you haven't defined.
They showed them "FMEA"—Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. Not because hospitals should run like race teams, but because both need to reduce failure probability to zero in high-stakes, time-compressed environments. The framework gave the medical team a structure for thinking about their process systematically.
This is what business architecture provides. Not rigid bureaucracy but disciplined thinking. The hospital didn't copy Ferrari's pit stop. They adapted the principle: define roles, sequence actions, designate leadership, plan for contingencies.
What Implementation Actually Looks Like
Building business architecture isn't a consulting engagement that produces a beautiful deck nobody uses. It's operational infrastructure you build into how work actually happens. And yes, it can get messy.
At the tour operator, our business function framework directly informed our implementation of Salesforce and an ecosystem of related tools. We didn't ask "what can Salesforce do?" We asked "which business functions need technology support, can Salesforce address them, and who is individually accountable for executing that function" The architecture became the master requirements document.
It shaped organizational restructuring. When we moved people from tactical execution to strategic leadership roles—or more accurately, pruned responsibilities that could be delegated so leaders could actually lead—the business function framework showed us exactly which functions needed senior ownership, who had capacity, and ensured clean handovers.
Most importantly, it created accountability. Every major business function has an owner. When something breaks, we know who fixes it. When we plan improvements, we know who decides.
The Blocking and Tackling Reality
Sam's observation from the Operating Partners Forum resonates because it's true everywhere. The successful operators aren't chasing shiny objects. They're doing the hard, unglamorous work of getting the basics right.
They know their customer conversations matter more than their marketing automation platform. They know call recordings reveal more than sentiment analysis dashboards. They know management rhythm beats planning retreats.
And they know that before you can optimize anything with AI or improve anything with consultants, you need to understand what you're actually doing. That's business architecture.
Why Most Companies Skip This
Business architecture is hard for three reasons:
It requires brutal honesty. You have to document what actually happens, not what you wish happened or what the handbook says should happen. That's uncomfortable. It's common for employees to play zone defense. The emotional toll can be high when teams are tight knit, responsibilities have grown organically over time, or the culture prioritizes smooth over direct.
It's never finished. Business changes. Your architecture must evolve with it. This isn't a project with an end date; it's ongoing discipline - a way of thinking.
It doesn't produce immediate results. You can't point to the architecture and say "this increased revenue by 23%." It's infrastructure. The payoff comes from everything that becomes possible because the foundation exists.
But here's what I've learned: companies that skip this step eventually hit a wall. Usually between $5M and $10M in revenue, sometimes more. Growth stalls. Key people leave and everything they knew leaves with them. New hires take six months to become productive because nothing is documented. Strategic initiatives fail because nobody can agree on what "implement this" actually means. To be clear, this also exists in $2B companies, but that's for another article.
The architecture work you avoid at $5M becomes exponentially harder at $15M.
Start With What Matters
You don't need to map your entire organization on day one. Start with the function that's causing the most pain. It's critical to show teams that you're not seeking to assign any blame for gaps and cracks you identify - those outcomes should be celebrated not cursed.
Ask these questions:
What are we actually trying to accomplish?
What are the component activities (tasks) that are performed in your business?
Who owns each piece? Here's it's helpful to have 1:1 discussions with team members because I guarantee that there are multiple people who would say they own many of your processes.
What information flows between them?
What happens when something breaks?
Document the answers. Create the taxonomy. Assign ownership. Build process documentation. Review and refine.
Then move to the next function.
The goal isn't perfection. It's shared understanding and deliberate improvement.
The Unsexy Truth
Building business architecture won't get you on a conference stage. It won't generate (much) LinkedIn engagement. Nobody writes case studies about your process documentation standards.
But it will let you scale without chaos. It will help you evaluate technology rationally. It will enable your team to coordinate without constant intervention. It will preserve institutional knowledge when people leave. It will turn good ideas into actual competitive advantages.
The Formula 1 pit crew didn't just execute faster. They thought about execution systematically. The operating partners aren't ignoring innovation. They're focused on the fundamentals that let innovation actually work.
That's the power of business architecture. Not exciting. Just essential.
And in a world where everyone's chasing the next AI breakthrough or growth hack, maybe doing the unglamorous work of getting your foundation right is actually the most contrarian move you can make.
What's the unsexy operational work that's actually driving results in your business? The stuff that doesn't make good LinkedIn posts but makes everything else possible?