The Soviet satirist Mikhail Zhvanetsky had a line about heroism: the heroic feat of one person is usually the crime of another. He added the part that stings, that it is a shame there are never any photographs of the true guests of honour, the people whose failure made the heroism necessary in the first place. In Russian the joke is sharper, because the phrase for guest of honour, “виновник торжества”, literally means the culprit of the celebration.
He was writing about society. He described most businesses exactly. Every business has someone who saves the day: a billing run that would have failed, a customer who was about to walk, a deadline that only held because one person stayed until it did. That person is photographed, thanked, sometimes promoted. The person whose upstream failure created the emergency is never in the picture. We celebrate the first and never go looking for the second. That is the tell.
The reactive save is not a rare event in most operations. It is the operating model. Deloitte, surveying close to 10,000 business and HR leaders across 93 countries, found that managers spend nearly 40% of their day on last-minute problems and admin, and only 15% of it planning ahead (Fortune, March 2025). Two full days a week going to fires. Most of one going to the future. That is not a busy quarter. That is how the machine is built.
We tend to read this as a workload problem, something more people or longer hours would fix. It is closer to a design signal. When the same kinds of problem keep needing the same kind of rescue, the rescue has become part of the process. The firefighting is not interrupting the operation. It is the operation.
Why heroics feel like strength
Heroic management is seductive, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous. The save is visible. Everyone sees the person who came in on the weekend and pulled it off. The adrenaline is real, the gratitude is real, and the story afterwards is a good one. A culture that runs on last-minute rescues feels committed and energetic, all hands to the pump. It wears the costume of a strong team.
What it is actually doing is hiding the defect that made the rescue necessary. Every heroic save is a receipt for a failure further upstream: a process that was never written down, a handover that does not exist, a decision only one person is allowed to make. The save clears the symptom and, worse, removes the pressure to fix the cause. Because the day was saved, nobody has to look at why it needed saving. So the same fire starts again next month, and the same person puts it out, and everyone calls it dedication.
The incentives quietly select for it
Look at who gets promoted. It is usually the person who was visible in the crisis, rarely the person whose part of the operation never had one. The quiet operator who built a process so solid that nothing goes wrong in their area is, by design, invisible. No drama, no war story, no weekend save to point to at the review. So the organisation keeps rewarding the firefighters and keeps overlooking the fire-preventers, and it slowly fills its senior ranks with people who are excellent in a crisis and have never been asked to build something that does not have one.
You end up optimised for the emergency you should have designed out. The behaviour you reward is the behaviour you get, and a great many operations are quietly paying their best people to keep the fires burning.
Overwork reads as commitment, and is usually a symptom
I have spent years rebuilding the operating side of businesses, and I have walked into operations where people were routinely working twelve-hour days, often six or seven days a week, certain that this was simply the nature of the work. It was not. It was the nature of the system they had been handed. By the time I finished, the same people were doing their contracted hours, often less, and the work came out more reliably than before. Their commitment had not changed. The operation had stopped needing anyone to be heroic to get an ordinary week over the line.
Here is the part that only shows up once you have run these operations rather than read about them. A business held together by heroics looks its strongest right before it breaks, because the heroics are load-bearing and invisible. They do not appear on any dashboard. There is no line in the accounts for the fact that a whole function actually runs on one person who has not taken a proper holiday in two years and who remembers things nobody ever wrote down. Then that person leaves, or burns out, or is simply away during the wrong week, and the operation that looked dependable falls over, because the thing holding it up was never a system. It was a person compensating for the absence of one.
The goal is to make the business boring
This is where the ambition should go. The aim of transforming an operation is to make it boring. A boring business is one where the exceptional has been made routine: the thing that used to need a hero now happens by default, every time, whoever is on shift. The billing run completes. The handover holds. The decision gets made at the right level without anyone escalating. Nothing dramatic happens, because nothing dramatic can.
Boring is not the absence of ambition. It is ambition pointed at the system instead of the crisis. It is far harder to build an operation that never has a dramatic week than to assemble a team of people who are good in one. Anyone can gather firefighters. Designing a building that does not catch fire is the senior work, and it is quieter, slower, and much less thanked.
None of this means a mature operation never meets a surprise. It means it does not manufacture them. A genuine emergency, a supplier failing overnight, a real external shock, will always need judgement and a cool head. The difference is that in a boring operation those are rare and external, not the Tuesday-afternoon consequence of a process nobody ever finished.
Sometimes the fix is to forbid the heroics
In one operation the staff were complaining, fairly, that they had to work after hours to hit their targets. Once a proper process was in place, I told them the after-hours work had to stop, and that the new process was to be followed precisely. A few could not help themselves. They kept doing the old things around the edges of the new system, the very habits that had made the long hours necessary in the first place, and kept staying late to do them. I told them plainly that continuing to work after hours, now that the system made it unnecessary, would be treated as a competence problem rather than rewarded as effort.
That sounds hard until you see what it protects. If you let the heroics continue after you have removed the need for them, you never find out whether the system actually holds, and you quietly teach everyone that the old way is still the real way. Praising the person who stays late to compensate for a process they are refusing to use is how you keep the fire lit. The discipline is not about effort or cruelty. It is the only way the calm operation becomes real rather than theoretical, and the people doing it get their evenings back.
Invincible businesses are boring on purpose
This is close to the whole point of building an operation that can take a hit. An invincible business is not one with better firefighters. It is one that needs fewer fires, because the failures that used to demand a rescue have been designed out. It survives a shock, the loss of a key person, a demand spike, a bad quarter, because it was never quietly depending on someone being heroic at the right moment.
So the question worth sitting with is an uncomfortable one. If your best operator took an unplanned month off, would your business have a boring month or a dramatic one? If the honest answer is dramatic, the heroics you are proud of are a risk you have not priced, and it is worth finding out exactly where the operation still depends on someone being exceptional. The work after that is to make them unnecessary, on purpose, while things are calm enough to do it.
That is the work I do: installing the system underneath an operation so that the exceptional becomes routine and the drama drains out of the week. It makes for a less exciting business to run. Zhvanetsky would approve. The aim is an operation with no heroes in the photograph, because nobody ever needed to be one.
References
- Fortune. “Overwhelmed managers are spending their days putting out fires instead of planning for the future.” March 2025. Read Article
