Notes on teaching executives
Some observations from running sessions with senior operators, mostly things I got wrong first.
They already know the concept. Every P&L owner has read the same articles. Explaining what optimisation is wastes the first forty minutes and signals you don’t know your audience. Start at the second question: where it fails, and why.
The real barrier is admitting the gap. Somewhere in the chain there’s a step a senior person has nodded along to for years without following. In a room of peers, nobody asks. The single most useful thing you can do is make it normal — take the unglamorous step and work it through slowly, as if it were obviously the hard part. It usually is.
Generic examples don’t land. A case study about a European retailer is entertainment. The same logic applied to their own network, with their own cost structure, is uncomfortable — and uncomfortable is the state in which people actually change something. This means preparation is most of the work, and it doesn’t scale, which is a genuine constraint rather than a problem to solve.
Nobody remembers the framework. Two weeks later what survives is one sentence and one number. Choose them deliberately, because they’re the entire deliverable.