TL; DR
If you treat Operations as innovative work and a core part of business building, you can beat even competitors whom you respect.
The idea in short
The next creative discipline: Operations
What haunts me: Operations will soon have a big impact on who wins. But few focus there.
It will be a new kind of operations: Creative work, not just efficiency work.
And even I have let myself feel judged for even considering the possibility that creative changes can come out of Operations, often seen as the ugly stepchild of innovative work.
But it keeps nagging, haunting me, to acknowledge the reality. Just as when formal company management started, the way we run companies—Operations—will be on the forefront of helping us win, as long as we let it.
It’s a stark reality
How could that be?
Picture two companies. Similar products. Similar prices. But one adopts a pragmatic mix of incoming tech and ways of working. That company can stay profitable at lower prices. The other? Can’t keep up. This isn't theoretical - it's the fundamental math of competition when products reach feature parity.
Play a new game
It’s also always been true. Right now, it just has much more fresh room to have an impact.
In other words, it’s partly an extension of older arguments that have always clamored for “operational efficiency.” What is new and powerful now is how much further we can take the effort.
It won’t just take technology. It’ll require a new mindset and entire methods of work: It will take creativity, not just rigor and analysis. It will be about achieving evolution and resilience, not just efficiency. And that change is revolutionary.
To be explicit, I assert:
Running companies (”operating”) is the next creative discipline.
Operations must evolve. Not just be efficient. be creative, resilient, enablers of evolution.
Think systematic innovation in how work happens, not just cost-cutting.
Two competitive spaces
You’ll need to evolve both your Production Operations and your Enterprise Operations.
Production Operations
Yes, automate your production. Use specialized tools. You must do this. But it is also hard because it must instantly work at scale, and the tech just hasn’t evolved far enough for that level of reliability in many areas. So you’ll need to partner with domain experts. Everyone else will do the same. So everyone will keep getting better. You will see major improvements. But it’ll be a race to keep up, not a way to get ahead.
Enterprise Operations
Here's where it gets interesting. The real edge may lie in systematizing how you run the whole “meta work” of our company:
- Office work beyond basic productivity tools
- Decision frameworks that scale
- Cross-functional coordination between teams, partners, and stakeholders
- Leadership routines
- Better ways to run projects
This has happened before
We have seen this in more modest ways, involving less or no tech. And even that was powerful:
Leading companies have always taken topics that other companies consider individual responsibility or unchangeable or boring and systematized them. They turned ideas into tools. More broadly, capabilities. Tools manifest the capabilities.
For example, Toyota pioneered this approach decades before the tech companies. In the 1950s and 1960s, they transformed car manufacturing from individual craftsmanship into a systematic capability called the Toyota Production System (TPS). We often focus on how they created standardized “processes.” But those were just the tool, not the soul of the work. Like other companies later, they looked at their work with creativity. They imagined what might change at a basic level. They didn’t just implement technology. They changed the work itself.
And this continued. Just to touch on a few more recent examples:
Still decades ago, P&G pioneered systematic decision-making with their memo system. Their format forces sequential thinking: background, recommendation, key benefits, and next steps. Each section builds on the previous one to drive clear decisions. Work evolved.
Later, Amazon applied the idea in new ways. They turned meetings into a system with their six-page narratives. No PowerPoint allowed. Instead, meetings start with 20 minutes of silent reading, followed by structured discussion. The result? Deeper thinking and better decisions. Again, we tend to focus on the structure of the outcome. But that’s just a mental aid. It took creativity to evolve the company.
Much more recently, in our space of business building, Google Ventures transformed early-stage product work through design sprints - a five-day process moving from challenge to tested prototype. Each day has specific activities: understand, define, sketch, decide, prototype, and validate. While it very detailed structure, that structure works in the service of freeing up people to focus on creativity, not drudgery. It’s efficiency in the service of evolution.
And innovation nerds among you will of course point out that this is just a new application of Prof. Clay Christensen's disruption theory: Systematically lower cost eventually wins. You'd be right. 😄
Where to start?
You have options. But the most impactful and surprising place may. be to start at the top. Let the COO's office be your lab. When non-nonsense executives show it works, others follow, both individual contributors and other executives. Begin with your highest-impact processes - the ones touching critical decisions and cross-functional work. (Plus, you’ll make improvements where, arguably, the cost is currently highest, given executive payroll.)
Stay out of the AI hype
A note: AI helps. But it's just one tool. You need everything - human systems, traditional software, new tech. Mix and match. Make it work. The goal is better operations, not just more technology.
The future is Creative Ops
The winners? Companies that make operations creative. Not just efficient. Not just lean. But smart. Different. Better.
This isn't about pinching pennies. It's about building something lighter. Faster. Happier. A fundamentally better operating model that scales.
Start now. While others still think ops is boring.
Got stakeholders who can’t handle the idea of “creative ops” yet? No problem, call it “good-cheap ops” for now. That rings of rigor, analytics, prudence, and sober pragmatism.
Of course, those concepts still are true. Don’t abandon them. We are not trying to replace a fad with some other fad. It’s about actually working better. But you might help people get used to it if you don’t throw their basic beliefs overboard. Deliver results first. Then gently get them used to an expanded view of reality that accepts both efficiency and evolution on the same team.
But whatever you call it, do start now.
Because soon, creative ops will be how you win.
T.I.S.C.
