Grinding it out is not a strategy

England went down to ten men against Mexico and somehow won 3-2. Four days later they needed extra time to get past Norway. Nobody watching either game would call it fluent, least of all their own manager. Thomas Tuchel came off the pitch after the Norway win and was asked if his team had a mentality problem. He nearly lost his patience with the question. "This is pure mentality," he said. "It's the quality of our games. That's it. It has nothing to do with mentality." He wasn't praising the grit. He was telling the world that grit had just carried his team as far as grit can carry a team, and that the actual problem, the one that needs fixing before it costs them the tournament, is the quality underneath it.

Compare that to France, who play Spain today for a place in the final. Six games, five of them won by more than one goal, never once behind. Nobody's asking Deschamps whether his team has mentality. Nobody needs to. The structural advantage does the job that effort is doing for England, and it does it without anyone needing to survive extra time to prove it.

Seamless segway warning! The same test applies off the pitch. I think most business leaders I meet are running their business the way England have played this tournament. Industrious. Honest. Everyone pulling in the same direction under real pressure, and it just about holds. That's not a criticism, because grafting through adversity is a genuine skill and a lot of businesses wouldn't survive without it. But grafting is not the same thing as having built the thing that makes winning look easy, and almost nobody teaches leaders the difference , because it's an uncomfortable thing to hear when you've spent years being proud of the effort. If England go out to Argentina tomorrow, that won't be bad luck. It'll be exactly what Tuchel already told everyone: mentality gets you into the picture. It doesn't win you the trophy on its own.

That's the job, as I've come to understand it. Not building the tool. Being the person who says the uncomfortable thing, and then stays in the room while you work out what to do with it.

Two conversations last week made this plain to me in a way it hadn't been before. Both businesses profitable, both growing, nothing wrong that anyone outside the building would notice. Both wanted the same thing from me: help going from where they are to somewhere with more clarity, more discipline, more alignment between what the leadership team thinks it's doing and what's actually happening on the ground. Neither was in any trouble. That's precisely what made the conversation interesting, because it meant the question wasn't "how do we stop the bleeding," it was "why are we working this hard for this result, and are we willing to confront it."

I've been chairing CutList, a precision CNC manufacturer near Thame, for six months now, and for most of that time I'd have told you those two conversations belonged to a different world entirely to the one I was operating in there. CutList had real strain across the leadership team and commercial clarity that was thin on the ground, and I went in braced for something closer to triage. What I didn't expect was that the read I'd give CutList and the read those two calm, profitable businesses were asking for would turn out to be exactly the same read, just asked at different points on the same distress curve. I think part of me didn't want that to be true, because there's a version of this work that feels more important when the building's on fire, and I'm not sure that version was ever really about the client rather than about me. It's satisfying to think of yourself as the heroic firefighter. In reality that's nonsense.

It's worth separating two things the restructuring industry easily blurs together. Crisis intervention is a genuinely different skill to the one I'm describing. It's regulatory, it's pre-packs and administration and the eleventh-hour accelerated M&A, and it needs someone fluent in a process most business owners will only ever go through once in their lives, if they're unlucky. I'm not that person, and I've stopped dressing up the fact that I have very little interest in becoming one. What I actually do is ask the question a leadership team has been avoiding, and then sit with them while they face what the honest answer means, because saying the thing out loud is the part people are actually afraid of. Once it's said, it becomes real, and real has to be dealt with.

CutList and it’s associated companies is where I've had to hold that under real pressure. A thirteen-week cash flow built from the ground up, ignoring everything incomplete or wrong that came before it, gave the leadership team an honest read of what the cash position actually was and the brutal reality of the cash path ahead. The gap between the story and the number became impossible to argue with and in that moment I had the privilege of seeing the leaders who were willing to fight for the business grit their teeth and take responsibility.

Later in the journey, a margin and cost-to-serve picture built product by product, so that being busy stopped getting mistaken for being profitable. An OGSM review that put stated priorities next to where everyone's actual time was going and let the room draw its own conclusion rather than having me draw it for them. None of those tools is the value. They're what earns you the right to ask the harder question and have it land as care rather than criticism. The value is what happens in a leader's own head once the question's been asked and somebody stayed to help them answer it, rather than handing them a report and leaving.

I don't do any of this on my own, and the longer I do it the less I think I should. I'm bringing in a cultural change partner to do the people work properly instead of squeezing it into an already stretched week, and a technical partner to build the tools that turn a leadership team's "I think we're fine" into something they can actually check for themselves. Both relationships are only just starting, and I am so excited to see what their combined value add looks like as it evolves.

If any of this is landing somewhere, here's who I think it's for. The business that's running fine on paper and has quietly stopped asking what's underneath it, because asking felt like inviting in a problem that wasn't there yet. The business, thriving or struggling, that knows, somewhere it doesn't say out loud in board meetings, that what's holding it together is effort rather than design. England go into their semi-final tomorrow still not knowing whether grit is enough. France already know it isn't, because they built the thing that means they never have to find out the hard way. Most businesses I meet are still finding out the hard way, week after week, and calling it stability. It doesn't have to be the only way to win.