How the Strongest Leaders Decide When to Fix and When to Build
Every scaling company faces the tension between execution and innovation:
Do we pause to fix what's broken?
Or push forward with new features?
Most CEOs know that both are necessary for growth, but they still treat them as separate—and the choice between them as a tradeoff.
The best leaders I’ve worked with see execution and innovation as part of a single rhythm.
Not competing priorities, but phases that depend on each other.
When you don’t understand their interdependence, you miss the places they impact one another. Despite your best efforts, you end up focusing too much on one or the other. And when trouble arises, you confuse symptoms for causes and double down on the wrong phase.
Growth isn’t found in either phase, it emerges in their oscillation.
I’ve seen many well-intentioned CEOs waste their energy fighting this natural rhythm instead of letting it carry them forward.
What’s Your Natural Imbalance?
All of us put more emphasis on one phase or the other. It’s unavoidable.
Some CEOs favor innovation, believing that speed is the surest way to success.
Others focus on execution, hoping to find success by ensuring stablity and predictability.
Neither impulse is bad, but if you can’t move easily between them, your business grows up lopsided.
When that asymmetry starts to show, that’s when your bias starts to cost you.
In the moment when seeing clearly matters most, you end up attributing problems to the phase you already favor:
To someone concerned with growing quickly, execution problems look like innovation issues.
To someone who is concerned with perfection, innovation issues look like execution problems.
So you keep investing your time in the wrong places. That imbalance becomes more pronounced, and it starts to drag heavily on growth.
Symptoms vs Causes
Escaping this trap starts with knowing how innovation and execution rest on each other.
When one is weak, the other will suffer.
If you don’t understand this, symptoms won’t be a reliable tool to locate core issues.
Answer yes/no to the following questions to get an idea of where you tend to lose the rhythm.
Do good ideas lose momentum once implementation begins?
Do strategy conversations feel energizing, but rarely change what happens next?
Do you feel stretched thin even when the company is “doing fine”?
Do you feel mentally excited about the future, but physically or emotionally exhausted?
Do small issues cascade into bigger ones more often than you expect?
Do constraints feel fixed rather than negotiable?
Does your team lack the slack to explore without risking the core business?
Do you postpone certain changes because now doesn’t feel like the right time?
Does the business feel too fragile to safely experiment?
Do you worry your team’s full talent isn’t being used?
Do you always rely on past wins/losses to guide next steps?
Fragile Execution
If your yeses cluster toward the top, it might feel like you have an innovation problem.
You don’t have time to focus on new territory. New ideas never fully take off. Your team gets bogged down before anything meaningful can ship.
But more likely, the issue lies in execution—you lack the predictable, resilient foundation to support your ideas.
When execution is fragile, all your energy gets consumed by firefighting and your best people get pulled into maintenance instead of progression.
The irony is, when you put too much emphasis on innovation, the company often fails to innovate.
This is how the boldest people—the ones most concerned with the future and most comfortable with risk—get stuck playing defense instead of offense.
Innovation Avoidance
If your yeses cluster at the bottom, what feels like an execution issue may be a sign it’s time to rethink your fundamental approach.
I have a client who came to me with an execution question.
His company’s product relied heavily on a third-party service. Recently, that service had become slower and less reliable. The team was wasting energy solving the same recurring problems. He wanted to systematize this firefighting so they could waste less time handling predictable issues.
This wasn’t a bad idea, but when he returned to his team an engineer stepped up and asked: why are we even relying on that third-party?
They ran with it. The engineering team rebuilt the capability in-house. It reduced costs, removed a recurring source of risk, and gave the team control over a core piece of their infrastructure.
What looked like a need to fix turned out to be a signal to create.
If we always default to stability, we will frame these moments as “just” infrastructure problems, when they may be invitations to rethink how the company works and what it’s now capable of.
Building Rhythm
Your yeses may be scattered across the questions.
This happens when we already know we have to dedicate time to both execution and innovation, but haven’t found their rhythm yet.
As you look for a sustainable balance between the two, you will overcorrect and fall into old habits. This work, even once you find that rhythm, requires constant adjustment and clear expectations.
Because of this, I try to build natural checks into my companies' foundations.
Here are four ways I do that:
Create a cadence for oscillation. Introduce deliberate cycles that alternate between execution and innovation. At my second company, we implemented 6-week build cycles followed by 2-week stabilization periods. This created a natural rhythm that told the team when to push and when to strengthen.
Use "foundation-first" language. Instead of framing technical work as "slowing down," we talked about "building foundations for speed." This shift changes how teams view maintenance work: not as a distraction, but as part of progress.
Track both metrics. Most companies track either stability metrics (uptime, performance) or growth metrics (features shipped, user acquisition). Try creating a dashboard that shows the relationship between your foundation and your growth. This way you keep an eye on both.
Practice strategic patience. Sometimes mastering the rhythm means allowing technical debt to accumulate in certain areas while you focus on critical growth initiatives—with a commitment to address that debt at a specific time in the future.
Growth rarely stalls because you’re focused on something unimportant. It stalls because you stayed in the right phase for too long.
Likely you already have the skills to fix and build. The real practice now is knowing when to shift, why you’re resisting the shift, and what it’s costing you to stay where you are.
See you next week! 👑
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