Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step. And they can easily stumble and fall when a step is missing or misaligned.

• Reduce by 80% the time it takes the top team to manage the business (operational activities)

• Refocus the senior team on market-facing activities

• Realign everyone else (onto the same page) to drive execution and results.

Because of these needed transitions, it’s often best to have some of the original functional leaders head business units — maybe head up expansion to a new country or lead the launch of a product line — so they can maintain direct operational control.

Owners like Gary choose to spend money every day to grow their businesses. However, sometimes they are actually spending their hard-earned money to cover management-influenced waste (read that again).

Paul did a lot more at Alcoa than use powerful words. He and fellow company leaders dismissed managers who didn’t turn knowledge about process improvements into action or, worse yet, covered up safety problems. As business author David Burkus argues, the genius of zeroing in on safety is “you can’t improve safety without understanding every step in the process— understanding each risk—and then eliminating it.” As a result, hundreds of process improvements “made the plants run more efficiently,” and Paul “gradually changed the systems and the culture” so that “executives began sharing other data and other ideas more rapidly as well.” Paul was effective not only because of the powerful language he used to fire up employees and focus their attention on the details of Alcoa’s production processes. What Paul didn’t say provides an equally important lesson for friction fixers: we can’t detect even a whiff of jargon monoxide in his words after reviewing numerous speeches, interviews, and written statements.