The Boring Work That Matters

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Last week, I spent an afternoon organizing my photography gear. Twenty years of equipment scattered across closets and drawers: lenses, filters, batteries, memory cards. I could have kept working around the mess for months.

While I sorted through cables and cleaned dust off equipment, I kept thinking about a CEO I'd talked to the week before. Six months into his AI project, with $200K spent, his team was still manually copying data into spreadsheets. "I don't get it," he said. "We bought the best tools."

The problem wasn't the tools. It was the mess underneath.

You Can't Organize What You Don't Understand

We do this all the time in business. We jump to the shiny solution without doing the boring work first. This CEO wanted AI magic without understanding his data, his processes, or his people. He wanted transformation without preparation.

Marcus Aurelius, who ran an empire, kept personal notes filled with reminders about basic principles: be just, be brave, control yourself, and think clearly. Not grand imperial strategies...just the fundamentals that make everything else work.

The same thing applies to technology. Before you can predict customer behavior, you need clean data. Before you can automate a process, you need to understand it. Before you can scale anything, you need to execute the basics.

The Work Nobody Sees

Good photographers know the work that matters happens before you press the shutter. The gear maintenance. The understanding of light. Getting your settings right when nobody's watching. Skip this prep work, and even the best camera won't save your shot.

In technology, this invisible work looks like:

• Reading actual user feedback instead of summary reports

• Understanding why that manual process exists before you automate it

• Having honest conversations about what works and what doesn't

• Building systems that fail gracefully, not just systems that work when everything's perfect

It's not glamorous. It won't make for exciting conference talks. But it's the difference between tools that transform your business and expensive software that sits unused.

Real Satisfaction

When I finished organizing that gear, I felt something I don't get after most strategy meetings: complete satisfaction. The work was done. The result was real. I could find what I needed when I needed it.

Good technology work has that same quality. No flash, no headlines. Just things that work reliably, solve actual problems, and make people's jobs easier instead of harder.

The best leaders I know get this. They're willing to do the unglamorous work first. They measure success by what continues to work long after they've moved on to the next project.

Twenty-five years in this industry has taught me something: the fanciest technology can't fix a problem you don't understand. The most advanced automation can't streamline a broken process. The most sophisticated technology can't overcome muddled thinking.

Sometimes the best thing you can do as a leader is step away from the computer, work with your hands, and remember that real solutions get built from the ground up. One piece at a time.

No amount of technology can fix what you're not willing to sort through first.

I help organizations identify the real problems before they rush to technological solutions. If you're wrestling with this kind of thing, we should talk: ericbrown.com or find me on LinkedIn.

If you found this post helpful, consider sharing it with another executive grappling with AI, technology, and data. If you want to explore AI and other Technology strategies, grab some time on my calendar, and let's chat.

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