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Reclaiming the CEO’s Time: Moving From Manual Sign-Offs to Automated Logic
There is a particular kind of operational dysfunction that affects successful companies more than struggling ones. It starts small: the CEO reviews every invoice over a certin amount. Then every vendor contracts. Then every hire. Before long, the CEO of a 200-person company is spending several hours a day on approvals that have nothing to do with strategy, product, or growth. They have become the most expensive rubber stamp in the organisation. This pattern is remarkably common, and remarkably costly. The CEO’s time is the scarcest resource in any company. When a meaningful portion of it is consumed by manual sign-offs that follow predictable rules, the organisation is converting its highest-value asset into a low-value processing function. Business process automation has transformed how companies handle manufacturing, logistics, marketing, and customer service. The approval chain, one of the most repetitive and rule-bound processes in any business, has been one of the last to change. The Approval Trap CEOs end up in the approval chain for understandable reasons. In the early days of a company, the founder signs off on everything because there is nobody else to do it and b...
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