Executive Attention Bottleneck
RCTClinical Trial
Operations in family-managed firms rely heavily on direct owner involvement, leading to the abandonment of structured practices when executives shift focus to non-operational business demands.
Picture this
Imagine a ship captain who has to step off the deck to negotiate freight prices at the harbor; while the captain is away in the market, the sailors stop filling out the daily navigation logs and safety checklists.
What the evidence says
A reduction in director managing time caused 3.6% of all management practices to be dropped across study plants (representing nearly 30% of the total 12.4% dropped practices), as directors reallocated hours to marketing, finance, or external real estate ventures.
- Who was studied
- 28 plants across 17 family-owned cotton textile firms near Mumbai, India.
- How
- Longitudinal RCT panel study tracking 1,042 practice-by-plant cells from 2011 to 2017 using structured owner and manager interviews.
What to do
Delegate operational compliance tracking to dedicated plant-level supervisors so daily monitoring routines do not rely on the physical presence or time of senior executives.
From the source
"Another major factor across all the plants was director time – overall 3.6% of practices were dropped when directors had to reduce the time they spent managing the plant, often because of other business commitments..."
Do-Management-Interventions-Lasts_Bloom-et-al_June2018.pdf