A statement I hear from time to time from my private equity clients is, “Eric, I feel like all they’re doing is running the business.” These individuals are speaking about the operating executive of one of their companies. It’s code for: they’re not doing things that are going to create significant longer term value. They’re not doing what’s necessary to transform the company.

Managing the business, while important, is table stakes for the leader of an aggressive growth company. Your ability to do that qualifies you to be a leader, but it is not nearly enough to make you successful in such a role. Your ability to transform the business—to have revenues grow three, four or five times—is rooted in your ability to manage what comes next: the future and building the strategy to get there.

In other words, what are you going to change? And how fast can you make that happen? Speed matters in this space.

There’s no magic number, but directionally this means that you need to spend 40 or 50% of your time on the future. It also means that your senior leadership team adopt a similar ratio.

If I had to generalize about why many highly competent leaders fail in aggressive growth roles, it is because they get this ratio wrong. They are too focused on the day-to-day and get caught up in the details. They focus obsessively on execution, instead of building a team that is strong enough to execute well without close supervision.

You need enough time apart from the day-to-day if you are going to be able to create a very different reality in the coming months and short years ahead.