There’s a chart Dave Kellogg shared recently I’ve been thinking a lot about. It’s from a survey of CEOs and operating partners in private equity. Here it is:

Each group was asked the same question:

How much value does you believe your operating partner provides, relative to their cost?

The gap in responses is... dramatic.

• CEOs, on average, said their operating partner was worth about 3x their cost.

• Operating partners, on average, said nearly 11x.

And the real kicker is in the tails: nearly half of operating partners believe they're delivering more than 10x their cost. Very few CEOs agreed—or thought they were even close.

So what explains the gap?

Some of it, sure, comes down to ego and incentives. But I think the deeper truth comes down to a distinction that rarely gets talked about out loud, even though it shows up everywhere once you see it:

The difference between being smart and being useful.

Smart Feels Like the Job

Being smart means understanding the problem deeply. When you go to work at a highly-selective, highly-analytical company, that’s what you’re taught to do. That’s what gets rewarded.

It’s your job to break down the funnel. Spot the pattern. Build the model. Run the analysis. Frame the issue in a way that makes people nod and say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Then you ship the deck and move on.

And that’s the trap. We start to believe that understanding the problem is solving the problem. That once you’ve “figured it out,” your work is done.

But anyone who’s actually run something knows better.

Earlier in my career, I interviewed for an operations role with another private equity fund. This fund was started by an ex-software CEO who now invested in smaller companies. And during our first get to know you conversation, he admitted he had a built-in bias towards people with consulting backgrounds, saying that,

“They tend to spend their time admiring the problem instead of solving it.”

That stung a bit (I was still at Bain at this point) but his words - and the idea behind them - have stuck with me: The idea that it isn’t enough to be smart. The idea that there’s some kind of shame in never moving past smart.

I think some of that - whatever you call it - explains what’s going on in the gap between CEOs and Operating Partners in that chart.

What Operating Partners Think CEOs Need

Here’s how I think what goes into that gap. Many operating partners (smart, accomplished, capable people, on average) believe they’re being valuable when they:

• Surface hidden insights in the data

• Spot blind spots the team missed

• Share the playbook that worked at another company

• Push for stretch targets to “raise the bar”

• Drive operational rigor through reporting

• Ask the “tough” questions in the boardroom

And to be fair, yeah, sometimes that’s helpful. But more often, the CEOs I work with are trying to unblock a very different set of problems - the kind that are slowing them down this week.

They need someone who will:

• Help assess and hire an executive for an open role

• Recommend a vendor who can solve this problem for them

• Translate what the board actually wants to see in the board meeting

• Step in as a fractional CXO while they fill the gap

• Coach a struggling sales rep so they close more this quarter

• Simplify the reporting dashboard, not complicate it

• Help prep for a tough conversation with a key leader

• Offer a reality check on a timeline that’s quietly derailing morale

• Share templates that save them hours on things they hate doing

• Prepare them for the exit process before a banker gets involved

It’s not that CEOs don’t want insight. It’s that insight, on its own, isn’t enough. They don’t just need a strategist. They need someone who’s going to help them make progress this week.

Someone who’s smart and useful.

The Oil Rig

Here’s another way to think about the difference.

Designing a solution on paper is like drafting the blueprints for an oil rig.
Everything is clean. Precise. Engineered to the inch. Elegant, even.

But when it comes time to execute? That’s when you have to stop designing the rig and step onto the rig yourself. That’s when you need to put your boots on.

You’re wearing a hard hat. You’re covered in grease and sweat. You’re gripping a thousand pounds of wet steel, throwing the chain, muscling it into place.

There’s no whiteboard down on the rig. No Notion doc. No need for a three-slide summary. Just the machinery of the business - and the awkward, uncomfortable work of making it move where you need it to.

And here’s the part that catches people off guard: The shift from thinking to doing doesn’t just feel different. It feels worse. It’s clumsy. It’s repetitive. It’s exhausting. It’s physical. And for people who’ve spent their careers refining their intellect and polishing the answer, it’s a kind of work they’re not always prepared for. It’s a kind of work they don’t jump into nearly fast enough.

So they freeze. They say they’re tightening the model. Adding a few more slides. Strengthening the answer. Making sure they haven’t missed anything.

But if we’re honest, they’re just trying to avoid the rig.

When to Make the Shift

So when is it time to stop thinking and start doing?

That moment almost never announces itself. You’ll still have questions. You’ll still see gaps. And if you’re wired like most high-performers, there’s a voice in your head whispering:

“Should we hold off just a bit longer? Should we get this one more detail right?”

And that voice sounds reasonable. Responsible, even. It sounds smart.

But at some point, you’re not learning anything new. You’re just trying to protect yourself, and putting off the dirty part of the work that is always a little less fun. You’re staying upstairs in the control room, looking at the rig through binoculars, telling yourself that more analysis will somehow make the work easier.

It won’t.

And here’s the part nobody tells you: Nobody’s going to give you permission to act. Not the investment team. Not the board. Not the founder. Not the CEO.

You have to give it to yourself.

Why Action Beats Certainty

The mistake most smart people make is thinking they need to be sure before they act. Spoiler: You don’t.

You don’t take action once you’re certain. You take action so you can become certain.

That’s what makes the best operators (the most useful operators) different. They act before everything’s perfect - not recklessly, but intentionally - because they know the act of doing creates the conditions for learning.

It’s not a gut-feel thing. It’s not a bravery thing. It’s a systems thing.

Look at how the best-run companies operate. Toyota. Danaher. Any business built on Lean or Agile principles. They all run the same loop:

Act → Observe → Adjust.

Not because they don’t value thinking. But because they understand that observation only becomes useful after something’s in motion.

And that’s what people in supporting roles often miss. The goal isn’t to deliver the cleanest recommendation. It’s to help the team learn faster than they would have without you.

Remember What the Job Really Is

Which brings us back to the chart.

If you’re in a supporting role - operating partner, advisor, board member - you don’t get to decide how valuable you are. The people you're helping do.

They don’t remember who explained the issue best. They remember who helped them get something moving.

Help, as they say, is defined in the mind of the recipient.

So before you publish another deck, tighten another framework, or schedule another check-in, think about asking something simpler:

“What are you trying to solve right now - and how can I help?”

Because the job was never to be the smartest person in the room.

The job is to be useful to the people in it.