What the Car Rental Business Taught Me That Business School Didn't
On the gap between strategic frameworks and the reality of leading at scale
Columbia Business School gave me a great deal. Rigorous analytical frameworks, exposure to exceptional thinkers, and a language for discussing strategy, markets, and organisations that I still draw on daily.
What it did not fully prepare me for was the particular texture of leading a business where the margin for error is thin, the operation never stops, and the humans doing the work are the strategy.
Running a large-scale car rental operation taught me more about execution, leadership, and organisational dynamics than any case study I encountered in a classroom. I want to share some of what I learned — including the parts that required me to unlearn things I thought I knew.
The Illusion of Controllable Variables
Strategy education, at its best, teaches you to identify the variables that matter and act on them decisively. What operating at scale teaches you is that most of the variables that matter are not fully controllable — and the attempt to control them often creates new problems.
In a car rental business, you are managing fleet, people, pricing, customer experience, and competitive positioning simultaneously, across multiple locations, in real time. The interactions between these variables are complex. An action taken to improve utilisation can affect service quality. A pricing decision made centrally can undermine a relationship that a frontline manager has spent months building.
The lesson I kept relearning was that good strategy in complex operations is less about optimising individual variables and more about creating a system that is coherent — where the parts reinforce rather than undermine each other.
Respect for the Frontline
I arrived in the general manager role with genuine respect for frontline staff. I left with something deeper: an understanding that the people closest to the customer and the operation carry a form of intelligence that does not travel well through reporting structures.
The best insights I received about what was actually working and what was not came from conversations with people who would never appear on an organisational chart above a certain level. They knew things I did not know. They had solved problems I was not aware of. They had also, quietly, developed workarounds for policies that were not working — which was sometimes a warning sign and sometimes a sign of genuine ingenuity.
The habit I developed — of treating frontline conversations as a primary source of strategic intelligence, not just a leadership courtesy — is one I have carried into every subsequent role.
Speed as a Discipline
Business school teaches you to make good decisions. The car rental business taught me to make good decisions fast, under uncertainty, with incomplete information, while managing the emotional temperature of a team that is watching how you respond.
This is not a different version of decision-making. It is a different discipline. And it requires something that case studies cannot fully develop: the tolerance for being wrong quickly and recovering cleanly, without letting the error compound.
I made mistakes in that role. Some of them were visible. What I learned was that how a leader responds to their own mistakes shapes the culture more than almost any other single behaviour. Teams that see leaders own errors and correct course become teams that feel safe doing the same.
What I Carry Forward
I am grateful for the rigour that business school instilled. The frameworks are real and they are useful. But the most durable things I know about leadership, strategy, and organisations came from the daily reality of running something — from the moments of pressure, uncertainty, and human complexity that no case study can fully simulate.
If I had one piece of advice for any leader transitioning from a strategic or advisory role into operational leadership, it would be this: the work will teach you things you cannot learn any other way. Stay humble enough to receive them.