The Spare Bearing: What My Uncle’s Navy Story Taught Me About Marketing

My uncle passed away in early September. At his funeral, among the stories that made us laugh and the ones that made us quiet, someone recounted an experience from his time in the Royal Australian Navy, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

He served as a storeman aboard ship, and as it happened, his brother served on the same vessel as a mechanical engineer. One day another naval ship came alongside with a mechanical emergency. A critical bearing had failed, and without a replacement she would be inoperable within two hours. My uncle’s brother came to him, explained the situation, and asked the obvious question: do we have a spare?

My uncle went away, checked the stores, and came back with his report. “Yes, we have the bearing. But I can’t give it to you.”

The reason, he explained, was naval regulation. There’s probably an official name for it, but the rule was that every ship must retain one spare of certain critical parts in its stores, in case of need. This bearing was one of those parts. So there was the situation in full: a ship alongside them, two hours from being dead in the water, in genuine need of a part; and a store containing exactly that part, held in reserve, in case someone needed it. Handing it over would have breached regulations and potentially earned him a disciplinary.

Now, my uncle being my uncle, I have no doubt he relished the irony of the moment, and enjoyed even more the opportunity to wind up his brother with that beautifully self-defeating piece of bureaucratic logic. I’m equally sure it was resolved shortly after, when the correct authorisation came from someone with the authority, and the wit, to take accountability for subverting the rule in service of the reason the rule existed.

That last part is the bit that stayed with me. The rule existed to make sure a ship in need could get a critical part. And the rule, followed to the letter, was the very thing preventing a ship in need from getting a critical part. The letter of the law had eaten the spirit of it.

When I returned to work after the funeral, I told the story to a few colleagues, and I found myself looking differently at a lot of what we do day to day, in marketing for ourselves and for our clients.

It’s human nature to be drawn to patterns, habits, and repetition. We thrive on repeatable process and efficiency, leaning on the brain’s natural propensity for recall over problem-solving. We look for data that supports and reinforces the repeatable actions we’ve settled into, and we gravitate towards it. None of that is wrong in itself. Data absolutely should inform what we do. But somewhere along the way, we can stop factoring in the spirit of the law and start serving only the letter of it. We forget why we’re doing what we’re doing, and instead focus on the process, on perfecting the process, rather than on achieving the outcome the process was built for.

So I’ve been inviting my team to do something simple and slightly uncomfortable: question why they’re doing what they’re doing. Are we caught up in the process and quietly losing sight of the outcome? Is it time to step back and look again?

This is really a story about strategy and tactics. Sometimes the strategy points clearly at one outcome, but the tactics have drifted and no longer support it, and we’re so invested in the plan that we miss the point of the play.

We start measuring the plan’s success rather than the business’s. That’s where measurement can become misleading. Rather than relying on activity or vanity metrics, businesses need to understand whether marketing is contributing to meaningful commercial outcomes. Our guide to measuring marketing ROI breaks down how to approach this in practice.

Let me give you a real example, with the names left out to protect the guilty.

At a previous company, I worked with a colleague who was determined to make a name for himself and prove he was an excellent marketer. We operated in a very niche industry. The entire pool of potential customers, globally, numbered in the low thousands. We were implementing HubSpot at the time, and he took it upon himself to own the configuration and get the lead funnel flowing. He worked hard at it, too: lead scoring, contact records, custom fields, all carefully tweaked. Then he switched on paid advertising to open the tap.

In the first month, 15,000 leads were captured.

We had a global sales team of ten. And a total addressable market in the low thousands. I looked at that number and knew instinctively that 15,000 leads were not 15,000 leads, and that something was very wrong. He looked at the same number, marched into the CMO’s office, gleefully announced that the funnel was working, and asked for a promotion.

Within three months he was working for another company. Much of his work had to be unpicked after he left, and the 15,000 leads a month were quickly exposed for what they were: bots, spam, and junk traffic that wasted everyone’s time. Worse, whatever genuine quality had existed in the pipeline was lost in the noise. He had been so caught up in doing what he thought good looked like for a marketer that he completely missed the who and the why of what we were doing as a business. We were still unpicking the issues his ambition and inexperience had set in motion years later. And he didn’t stay long enough to learn from any of it. Quite possibly he never knew there was anything to learn. He moved on to a more senior role elsewhere, presumably to teach them how he’d taken us from zero to 15,000 leads a month.

Notice, though, that his failure was the opposite of my uncle’s situation. My uncle knew exactly what needed to happen; the process just didn’t empower him to do it. My colleague was fully empowered and never understood what needed to happen. Process defeats outcome from both directions: sometimes it locks the right judgement out, and sometimes it hands the controls to someone who never looks up from the plan.

So here’s the exercise, and I’d encourage you to run it honestly, because I’ve been running it on myself.

What are we doing that’s quietly sabotaging our own success? What are we investing effort in that is really just busy work, disconnected from the outcomes the business needs, activity that doesn’t move the needle? What could we stop today with zero impact on revenue? And what could we start that would do the opposite?

The distinction between activity and outcomes is critical. Doing more marketing doesn’t necessarily mean creating more growth. We explore this further in our guide to turning marketing activity into real business growth, including how to keep execution aligned with broader commercial objectives.

And then there are the organisational versions of the spare bearing, the ones many marketers will recognise with a wince.

Have you found yourself asking for marketing investment in order to generate more leads, and been told no, because you aren’t bringing in enough leads?

Worse still, have you ever had a marketing budget approved, gone to spend that already-approved budget on activity with a proven return, and been told you can’t spend it unless you prove the ROI all over again in a fresh business case?

That’s the bearing sitting in the store while the ship goes dead in the water. The governance exists to protect the outcome, and applied without thought, it becomes the thing preventing it.

Here’s the nuance, though, because this isn’t an argument against rules, process, or scrutiny. Sometimes challenging the status quo is exactly the worthy activity, asking why we’re doing something and how we’ll actually extract the value from it. Take that trade event in the budget. Interrogated properly, the question isn’t “should we go?” It’s “how do we go?” Because attended without the right mindset, it’s a flag-waving exercise: a presence without ever really turning up. No serious lead capture, and a sales team having a jolly rather than hunting the floor and scanning badges like their lives depend on it. The scrutiny, aimed at the outcome rather than the paperwork, is what turns the same spend from theatre into pipeline.

And here’s the part of my uncle’s story I nearly missed, because it’s hiding in how it was resolved.

The Navy didn’t expect my uncle to break the rule. It also didn’t design a system where a ship goes dead in the water because a rule says so. It built a third thing: a chain of command, through which authority could be granted to subvert the regulation, by someone senior enough to weigh the situation, with the wit to see it clearly and the willingness to take accountability for the call. The rule stays intact for the thousand ordinary days when it should hold. The escalation path exists for the day it shouldn’t.

Rigidity at the bottom, judgement at the top, and a working connection between the two.

Most businesses have the first part and lose the second. We lock people into actions without the agility to pivot, and then we’re surprised when nobody adjusts course as conditions change. The storeman-level people, the ones closest to the work, can often see that the process is sabotaging the outcome, but the plan is the plan, and questioning it feels like insubordination. Meanwhile, whoever does hold the authority is too far from the work to see the ship taking on water. The result is a team of good people blindly following a dusty plan that nobody currently believes in, because no one is clearly empowered to say “stop, this isn’t serving the point anymore,” and no escalation path exists to someone who is.

So the fix isn’t less process, and it isn’t heroic rule-breaking either. It’s building your own chain of command for misalignment: making it explicit that anyone can raise the flag when the letter of the law starts undermining the spirit of it, being clear about who has the authority to adjust course, and expecting that person to exercise judgement and own the call rather than hide behind the plan. Don’t become rigid in your thinking, and don’t build a team that has to choose between following orders and doing the right thing. Build the third option.

Sometimes we get in our own way with all the best intentions in the world. The letter of the law undermines the spirit of it, and we miss the mark. So never be afraid to step back, look again, challenge your own thinking, and ask the question my uncle’s story keeps putting in front of me: why? Why are we doing this? If the answer meets the purpose, wonderful, carry on. But if we’re missing the mark, maybe it’s time to let common sense take over and deliver for the greater good.

My uncle would have enjoyed that conclusion, I think. Right after he’d enjoyed making his brother sweat for the bearing.

Caught between the plan and the point? Step back, look again, and ask why. And if you’d like a second set of eyes on the answer, talk to Hunt + Hawk.