Roughly a third of leadership teams in India's auto component sector spend most or all of their time on urgent day-to-day issues rather than on the strategic decisions that will determine where their companies sit in five years, according to the BCG-ACMA report Beyond Resilience.
Across the survey of over 50 companies, 8% of respondents said their leadership time goes almost entirely into firefighting and a further 26% said it is mostly firefighting – 34% in all. Another 32% described a balanced split, and 34% said their time is mostly strategic.
The pattern varies sharply by company size, and not in the direction of comfort for the sector's long tail. At large companies, half the respondents said their leadership time is mostly strategic and none reported being almost entirely consumed by firefighting. At small companies, 18% said they are almost entirely firefighting and another 24% mostly so – 42% in total – with only 24% mostly strategic. Medium-sized companies clustered in the middle, with 43% reporting a balanced split.
This matters because of what leaders are being asked to decide. The report maps ten live strategic trade-offs, and finds that no single one dominates. Half of all respondents flagged automate versus deepen the bench; 45% flagged invest ahead of demand versus wait; 39% acquire versus build capability; and 34% diversify versus go deeper with existing customers. Ownership of intellectual property versus build-to-print, adopting AI now versus fixing the core first, and building for scale versus staying lean were each cited by 26%.
For most of these decisions, between 20% and 40% of companies said they were actively weighing them, and no single decision was top of mind for more than half. Every company, in other words, is holding several of these calls open at once. The report notes that leaders in interviews consistently recognised the importance of these decisions while acknowledging that operating pressure limits the time available to think them through.
The finding the industry will argue about is the one linking planning to performance. Within the survey sample, more than half of the companies with a current three- to five-year plan reported growth above 10% a year. Among respondents whose plans were outdated or absent, none did.
That is a striking split, and it should be read carefully. The survey establishes an association, not a mechanism. Companies growing above 10% a year may have the headroom, the management bandwidth and the balance sheet to maintain a formal plan, as easily as the plan may be producing the growth. The sample is also small – over 50 companies, self-selected into an industry study – and the report does not disclose how many respondents fall into each planning category. Treated as a correlation worth investigating rather than a causal claim, it is still the most actionable line in the section: the companies that look ahead are, at minimum, in different company.