Running a business can be, if not easy, at least straightforward: Develop and provide a product or service and satisfy your customers.

But add other constituents to the mix, like partners, investors, vendors, affiliates, independent contractors, etc., and satisfying the short-term needs of everyone involved -- while taking steps to ensure the long-term health of the business -- can become incredibly complicated.

Perfect example: NASCAR. The sport has independent owners who operate under the auspices of a sanctioning body. And it needs to meet the often conflicting needs of sponsors, broadcast networks, venues, vendors, suppliers.

And just like any professional sport, it's also a business, which requires delivering on-track competition that is entertaining and engaging for fans, and balancing the needs of a variety of people with different needs and agendas.

If all of that sounds familiar, meet Steve O'Donnell, NASCAR EVP and chief racing development officer.

This year Steve oversaw a number of changes to the rules package (cars are required to comply with a comprehensive set of specifications) designed to improve on-track competition.

To date, those changes have paid off: The average number of lead changes during a race is up. Green flag passes are up by over 35 percent. And even though some predicted the changes would introduce a level of "random" to the results, the majority of races this year have been won by former champions.

All of which means on-track action has increased, but the cream still rises to the top.

If you and your investors, suppliers, vendors, employees, and customers share the same overall goal, but don't always agree on how to accomplish that goal, read on.

You definitely have a thankless job: Because you're balancing the needs of so many people, someone will always disagree with a step your team takes.

If I tell my kids, "See who can be first to find someone on social media who says your dad should be fired," that contest only takes a few seconds. (Laughs.)

That's part of the job. I'd be lying if I said I never take it personally, but the way I look at it is our fans are passionate, and they have opinions. We want them to have opinions. And they absolutely have the right to disagree with a decision or feel we made a bad call. Because

we're definitely not perfect.

So I try to interact whenever I can, mostly to explain why we made a certain call. We may still disagree, but I can at least tell you why.

And here's the thing: If no one was talking, that would mean no one cares. So in that way... the more conversation, the better.

Speaking of conversation: Your job is to meet the needs of many different constituents with different agendas. That could be paralyzing. How do you weigh all the input and come to a decision?

You're right, but the core of our job is a tremendous amount of listening.

One of the worst things you can do is not talk to everyone, or even worse, ignore everyone and just do what you think is right. We don't have that luxury, and we don't want that luxury.

Of course that can result in a different problem. I had a boss who said, "Don't ask employees for input, because they'll get upset if you don't do what they suggest, and accuse you of not listening."

We don't -- and can't -- always do what someone says we should. But as long as you have a conversation, then, if you end up going left and that person thought you should go right, you at least know where they stand and can follow up and explain why you made the decision you did.

People understand that: They know theirs is not the only perspective, but they want you to at the very least understand their perspective. Many have a much broader perspective than you might think: We have drivers who came up through short tracks, who are or have been team owners. Our owners started small and built their organizations... they embrace the need to balance short-term and long-term goals.

And even if we do go in a different direction, that opinion is still valuable. Say a stakeholder disagrees: We'll explain why, but that initial feedback often helps us consider an issue or aspect we might never have recognized.

For a driver, their job is to dominate a race. An owner wants to dominate a race, but they also want to reduce costs, while still spending what they need to be able to win. A track owner doesn't want one car to dominate a race; they want every lap to be thrilling for fans.

Our job is to take all that input and work to chart a course that is best for the sport today, as well as five and 10 years from now, and the only way to do that is to create a path forward that allows for disagreement.

In regard to the new rules package, no matter how much testing and analysis you do, you never really know until you roll something out.

We're happy it's worked out well. And also relieved. (Laughs.)

We definitely took a risk. We knew going in it wouldn't be the most popular decision, but we believed in the research and the work we had done around intermediate tracks to create more green flag passes, more lead changes.

What we've said from the beginning is that we want the best drivers and teams to win.

Some people thought the entire field would wreck and the 30th place driver would end up winning every race. That hasn't turned out to be true.

But we're always aware that no one solution can ever fix all.

If only because as soon as you introduce a new rules package, hundreds of intelligent people start thinking of ways to gain an advantage.

You're right: Any direction we might go, a bunch of smart people immediately start thinking about how they can adapt and create new technology that wins races.

But we also factor in cost: We would never introduce a new rule that would compel teams to spend millions of dollars trying to win one or two races.

We have incredibly smart people in our R&D Center, but the teams never let us forget that we're taking on the best and brightest engineers in the world. (Laughs.) That's a challenge, but it's a fun challenge.

Finding the time for strategic rather than tactical is a challenge for most small-business owners. How do you balance day-to-day responsibilities with planning for the future?

Three or four years ago I became friends with Russell Hensley of McKinsey. He asked me that same question. I mapped out my day-to-day, and he said, "What are you doing? You're too in the weeds. You're too tactical. If you aren't focusing on strategic planning, who is?"

The problem was that if I didn't feel like I was heavy into the day-to-day, I wasn't really part of the team.

When you come up through the ranks, that's a tough transition. It took me forever to stop wanting to be on the shop floor getting my hands dirty.

It is, but then I realized we have great people I trust who care about where the company is going; who feel the same level of responsibility and ownership; who feel the same way I do.

That helped me to focus more on the bigger picture.

It also helps that the culture at the R&D Center is so great. There's tremendous camaraderie, tremendous trust. This industry is a seven-day-a-week job, and if you don't like the people you work with, you're not going to like the job.

I also constantly remind myself that along the way, people gave me a chance. People gave me a job, a project, a task, and then trusted me to get it done.