Why the Fastest Company Wins

Wow. Okay here we go. It seems like the playbook most executives are running right now was written for a world that really no longer exists. Org charts, they feel more like status symbols these days. Headcount as proof of leadership? Nah, not really. And AI prototypes that wow everyone in the boardroom only to fall apart in the real world? There's a lot of that going around.

This week I've been thinking about what happens when reality catches up. Why some companies seem to be pulling away while others are stuck spinning their wheels. And why the winners usually aren't smarter, they're just moving faster.

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Let's get into it.

Some leaders are addicted to headcount. That's about to become a big problem.

It's corporate vanity.

We rewarded leaders for building bigger teams. But nobody cares anymore about how many people report to you. The market only cares about output.

The age of headcount flexing is over. Your sense of self and identity cannot come from the number of people who report to you.

You can't measure leadership by the size of their organization,  you have to measure it by the value you create with the fewest resources possible.

When leaders stop focusing on headcount, they actually have to understand the technology they are trying to manage. When they refuse to get their hands dirty on the ground floor of execution, they fall face first into an expensive trap.

Every CEO should spend one week building with AI before making an AI strategy decision. It would eliminate a lot of stupid delusions.

I was talking to a CEO the other day who told me: 'The distance from a convincing prototype to a scalable production platform is way bigger than I realized.'

That's the most honest thing I've heard about AI all year.

Like every CEO, he initially thought:

Then he opened Claude and started building. That's when reality punched him in the face.

Nothing kills AI delusion faster than reality. After that, he said that the conversations changed. There was less hype, less panic, and better decisions.

I actually think the CEOs who have built with AI are often the most optimistic about its future. They're also the least naive about what it takes to get there.

The executives who've actually built with AI stop asking "why can't it just do this?" They start asking better questions. That's the only real cure for operational delusion.

ESPN has thousands of hours of NBA footage and decades of archived content. And somehow they decided the best way to honor Tony Parker was to create an AI-generated version of him.

This is what happens when executives become obsessed with using AI instead of improving the business.

Not every process needs AI and not every human touchpoint should be replaced.

You have to be disciplined enough to know where NOT to use AI and right now, most organizations are automating things nobody asked them to automate.

True automation is not about building AI images to look cooler. It is about deploying AI to solve immediate, high-volume functional friction where absolute speed dictates the bottom line.

It's crazy, everyone wants more leads but nobody is obsessed with responding to them faster.

In a recent comparison between AI SDRs and Human SDRs, the biggest difference wasn't messaging, personalization, or qualification.

Read the full edition here.

That’s it for today. I’m moving this newsletter to Atonom, so if you’d like to keep following along, you can subscribe here.