I've always loved moving fast. Give me a problem and a deadline, and I'm probably going to have a pretty good day. I've spent most of my career around startups and growth-stage companies where a bias toward action isn't just encouraged, it's practically a requirement. You ship something, learn from it, adjust, and go again. Sitting around debating things for six months while the market moves around you has never been my style.
For a long time, I've thought of that as one of my strengths. But these days, I'm wondering if it's sometimes been one of my weaknesses too.
I've been spending a lot of time lately with CEOs and GTM teams that are under enormous pressure to move faster. They need more pipeline this quarter, more meetings this month, a better story for the next board meeting, a new website, a new campaign, a better sales playbook, a clearer AI strategy. There is always something that needs to happen now, and because technology has made it possible to do almost everything faster, there is increasingly an expectation that we should.
The result is that a lot of companies are incredibly busy without necessarily making much progress.
Don't confuse speed with progress
You can see it everywhere. Pipeline is down, so we launch another campaign. Sales needs more meetings, so we buy another tool or stand up an ABM program. The story isn't resonating, so we rewrite the deck. The website isn't converting, so we redesign it. Growth isn't where it needs to be, so we reorganize the team. Someone discovers a new AI platform that promises to change everything, so we add that to the list too.
None of those decisions is necessarily wrong. In fact, that's part of what makes this so difficult. Most random acts of GTM are perfectly reasonable when you look at them individually.
I've made plenty of those decisions myself. Sometimes they worked. Sometimes they probably created the appearance of progress while allowing me to avoid a much more uncomfortable question: What if the underlying strategy is wrong?
That's a hard question to sit with when you're responsible for a company or a number. There's a board meeting coming, the quarter isn't going the way you expected, employees are looking to you for answers, and doing something feels infinitely better than doing nothing. Activity creates momentum, or at least the sensation of it. A new campaign, a new hire or a new initiative is also much easier to explain than, "We need to stop for a minute because I'm not sure the model we're operating against actually works."
So we keep moving.
And sometimes we look up 12 months later and find ourselves having almost exactly the same conversation.
Random acts of marketing typically aren't a marketing problem
I've used the phrase "random acts of marketing" for years, but I've started to think it's a little unfair to marketing because most random acts of marketing aren't really marketing problems. They're usually symptoms of a company that hasn't made enough choices.
When there isn't a clear strategy, almost every idea sounds like a reasonable one. We should do more executive events. We should build an ABM program. We should create more content. We should sponsor that conference. We should launch a podcast. We should redo the website. We should get the CEO posting more on LinkedIn. We should hire an agency. We should invest in category creation.
Again, any one of those things could be exactly the right thing to do. The problem is when nobody can clearly explain why this is the thing we're doing, what problem it is intended to solve, what we're choosing not to do because of it, and how we'll know whether it worked.
I've watched companies build an entire year out of individually reasonable ideas. I've participated in it myself, and I'm sure there have been times when I've caused it. At the end of the year there are hundreds of things to point to—campaigns, events, decks, videos, tools, new messaging, new processes and maybe even a new org chart—but the fundamental problems haven't moved very much.
Pipeline is still inconsistent. Conversion is still too low. Sales and marketing still disagree about what a qualified opportunity is. The company is still struggling to explain why it matters. Customers still aren't expanding the way everyone hoped.
So another planning cycle begins and, instead of questioning the model, everyone starts making another list of things to do.
That's not an effort problem. Most of these teams are working incredibly hard.
It's a strategy problem.
AI is making this much more interesting
For most of business history, execution had friction built into it. Writing something took time. Designing something took time. Research took time. Analysis took time. Building a campaign took time. Creating a presentation took time. Those constraints could be frustrating, but they also forced us to make choices because there was only so much a team could reasonably produce.
AI is removing an enormous amount of that friction.
That's obviously exciting. I spend a huge amount of my own time thinking about what becomes possible when one person or a small team can suddenly accomplish things that used to require dozens of people. I believe deeply in that future.
But I also think there's a consequence we aren't talking about enough: a company with a broken GTM model can now execute its broken GTM model at 10 times the speed.
We can create more campaigns without knowing whether we need another campaign. We can produce more content without having anything particularly interesting to say. We can personalize thousands of messages without being sure we're talking to the right people. We can analyze enormous amounts of data without agreeing on which questions actually matter.
AI didn't eliminate the need for strategy. I think it may have made the cost of not having one much higher.
When execution becomes abundant, the ability to decide what deserves to be executed becomes scarce. Judgment matters more. Prioritization matters more. Taste matters more. Saying no matters more. And strategy—the actual act of making choices about where you're going and what you're willing not to do—matters much more.
It's true...sometimes moving slower is the faster path
This is something I'm still learning, and probably something I'll always have to work at because my natural instinct is still to move.
When something isn't working, I want to fix it. When I see an opportunity, I want to chase it. When I have an idea at 11:30 at night, there's a very good chance I'll convince myself it needs to exist by midnight.
I've pulled a lot of levers in my career, and plenty of them needed to be pulled. But with the benefit of hindsight, I can also see times when pulling another lever was easier than sitting with the possibility that we didn't fully understand the problem.
Experience hasn't really taught me how to move faster. I've always been pretty good at that. What I'm trying to get better at is knowing when not to move...when to sit with a problem a little longer, ask another question, challenge an assumption everyone has accepted as fact, or resist treating the symptom because everyone is uncomfortable waiting for the diagnosis.
There are moments when the most important thing a leadership team can say is, "Before we add another thing, let's understand why the things we're already doing aren't working."
That can feel painfully slow in the moment. Over a year, it might be the fastest decision you make.
The race didn't suddenly become a sprint
I understand why companies have become so focused on the immediate future. Markets change quickly, technology changes even faster, boards expect results and nobody wants to discover that a competitor moved while they were still building a strategic plan.
But I worry that we've allowed the next quarter to become the only horizon that matters.
Companies aren't built in quarters. Brands aren't built in quarters. Trust isn't built in quarters. Great teams aren't built in quarters, and meaningful strategies certainly aren't.
The challenge is to operate with urgency in the present without becoming trapped by it. A leadership team should be able to explain what it is trying to build over the next several years, what needs to be true 12 months from now for that vision to become more likely, and which few things matter most right now.
Just as importantly, it should be able to explain what it isn't going to do.
That's the part of strategy I think we've lost. Strategy isn't a longer list of initiatives. It's the discipline to choose among a thousand things that could plausibly work and commit to the few you believe matter most.
That discipline is going to become much harder in a world where AI makes almost every idea feel inexpensive enough to try.
I'm trying to learn this too
One of the unexpected things about writing publicly again is realizing that most of the things I want to write about aren't lessons I've mastered. They're questions I'm still working through.
This is definitely one of them.
I still love speed. I still get excited by new ideas, and I still have to stop myself from turning every interesting thought into a project. AI has made that temptation exponentially stronger because so many things that used to require a team, a budget or a month of work can now begin with a conversation and exist before I've finished my coffee.
That's incredible. It's also dangerous.
Because I don't think the next era of business is going to suffer from a shortage of ideas, content, campaigns, software or things we could do. We're going to be drowning in them.
The scarce resource will be knowing what actually matters.
Maybe that's why I've found myself thinking more about strategy at the exact moment when everyone seems obsessed with speed. The companies that win won't necessarily be the ones that do the most things or even the ones that move the fastest. I think they'll be the ones that develop the judgment to choose what matters, the courage to ignore what doesn't, and the patience to stay with the right things long enough to see whether they work.
So yes, move fast. Experiment. Build things. Ship things. Learn and adjust when the evidence tells you to.
But every once in a while, stop long enough to look at the map.
Because speed is incredibly valuable.
But only if you know where you're going.