I found myself articulating something I had felt for a long time but never quite named. Something about why meetings feel increasingly pointless, why the people with the best ideas keep losing to the people with the fastest execution, and why the standard playbook for how teams build things together is starting to feel like a costume that no longer fits the body wearing it.
What follows is my attempt to put that something into words rigorous enough to be useful. I make no claim that I have all of this right. Some of what I argue here has good evidence behind it. Some of it is inference. I will tell you which is which, because I think you deserve that.
What I am confident about is this: the bottleneck has moved. And when the bottleneck moves, everything that was organized around the old bottleneck needs to be rethought.
Not everything will change at once. But what matters is changing — and the teams and individuals who recognize that early will operate differently from those who don’t.
That rethinking is what this book is about.