The Moment an 8-Year-Old Changed Everything
3 Deaths. 3 Lessons. 3 Questions to Survive (and Thrive)
Sunday morning, my phone blew up. Thirty-three text messages. Most mornings, I have zero, so my first thought was “who died?”
The texts were about a death. Sort of.
Sloan Management Review died (ceased publication) and a group chat filled with academics, thought leaders, and consultants were having an absolute meltdown.
Knowing that my husband, an actual Sloan graduate, hadn’t yet seen the news, I broke it to him gently. “Okay,” he shrugged, not even glancing up from his phone.
This was in stark contrast to his reactions to the demise of Spirit Airlines (howling with laughter at the memes) and the resurrection of Allbirds as an AI company (thoughtful and incredibly technical analysis).
Lesson 1: The Race to the Bottom Never Ends Well
CNN’s headline said it all, “Why did Spirit fail? Too many passengers hated flying it.” To prove the point, the article opens,
“Lousy service, not the Iran war, killed Spirit Airlines. Spirit was doomed to fail because of mismanagement, deep financial problems, and – crucially – its reputation for poor customer service. The spike in jet fuel prices during the war just accelerated Spirit’s inevitable demise.”
If that can be written about your business, you don’t deserve to be in business.
It’s only a matter of time until you’re not.
Lesson 2: Be Patient for Growth and Impatient for Profit
Allbirds raised $348 million when it IPOed in 2021 and, at one point, was valued at $4.1 billion despite never turning a profit. Six years later, its stock price had fallen 95% and it sold its business and IP to a brand management company for $39 million.
How did this happen? There are plenty of theories – it expanded too aggressively into bricks and mortar retail, it made ugly shoes but operated like a fashion brand, its Tech Bro image is no longer aspirational for Gen Z customers – but the fact is that it prioritized growth over profit and that ultimately bit them in the balance sheet.
Lesson 3: Some Businesses are Butterflies
While my colleagues’ alarm was understandable, it missed the bigger picture.
Sloan Management Review (SMR) didn’t die. It metamorphosed.
Yes, the SMR brand is going away, but future ideas, research and findings will continue to be shared through digital newsletters, short-form videos, podcasts, and social-first content.
In effect, SMR is metamorphosing to better reflect how its subscribers consume information. Busy executives don’t have the time to read long-form, dense research articles. They grab information in snippets and soundbites. This change ensures the people who need the ideas the most get them.
3 Questions to Find Your Fate
- Do you treat your customers like they exist for your benefit? In other words, are you more focused on value extraction than value creation and delivery? If yes, start planning your business’ funeral and don’t expect anyone to attend.
- Do you have a financially and operationally sustainable business model? If no, start planning your funeral but take comfort in the fact that people will attend and may even say nice things about you.
- Do you know the unique, relevant, valuable, and hard to imitate reason why you exist? Can you articulate the rare and essential Job to be Done you do for your customers? If no, you’re on life support. When you can answer yes, you’ll be ready to be a butterfly.
One quick caveat
When businesses die, people lose their jobs and that is incredibly tragic. The psychological, financial, and relational impacts of job loss are tremendous, impacting people far beyond the individual laid off. It can take months, even years for people and families to recover and, for some, it never happens.
Creative destruction is real and necessary for long-term economic, technological, and societal growth. But the short-term impact has human consequences that should never be ignored.
Competing Priorities Aren’t a Trade-off. They’re a Test. Are You Passing?
“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” – Ron Swanson, Parks and Rec
With all due respect to Ron Swanson, leaders today need to whole-ass two things. In a world of constrained resources, you don’t have enough time, money, or people to put against your highest priority, let alone multiple high priorities.
But if you think you must choose between investing in today or the future, know that you’re most likely choosing between killing your company quickly or slowly. That’s what “And, not or,” and it’s required in these three areas.
Development AND Research
“Right now, it’s not sufficient to just keep treading water.” – L. Rafael Reif, former MIT president and current professor of electrical engineering and computer science
“America Is Losing the Innovation Race” screamed the Foreign Affairs article in which Reif detailed evidence that America is falling behind China in electric vehicles, nuclear energy, war technologies, and other areas of critical technology.
Since 2015, as China invested in science and technology to develop the capability to produce high-end products at scale, US federal spending on basic research, as measured in real 2017 dollars, has declined.
Even the research that is funded isn’t keeping up. A paper published in 2022 examined nearly 50 million academic papers and patents from 1945 to 2010 and found a precipitous decline in the “disruptiveness” (i.e. makes previous findings obsolete or pushes the field in a new direction) of research across all scientific fields, including a 100% drop in the physical sciences and a 78.7% decline in computer and communications patents.
The funding story is quite different but no less alarming on the corporate side. Between 1964 and 2022, business funding as a source of R&D funds more than doubled but the vast majority of those funds are spent on applied research (13%) and development (80%), not the type of fundamental research that launches a country forward economically or societally.
Operators AND Innovators
“It’s a trap” – MBA student
For two hours, we discussed Netflix’s culture: the no vacation policy” policy, the “act in Netflix’s best interest” expense policy, and the management philosophy that stresses hiring people for their expertise and then trusting them to make decisions.
To me it sounded like a dream. So, when I asked who wanted to work for Netflix, I was shocked when not a single hand went up.
To my students, it sounded like a trap.
And that’s ok. Not everyone wants to face the accountability and repercussions of taking risks, exercising judgment, and making decisions.
Companies need people who want to follow processes, become experts in their fields, and keep the business steady and growing. AND they need people who question processes, explore far beyond their industries, and challenge the business to do better and grow further.
AI AND Humans
“What keeps me up is the fact that so many people are being convinced that they don’t matter anymore.” – Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
When 16,000 jobs, on average, have been lost each month for the past year due to AI, it’s pretty hard to convince a human and they matter.
Yet a growing body of research shows that humans enabled by AI generate new and novel ideas more quickly and cost efficiently than either AI or humans alone. In a battle between 125 “global problem solvers” and one expert in prompt engineering, the latter produced 180 ideas in 5.5 hours at a total cost of $27.01 and none of the ideas were meaningfully different in terms of strategic viability, environmental or financial value, or overall quality than the human-only ideas. At P&G, researchers found that the most innovative ideas were generated by AI-enabled teams and that those teams worked about 12% faster than other teams and AI-enabled individuals.
Ultimately, the companies that succeed won’t be the ones that make the best bets.
They’ll be the ones that learn to whole-ass two things.
What If Moving Faster is Driving You Out of Business?
“Weeks. Always weeks. Man, the last time I talked months was a million weeks ago.”
Jim Halpert, The Office, 2013
Last week, I spoke to the Chief Human Resources Officer of a tech company about an engagement that would take 2-3 weeks to complete. Her response? “We don’t talk in weeks anymore. We talk in days, preferably hours.”
At first, I wanted to remind her that just because a woman can make a baby in nine months, doesn’t mean nine women can make a baby in once month.
But we weren’t talking about making babies. We were talking about leading a company in a world that feels like it’s changing faster than ever and we’re scrambling to catch up or keep pace. But is speed really the solution?
She’s right. We need to move faster.
An increase in the pace of change isn’t just a feeling. It’s facts:
- The World Uncertainty Index, which tracks expert analyst reports across 143 countries going back to 1952, is now nearly double what it was in the mid-1990s.
- The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has dropped from 33 years in 1965 to roughly 15 today and is projected to keep falling.
- Technology launched in 1950 took 25 years to reach adoption within 70% of US households. Tech introduced in 2020 only took 14 years.
The World Economic Forum and Bain & Company put it plainly, “What was once a five-year strategic horizon has compressed into a 12-month horizon, while a two-to-three-year plan is now a six-month view. The strategy machinery must spin at a speed no company is used to managing.”
They go on to say that “waiting is not caution – it is abdication.” But as dangerous as doing nothing is, how does it compare to do the wrong thing quickly?
She’s not wrong. But speed isn’t the (whole) answer.
McKinsey’s research begins to answer that question. It found that, of the 70% of large-scale transformations that failed, neither a lack of urgency nor insufficient speed were root causes. Instead, the most common root causes were:
- Setting targets based on incremental thinking rather than bold vision
- Failing to engage the full organization in the change
- Never embedding new ways of working into how the business actually runs day to day
These findings are reinforced by The Project Management Institute’s 2025 global study of nearly 6,000 projects finding that that found that 50% of projects successfully delivered the intended outcomes and create value while only 13% failed. For projects without a clear vision of success, the number are flipped, failures exceeded both successes and projects with mixed results.
None of those failure modes are solved by moving faster. In fact, compressing timelines makes them all worse. Less time to clarify and communicate a vision of success and build commitment. Less time to engage broadly. Less time to make anything stick.
The solution isn’t speed. It’s clarity.
Without clarity, every new technology, every competitor move, every shift in the market feels equally urgent and equally threatening. And when everything is urgent, nothing gets done well. Just quickly.
But when you have clarity about who you are as a leader and why your organization has a uniquely relevant, valuable, rare, and hard to imitate reason to exist, you aren’t overwhelmed when things change. You see relevant choices faster, understand trade-offs better, and move with confidence instead of chaos.
This is why the WEF and Bain report doesn’t focus on speed but on the imperative to treat strategy as a continuous cycle: constantly updated, scanning for signals, recalibrating as new information arrives.
The time pressure you feel is real, but the answer isn’t only to move faster. It’s to root yourself in clarity about who you are and what you do so that when you need to move in days, you already know what you’re moving toward.
Clarity leads speed. Not the other way around.