The rank-and-file employee – the one who solves customer problems every day, extracts leads from a leaky CRM system, and defends a pricing policy they didn’t design – sees things that an owner or board member will never see. And they won’t see them because they view every process from a distance, with a completely different perspective.
The party ended in the early morning, in a state that ketamine users call the K-hole. Time and space ceased to matter, and I experienced the absolute. My absolute consisted of designing, prototyping, and seeing a working tool.
For years, one of the high-end fashion brands burned its own products. Unsold coats, handbags, dresses, scarves – anything that didn’t find a buyer went into the furnace instead of being put on sale. A price reduction would have destroyed something more valuable than a container full of clothes. It would have undermined the company’s reputation for exclusivity.
A meeting with a client at nine. A second one at eleven. A third after lunch, and a fourth right after that. In between, two calls from a sales rep apologizing because the client said he “only wants to talk to the boss.” In the evening, the founder sits down to check his email and realizes he hasn’t looked at the company’s growth strategy even once.
No one commissions branding just to blend in with the crowd. Yet year after year, across every industry, hundreds of brands enter the market with identical branding and high hopes of conquering the world. This problem has existed for a long time, and the availability of generative AI is effectively making it worse.
Not every task we perform at work requires a formalized process. If we formalize a process just for the sake of having it formalized – so that it appears in some folder or document – then it is most likely a completely unnecessary process.
