AI in Growth, Engineering, and Leadership
Most CEOs are optimizing for a world that no longer exists.
Progress isn’t driven by resources, talent, or even technology. It’s driven by how fast you can create knowledge: make bold guesses, criticize them mercilessly, and replace bad explanations with better ones. Companies (and societies) that institutionalize rapid error-correction at every level don’t just adapt to change; they outrun it while others are still writing their five-year plans.
Problems are inevitable; all problems are soluble. There’s no such thing as a fundamentally limited resource; only knowledge limits us. Energy? Solvable. Talent shortages? Solvable. Even the apparent speed limit of AI progress is just a current bad explanation waiting to be demolished by a better one. The moment you truly believe this, short-term trade-offs and zero-sum thinking start looking childish.
The most valuable companies today aren’t the biggest or the most efficient; they’re the best at conjectures and refutations. They run thousands of small experiments, kill failures overnight, and scale the rare ideas that survive reality’s brutal criticism. One team I know ships code that’s deliberately designed to be wrong just to force the feedback loop to scream sooner.
If you lead people, your real job stopped being “having the answers” a long time ago. It’s creating an environment where bad ideas die fast and good ones mutate faster than the competition can copy them. That single shift turns exponential technologies from a threat into an unfair advantage.