Someone always asks it.
Someone always asks it.
A few minutes in, once the conversation has warmed up.
Why aren’t we doing what the others are doing?
There was a stretch of my career where that question moved something in me. A small drop in the stomach. The feeling of being caught half a step behind and working to sound like I wasn’t.
By the time we were moving everything to the cloud, it didn’t land that way anymore. I’d stood in that room before. Different technology, same table, the same question with a different noun in it. The one before, that nobody even remembers being frightening now.
So when it came, I didn’t scramble to list everything we were doing. I didn’t reach for the rival to measure us against. I recognised it – the shape of a moment I’d been in three or four times, dressed up each time as an emergency, turning out each time not to be.
There’s a particular pleasure in that recognition. It’s the closest thing experience gives you to calm.
The leaders sitting in that seat now, with AI on the table, are dealing with one thing I didn’t.
Now everyone has a view, and some of the loudest are the least informed.
The recognition still helps.
It just has to work a little harder.
