We're Pulling the Steps and Still Expecting People at the Top.

I Started in the Warehouse

Thirty years ago I worked in our warehouse. I took in the set pieces coming back from finished events and prepped them for the next ones. The rest of the day I was cleaning the place or running errands for whoever needed one. It was the bottom, and it felt like the bottom. What I couldn't see was that I was meeting the vendors I would lean on as chief operating officer three decades later, and making the relationships that would teach me the job years before I knew there was a job to learn.

The tasks were laying a foundation, and I couldn't feel it happening. What it builds is the one skill nobody can hand you and no tool can replace, the ability to think on your feet when the plan breaks. Because you can't see it forming, doing the work well is an act of faith, putting in the reps believing they'll add up long before anything proves they will. I'm writing this now because that same work, the receiving and the cleaning I did in the warehouse, is the exact work the tools are starting to take on across every industry. We're pulling out the rungs, and almost nobody has noticed the rungs were what built the people who climb them.

When the Plan Breaks

I can tell when it's forming in someone. It shows up as confidence, the earned kind, the kind that comes from knowing what you're doing. Someone crosses from doing what they're told to trusting what they see, and you can hear it. They get excited about what they're about to pull off, and they want to walk you through it first. They want it on record. The ones who aren't sure keep their plans to themselves, because they don't want to be on record for a call that might miss.

You can't see the foundation until the plan breaks. Anyone looks good when the day goes the way it was drawn up. Early success comes easy in a perfect scenario, and it fools everyone, the person having it most of all. The real test is the moment it all goes sideways and someone has to improvise on the spot. The one with the reps finds a way through. The one who skipped them freezes, because you can't fake reps you never did.

Improvising is a creative act, the most pressured kind there is. There's no answer on the shelf to reach for, so you build one in the moment, out of everything you stored up before you needed it. That's why it comes down to two plain parts, the reps you put in and the map of people you drew along the way. When you're past what you know, the whole move is knowing who to call, and that map takes years to draw. Which brings me back to the warehouse. Every vendor I met sweeping that floor became a name I would reach for later, when something broke that I couldn't fix alone. The earliest form of improvising is the plainest one, the person unafraid to say I don't know this yet, but I know who does. When I trust someone with more than they've proven, that's the bet, that they'll reach for the right person before their ego gets in the way.

The Foundation We're Giving Up

I'm not in a panic about the machine. I've worked with it well, and I'd tell anyone starting out to learn it fast and not fear it. But I can see the trade we're making without meaning to. The machine can do the tasks, and most of that work was drudgery that deserved to disappear. The trouble is that some of the same work was the apprenticeship in disguise, the reps that form the foundation, and a machine can't tell the two apart. It cuts the work that builds judgment and the busywork with one blade. So one efficient quarter at a time, we're deciding to stop pouring the foundation, and we won't feel the hole for ten years, until the day everyone wants someone with real instinct and finds too few people were ever given the chance to build it.

I want to be honest about the other side of this, because the easy version would be a lie. Not every mundane task is worth your time. Time is the most expensive thing you own, more than money, and a young person's real job is to guard it. So this is the test worth using, on yourself and on the work you hand other people. Does it build judgment, or does it only fill hours? The reps that teach you to read a situation are worth protecting, from a busy quarter and from a machine both. The ones that spend your time and teach you nothing are the ones to let go, and the ones to hand off to the tool.

I think about the young man cleaning that floor, shaking hands with people he doesn't yet know will teach him the next thirty years. He can't see the foundation going in. Nobody can. That's why it's so easy to skip, and so hard to notice until you go looking for someone who has it and come up empty. You pour it blind. You stand on it later. Take it away, and there's nothing under the ones coming up behind.