the room was flawlessly wrong

They weren't underperforming. They were over-performing the wrong thing.

Dear reader,

I sat with a leadership team last month whose dashboards were, without exception, green. The tone in the room was quietly triumphant. What struck me wasn't the numbers. It was that every metric on the wall answered a question the market had stopped asking about eighteen months ago.

Organisations rarely fail because the people in them become stupid. They fail because a room full of talented individuals become exceptionally good at the wrong things. The KPIs harden. The story about why-we-win becomes more important than checking whether we still are. The playbook that made careers becomes the reflex leaders reach for when the ground shifts underneath them.

Dalio calls this the Big Cycle. In a boardroom it looks smaller and more ordinary: a beautiful deck describing a world that has quietly moved on. The uncomfortable question isn't whether change is coming — everyone in the room already suspects that. The question is what intelligent people are still defending today that a future version of themselves will find embarrassing.

What are you still optimising that no longer matters?

— Kenneth

Copenhagen, July