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In boardrooms and startup accelerators around the world, a counterintuitive truth is emerging: the leaders who move fastest are often the ones who deliberately slow down. While our Western culture glorifies the perpetual sprint, elite performers are discovering what Navy SEALs have known for decades”slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” The Tyranny of Chronos Our modern productivity obsession is rooted in what the ancient Greeks called chronoslinear, measurable time that ticks relentlessly forward on our calendars and clocks. This is the time of deadlines, sprint cycles, and quarterly earnings reports. It’s quantitative, urgent, and unforgiving. But the Greeks recognized another dimension of time entirely: kairosthe right time, the opportune moment, time that’s qualitative rather than quantitative. Kairos is the difference between sending an email at 2 a.m. because you can, and sending it when your recipient is most likely to engage meaningfully with your message. It’s the difference between filling your calendar with back-to-back meetings versus creating space for the kind of strategic thinking that actually moves the needle. The most successful entrepreneurs and leaders I’ve worked with have learned to dance between both types of time, but they’ve discovered that honoring kairos often requires the courage to slow down in a chronos-obsessed world. The SEAL Philosophy in the C-Suite When Navy SEALs say “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” they’re describing a mindset that prioritizes precision over speed, preparation over reactive rushing. In high-stakes military operations, moving too quickly can mean missed details, poor communication, and catastrophic failure. The same principle applies to business leadership. Consider the CEO who spends an extra week refining their product strategy rather than rushing to market. That deliberate deceleration often prevents months of costly pivots later. Or the manager who invests time in really understanding a team conflict rather than applying a quick fix that creates deeper resentment. This isn’t about moving slowly for its own sakeit’s about moving at the speed of insight rather than the speed of anxiety. The Three-Part Rhythm of Peak Performance The most effective leaders operate in a rhythm I call “Move. Think. Rest.”or MTR, pronounced motorthree integrative phases that honor both chronos and kairos time: Move: This is the phase to step away from your desk, to get out of your head and into your body so that you can activate those feel-good hormoneslike serotonin, endorphins and dopaminein order to bring calm to the chaos and energy to blah thinking. It could take the form of an in-person walking meeting; a walking meeting on the phone, sans video; or a team standing meeting. It might also take the form of a dance break. Humans are designed to move, and the type of movement I describe is intentional and finite. It helps you to shift away from rushing to entering a flow state. Think: This is your kairos timespace for backcasting (reflection, memory, metacognition) as well as forecasting (imagination, dreaming, and daydreaming). It’s when you pause to step back from the tactical and zoom out so that you can actually think more strategically. Many leaders skip this phase, jumping from one action item to the next, then wonder why they feel perpetually reactive rather than proactive. Rest: True rest isn’t just for physical recoveryit’s purpose is also for cognitive and emotional renewal. It’s the space where your subconscious continues processing complex challenges while your conscious mind recuperates. It allows for your default mode network to kick in. The DMN is the meaning-making part of the brain and it goes to work when you are not engaged with the world. The leaders who understand this phase gain access to insights that their always-on competitors miss. The Value of Emotional Recovery This emotional recovery component of MTR is particularly crucial for leaders. As executive coach Scott Peltin pointed out to me, leaders spend their days absorbing the emotional energy of their teamsfielding frustrations, celebrating wins, navigating conflicts, and holding space for others’ anxieties and ambitions. Without intentional emotional recovery, leaders become depleted reservoirs, unable to provide the steady presence their organizations need. Emotional recovery isn’t just about taking a vacation or getting enough sleep (though both help). It’s about creating regular practices that allow you to process and release the emotional residue of leadership. This might mean a daily walk without podcasts or music, journaling to externalize swirling thoughts, or simply sitting quietly for 10 minutes between high-stakes meetings to reset your emotional baseline. Practical Applications for the Overwhelmed Executive How do you implement this philosophy when your calendar is already packed and expectations are sky-high? Start small: Introduce “Think Time” blocks in your calendar. Even 15 minutes before major decisions can shift you from reactive to strategic mode. Practice the “24-hour rule” for important communications. Draft that crucial email or decision, then sit on it overnight. You’ll be amazed how often this prevents costly mistakes. Create “slow lanes” in your workflow. Designate certain projects or decisions as nonurgent, allowing them the time they need to marinate for optimal outcomes. Build in emotional recovery rituals. Schedule brief transition moments between intense meetings. Even three minutes of deep breathing or stepping outside can prevent emotional buildup that clouds judgment later in the day. Embrace strategically saying no. Every yes to something urgent is often a no to something important. Slow leaders understand that protecting their kairos time sometimes means disappointing people who operate purely in chronos time. The Competitive Advantage of Deliberate Pace In our hyperconnected world, the ability to slow down becomes a differentiator. While your competitors are spinning their wheels in perpetual motion, you’re gaining the clarity that comes from operating at the speed of wisdom rather than the speed of fear. The future belongs to leaders who can resist the cultural pressure to confuse motion with progress, who understand that in an age of infinite information and constant connectivity, the scarcest resource isn’t timeit’s attention. And attention, like wine, improves with the right kind of patience. Remember: in a world obsessed with faster, the leaders who master the art of strategic slowness don’t just survivethey flourish.
Category:
E-Commerce
By now weve all heard of tech debtthe costs well have to incur in the future to maintain suboptimal software and technology decisions from the pastbut in three decades as a tech executive, Ive come to observe a far more insidious phenomenon that threatens to undermine business transformation: process and data debt. Unlike tech debt, process debt isnt just ITs problem. The accumulation of manual workarounds, inconsistent data practices, and inefficient workflows that build up over time spreads throughout the organization, affecting every department, from accounting to supply chain. And process debt is the number-one thing that will stand in the way of a companys ability to adopt AI to innovate and reinvent itself. Process debt doesn’t just slow down AI initiatives; it fundamentally stops them from reaching their potential as we move toward more autonomous systems. The Tomato Problem Consider something simple: ordering 1,000 kilograms of tomatoes. Due to natural moisture loss, only 950 kilograms arrive. The supplier invoices for the full amount. Most systems escalate this to human review. But when operational foundations are clean, autonomous AI approaches this differently. It understands tomatoes typically lose 5% in transport, factors in seasonal patterns, then processes autonomously. More importantly, it builds institutional knowledge for future decisions. This is the difference between AI that frustrates and AI that transforms. Your Roof Collapses In insurance, we’ve seen property claims processing transformed from days-long research into minutes of intelligent analysis. AI systems now handle complex items, such as custom artwork, by leveraging deep databases and sophisticated reasoning. The results: an 80% reduction in processing time and a 23% improvement in pricing accuracy, representing millions of dollars in annual value while dramatically improving the customer experience. The lesson wasn’t about efficiency gains. It was about how AI performs when you design processes around its capabilities rather than retrofitting it onto existing workflows. The Learning Gap What we’re seeing validated in research confirms what many suspected: there’s a fundamental difference between organizations that succeed with AI and those that don’t. Recent MIT research shows that 95% of enterprise AI initiatives struggle to deliver value, not because of technology limitations, but because most systems cannot adapt and integrate effectively into existing workflows. Gartner reinforces this trend, predicting that by 2030, more than 50% of AI models will be domain-specific, tailored to industry or function, up from 5% today. The pattern is clear: generic solutions cannot address the unique operational challenges that define real business value. An Agentic Order of Operations The most impactful AI transformations start with addressing process and data debt first. Organizations that clean up their operational foundations unlock AI’s full potential. Those that don’t find themselves constrained by legacy inefficiencies, regardless of their technology investment. This creates an interesting dynamic. As AI becomes more autonomous, competitive advantage increasingly belongs to organizations willing to do the hard work of liquidating process debt before deploying sophisticated systems. What This Means for Leaders We’re entering an era where AI does not just assist. It makes autonomous decisions and manages entire business ecosystems. The organizations that understand this are building the foundations that will define tomorrow’s competitive landscape. In my experience, the answer lies not in the sophistication of your AI models, but in the quality of the operational foundation you build to support them. That foundation work happening today determines who leads in the autonomous economy of tomorrow. I often say, There is no artificial intelligence without process intelligence. The companies that understand this distinction will be the ones that thrive.
Category:
E-Commerce
Imagine that it’s time to file expenses. Instead of logging into a portal, uploading photos of your crumpled receipts, filling out 10 information fields, and then waiting a week for your manager to sign off, you simply answer a text with a photo of a receipt and a short note about what it’s for.Done.That is, to me, the golden experience, says Diego Zaks, VP of design at Ramp, the $22.5 billion fintech company that’s reinventing the business expense landscape.Ramp as a platform is in the business of simplifying. It consolidates corporate cards, expense management, bill payments, and accounting automation into a single system, making it easier for companies to track expenses and keep their finances in order. In the era of AI, Zaks believes the company can do even more to simplify the software for the people who use it. He envisions a world where Ramp’s customers can accomplish any task with the push of a single button. And his ultimate goal? Someday youll forget altogether that youre using Ramp.I don’t want anyone using Rampbecause every minute that you’re on Ramp, it’s a minute that you’re dealing with expenses and not actually doing the job that you’re hired to do, he explains. We actually measure engagement and time spent on Ramp going down as the signal that we are trying to get.A better AI agentIn July, Ramp introduced Ramp Agents, an autonomous, AI-driven system built atop OpenAI’s latest reasoning models. Ramp Agents work behind the scenes to review expenses, enforce company spend policies, and even suggest improvements to those policieswithout users needing to intervene or monitor every transaction manually.Instead of relying on rigid rules or requiring employees to learn new workflows, these agents reason through real business context, handling approvals, flagging anomalies, filling forms, and learning from every bit of feedback. They don’t require a prompt to do things; instead, they do everything on their own, so people interact as little as possible, if at all.[Image: Ramp]People didnt come to Ramp to engage with AIthey come to do a specific job, and we have AI in the background doing 90% of that job or as much of that job as we possibly can and just displaying the outcome, Zaks says. We skip 17 steps and we just got [managers] to the last moment of Does this look good? And they can just say yes, and it’s done.The agents are part of Ramps larger ecosystem. When companies sign up for Ramp, they receive corporate charge cards with preconfigured spending policies and limits. Employee transactions trigger receipt capture through email integrations, mobile apps, or merchant partnerships with Amazon Business, Lyft, and Uber. The system categorizes expenses, enforces policies in real time, and flags violations automatically.Zaks believes that when deployed smartly, agents will be able to eliminate nearly all of the grunt work that once fell to humans. The agents currently approve 85% of expenses without human review, and early customers report 99% accuracy in expense approvals. The AI doesn’t just process receiptsit cross-references calendar data, checks policy nuances, and delivers outcomes that make sense to human managers.Zaks says this vision is most clearly exemplified by the SMS example. After using his Ramp card, Zaks receives a text asking what the expense was for. The system checks his calendar, sees a scheduled one-on-one meeting, and when he confirms it was for that meeting, the entire expense process completes automatically. No apps to open, no forms to fill, no categories to select.Managers no longer see dashboards filled with every transaction. Instead, they find two categories: expenses that look good to go with a single approval button, and transactions that need attention with focused context about why. Each flagged item includes a summary in 15 to 20 words, the full policy context highlighted on demand, and a feedback mechanism that improves the system’s accuracy.It’s not an AI view. It’s like a transaction view. You have the receipt, all the information you need, Zaks says. And there’s a module at the top that just says a recommended outcome for the manager to take and the reasoning why.From left: Ramp founders Karim Atiyeh, Eric Glyman, and Gene Lee [Photo: Ramp]Why Ramp existsRamp’s move toward the near-total elimination of UX is logical, given the companys mission. Ramp’s founders, Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, and Gene Lee, all worked in Capital One’s credit card division in the late 2010s. They joined after Capital One acquired their company Paribus, a price-tracking app that secured refunds for 10 million users when online purchase prices dropped.At Capital One, they realized there was a fundamental tension in the business model: Credit card companies incentivized spending, while businesses desperately wanted to save money. In early 2019, they left the bank to start Ramp.Ramps core premise flipped the script. Instead of rewards programs that encourage more spending, the company built a financial operations platform that actively helps companies spend less while automating the tedious work that consumes finance teams.For accounts payable, invoices are processed through customizable approval workflows and payments are scheduled automatically. All transactions sync to business management software in real time. Ramp generates revenue primarily through interchange fees earned on every card transaction (typically 1.5% to 2.5% of the purchase value shared among Visa, the issuing bank, and Ramp). Ramp is now one of the hottest tech unicorns, with a valuation of $22.5 billion after capturing les than 2% of the U.S. corporate card market. The company claims that its customers save an average of 5% on spending, close their books 75% faster, and have collectively saved more than $10 billion and 27.5 million hours of work. [Image: Ramp]Building an invisible interfaceSo much of Ramps success hinges on the idea that the best AI is the AI you cant see. Zaks calls this background AI, and its what will power the next generation of Ramps zero-interface ambitions.Right now, every time a human makes a decision on Ramp’s platform that information is used to create a better experience. When a manager disagrees with an agent’s decision, for example, their explanation is fodder for better policies. The agents can alert teams to suspicious receipts and invoices, uncover trends that signal fraud or careless spending, answer employee questions about spend policy, and suggest edits to company expense policies based on usage patterns.The experience data aggregates into policy suggestions for finance teams. Zaks explains that the system basically says, Hey, your policy could be a little clearer about these five things on the work-from-home stipend, for example. If the finance team agrees, they can approve policy updates with one click.Eventually, Ramp will be so optimized that its UI will disappear in the future. Thats Zakss objective: He wants most users to forget Ramp even exists. My approach has been to just pretend like we’re already in 2030 and that AI is just standard, nobody cares, it’s just always in the background, he says. Kind of like how software now is in the cloud. We don’t make a big deal out of that. It just is.
Category:
E-Commerce
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