I had to crack up when I said that line during a conversation with a leader about her business's culture.

We are living in very challenging times, and leaders who understand how critical culture is to success are constantly looking for ways to address what gets in the way of a healthy culture.

What makes a good culture in this environment? I can share a list of things that I hear every day in the work we do around designing, developing, and delivering our award-winning business simulations:

• Honest and Unbiased Management: Leaders must act with integrity, tell the truth even during difficult business cycles, and hold everyone, especially management, accountable to the same ethical standards.
• Civil Behavior: Workplaces must actively prevent toxic behavior, disrespect, microaggressions, and a lack of recognition to ensure a safe, supportive environment for all employees.
• Meaningful Work and Opportunities: Employees need to feel that their daily tasks create a tangible impact and that the company provides a clear path for personal career growth.
• Open Communication: Organizations must cultivate transparent feedback channels where team members feel safe expressing their authentic selves and raising concerns without fear of punishment.
• Urgency: Cultivating a proactive, agile mindset where employees prioritize speed to action and decisive execution over hesitation or perfectionism.

During our conversation, we talked a lot about this element of urgency, and in today's fast-paced global business environment, this is how it defines a positive workplace culture:

• Urgency and Agility: Teams treat time as a critical resource, moving quickly to seize market opportunities, respond to competitor moves, and solve customer problems before they escalate.
• Overcoming Perfection Paralysis: It encourages a "bias for action," meaning employees are empowered to make fast, calculated decisions and learn from mistakes rather than letting bureaucratic red tape or fear of failure stall progress.
• Focus on Impact: True urgency is not about artificial panic, burnout, or endless multitasking. Instead, it is the focused, purposeful energy directed toward the organization’s most critical, high-value strategic goals.

You have probably seen the Microsoft advertising about poor Hank’s pizzeria. The commercial features a struggling fictional pizzeria owner named Hank, whose business has slowed down, so he uses Microsoft Copilot in Excel to analyze his numbers, optimize his costs, and figure out how to bring back a legendary $1 pizza slice.

The ad depicts a fairy-tale scenario where AI instantly transforms a business model and solves all of Hank's operational math in one go, without him needing to deal with messy spreadsheets.

I’ve seen the ad too many times now, and I feel really bad for Hank and his lack of business acumen.

First of all, while Copilot and other AI agents are incredible, if you look closely, Hank’s data appears to be neatly structured in a clean table. Anyone who has worked on real-world projects with non-data people knows how rare that is.

One of the joys of speaking with dozens of business leaders every week while delivering our business acumen and business leadership programs is hearing all the new buzzwords being thrown around.

Some of it is corporate jargon and blather that will disappear in six months. But I try very hard to listen through the noise because every once in a while, what sounds like another buzzword is actually a weak signal that something important is changing.

Over the past several months, one of those signals has been getting louder: Scale.

Voices of Leadership

“We are making an investment so we can really scale this thing.”

“AI is the catalyst we have been waiting for to achieve massive scale.”

“The world is getting smaller, which gives us an incredible opportunity to scale.”

Scale certainly isn't a new concept. Business leaders have been obsessed with it for hundreds of years.

But I am beginning to think the definition is changing.

The Old Economics of Scale

What really got me thinking about this were the television advertisements for Starlink.

Internet virtually anywhere. Satellites orbiting the earth. Infrastructure being created at a level that would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago.

Whatever your opinion of Elon Musk, there is an interesting business principle connecting many of the businesses he has been involved with: the pursuit of usable scale. Electric vehicles aren't very interesting economically if you can manufacture only a few thousand of them. Space travel changes dramatically when rockets can be reused. Satellite internet becomes something entirely different when thousands of satellites can create a global network.

Amazon did something similar in a completely different way. What began as an online bookstore became an infrastructure capable of connecting millions of products, customers, sellers, warehouses, transactions, and eventually computing resources.

But none of this is really new.

The Industrial Revolution was fundamentally about scale.

Machines allowed companies to produce more goods with fewer hours of human labor. Railroads expanded reachable markets. Electricity enabled larger and more productive factories. Telecommunications allowed businesses to coordinate activities across increasingly large distances.

For most of business history, however, achieving scale required something very important: More.

More factories. More machines. More people. More capital. More inventory. More distribution. More infrastructure.

Yes, businesses became more efficient as they grew, creating the economies of scale we all learned about in Economics 101. But getting bigger generally required significant incremental resources.

That relationship is beginning to change.

As a person who studies business acumen for a living and has been doing so for more than 50 years, I can sleep pretty well at night without worrying that AI is going to take over the world and kill all the humans.

Turn on the news, listen to a podcast, or spend ten minutes scrolling through your social media streams, and you might reach a different conclusion. Apparently, artificial general intelligence is coming, superintelligence is right behind it, millions of jobs are going to disappear, humans will become obsolete, and the machines will take over sometime around a week from next Thursday.

Maybe.

But I have a slightly more cynical, and much more boring, business acumen perspective.

Eventually, somebody has to pay for all of this. And that is where things get interesting.

A Little History Lesson

Over the past 150 years, we have seen versions of this movie before.

Banking became enormously powerful and complicated. Pharmaceuticals experienced explosive innovation and investment. Agriculture industrialized. Telecommunications transformed the world. The internet created entirely new industries. Software changed virtually every business process. Cryptocurrency arrived promising to reinvent money itself.

The technologies were different, but the business cycle often had some familiar characteristics.

An exciting new opportunity emerges. Capital pours in. Companies race to establish leadership. Investors reward growth. Competitors spend aggressively because nobody wants to be left behind. Infrastructure gets built. Talent becomes incredibly expensive. Expectations become enormous.

For a while, almost nobody wants to be the person in the room asking the boring questions.

How much is this costing us? Where is the return? When will this investment generate positive cash flow? What happens if demand doesn't grow as quickly as projected? What are the risks?

And perhaps the most important business acumen question of all: Is the next dollar we invest going to create more value than the last dollar we invested?

Within the past month, the number one burning issue I have heard from business leaders, ranging from pharmaceutical companies to professional services firms, has been how to respond to customers demanding lower prices for products and services because a company “uses AI.”

The argument sounds logical.

“You’re using AI. AI makes your people more productive. The work takes less time. Therefore, you should charge me less.”

Maybe.

But maybe not.

For any business, using AI has two edges to the sword. On the one hand, when people who know what they are doing use AI effectively, they can create significant efficiencies, produce better work faster, and sometimes more cheaply.

On the other hand, AI isn't free, and there is a much steeper learning curve than most people understand. Companies are investing enormous amounts of money in platforms, infrastructure, integration, security, governance, training, and new capabilities. And when you factor in rework and lost productivity from people misusing AI and producing what has affectionately become known as “AI slop,” the economics aren't nearly as simple as customers might think.